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Four French Symbolists Poets: Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Verlaine, Mallarme
English, French
376 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1981
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
March 4, 2015
I read Verlaine's and Mallarme's poems, but not the others. I'm new to French poetry so can't speak to the translations. But I enjoyed the poems very much.
Verlaine's poems are very perceptive of psychology, their ideas have a great power that is slowly developed and then suddenly revealed. From Verlaine's poem "the sky is above the roof";
The sky is, above the roof,
So blue, so calm!
A tree, above the roof,
Is rocking its palm.
The bell, in the sky that one sees,
Is softly ringing.
A bird in the tree that one sees
Is plaintively singing.
Dear me, dear me, life exists there,
Simply, tranquilly.
That peaceful murmur there
Comes from the city.
--what have you done, oh you there
Shedding ceaseless tears,
Tell, what have you done, you there,
With your youthful tears?
Mallarme shows a delicate speed of thought that is so distinct from what has come before in previous generations of poets. It's as if the subject of the poem won't remain still long enough to be described. And at some point midway through the poem you realize that the subject of the poem has become language itself, a kind of language that shimmers like the colors of a hummingbird; language vibrating so quickly that it becomes thought itself. From Mallarme's poem "The Chastened Clown":
Eyes, lakes with my simple intoxication to be
Reborn other than the actor who with a gesture evoked
Like feather the ignoble soot of the filthy
Oil lamps, I have bored in the canvas wall a window.
A limpid, traitorous swimmer, with multiplied bounds
Of my leg and arms, forswearing
The bad Hamlet! it's as though I innovated a thousand
Sepulchers in the wave to vanish virgin there.
Hilarious gold of a cymbal irritated
By fists, all at once the sun strikes the nudity
That pure was exhaled from my freshness of nacre,
Rancid night of the skin when you passed over me,
Not knowing, ingrate! that that was all my consecration,
That paint drowned in the perfidious water of the glaciers.
Verlaine's poems are very perceptive of psychology, their ideas have a great power that is slowly developed and then suddenly revealed. From Verlaine's poem "the sky is above the roof";
The sky is, above the roof,
So blue, so calm!
A tree, above the roof,
Is rocking its palm.
The bell, in the sky that one sees,
Is softly ringing.
A bird in the tree that one sees
Is plaintively singing.
Dear me, dear me, life exists there,
Simply, tranquilly.
That peaceful murmur there
Comes from the city.
--what have you done, oh you there
Shedding ceaseless tears,
Tell, what have you done, you there,
With your youthful tears?
Mallarme shows a delicate speed of thought that is so distinct from what has come before in previous generations of poets. It's as if the subject of the poem won't remain still long enough to be described. And at some point midway through the poem you realize that the subject of the poem has become language itself, a kind of language that shimmers like the colors of a hummingbird; language vibrating so quickly that it becomes thought itself. From Mallarme's poem "The Chastened Clown":
Eyes, lakes with my simple intoxication to be
Reborn other than the actor who with a gesture evoked
Like feather the ignoble soot of the filthy
Oil lamps, I have bored in the canvas wall a window.
A limpid, traitorous swimmer, with multiplied bounds
Of my leg and arms, forswearing
The bad Hamlet! it's as though I innovated a thousand
Sepulchers in the wave to vanish virgin there.
Hilarious gold of a cymbal irritated
By fists, all at once the sun strikes the nudity
That pure was exhaled from my freshness of nacre,
Rancid night of the skin when you passed over me,
Not knowing, ingrate! that that was all my consecration,
That paint drowned in the perfidious water of the glaciers.
January 18, 2012
No, it isn't really read. I've read a few of Rimbaud's poems. The translation is so disheartening that I can't read the rest. It's clunky, it's awful. The great internet gives me a lovely Rimbaud so that I can blame only the translation.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews