Today's post on Terressa's blog invited commenters to share a poem. But the one I wanted to share was french and I couldn't find a good translation. Either they were pretty but too far removed from the original, or stuck doggedly to the original words like a machine translation. None of them respected the structure, though some of them did try to reproduce some kind of rhyming pattern.
It's true that translation is (barring a few exceptions Baudelaire translating Poe to french for instance) a terrible thing to do to poetry, but here is my best try at it, feel free to brand me a criminal:
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1866 - Paul Verlaine, "Poèmes saturniens"
"My Familiar Dream"
I often have this dream, strange and engrossing dream
An unknown woman, whom I love and loves me, and
Every time, she is never quite the same it seems
Nor wholly different, she loves me and understands.
She sees within me, for her, my heart is crystal
Just for her, alas! It’s no longer an issue
Not for her, and when my pale brow beads with hot dew
She alone knows how to cool it, as her tears fall.
Brunette, blonde, or auburn? – I can’t say, don’t ask me.
Her name? It’s sonorous and sweet, as I recall
Like the names of loved ones, whose brimming cups were spilled.
Her gaze, like that of a statue, veiled in mystery.
Her voice, is distant, quiet and grave when she calls,
Echoing tones of beloved voices now stilled.
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And for those who can grok the original here's the french (for those who can't but want to hear it, scroll down):
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1866 - Paul Verlaine, "Poèmes saturniens"
"Mon Rêve familier"
Je fais souvent ce rêve étrange et pénétrant
D'une femme inconnue, et que j'aime, et qui m'aime,
Et qui n'est, chaque fois, ni tout à fait la même
Ni tout à fait une autre, et m'aime et me comprend.
Car elle me comprend, et mon coeur transparent
Pour elle seule, hélas ! cesse d'être un problème
Pour elle seule, et les moiteurs de mon front blême,
Elle seule les sait rafraîchir, en pleurant.
Est-elle brune, blonde ou rousse ? --Je l'ignore.
Son nom ? Je me souviens qu'il est doux et sonore
Comme ceux des aimés que la Vie exila.
Son regard est pareil au regard des statues,
Et pour sa voix, lointaine, et calme, et grave, elle a
L'inflexion des voix chères qui se sont tues.
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Here's a sung version by Julos Beaucarne, a multi-talented Belgian artiste. I grew up hearing this interpretation of the poem, it was one of my mother's many favourites... it wasn't until I got interested in classical poetry (much much later) that I realised it wasn't originally a song.
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I'm not above aping a good idea. Do any of you readers (all four of you) have pieces of well loved poetry you'd be kind enough to share?
A picture from the Père Lachaise cemetery I found online
This is a beautiful poem! I wonder why the woman is always different? Does she represent different people in that person's life?
ReplyDeleteMy all time favorite poem is Lord Byron's Lady of Shalott. :)
Alesa - That's a wonderful translation, even if I can't claim to understand all the French. Two quarters in college does not an expert make.
ReplyDeleteMy all-time favorite poem is Wild Geese by Mary Oliver:
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about your despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting --
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
@Aubrie: Hello and welcome. Hajimemashte! You can interpret it many ways: sure the dream can be love and the women could be those he loved in the course of his life until he meets lady death in the end; or perhaps death, in its many guises, is the alluring woman all along; perhaps she is an ideal, an ever shifting dream tinted with the bitter sweetness of regret; it's a poem, it's open for interpretation to some extent.
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Yes, the Lady of Shallot is an excellent piece. I think I'll go unearth my musty tome of Tennyson's works... Yes, surely, you mean Lord Tennyson, not Lord Byron?
@Kass: Glad you enjoyed it. Translating poetry is an arduous and tricky task.
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Hmm... Yes, I can see why it would be one of your favorites, I can see it from what little I've read of your writing. Very visual, very evocative. Thanks for sharing that! It's always a treat to discover a new poem and author that I like.
This is beautiful. A favorite poem of mine at the moment...and it changes constantly as does the state of my being, was shared by a dear blogger friend.
ReplyDeleteTHE THING IS - By Ellen Bass
To love life, to love it even
when you have no stomach for it
and everything you've held dear
crumbles like burnt paper in your hands
your throat filled with the silt of it.
When grief sits with you, its tropical heat
thickening the air, heavy as water
more fit for gills than lungs;
when grief weights you like your own flesh
only more of it, an obesity of grief,
you think, How can a body withstand this?
Then you hold life like a face
between your palsm, a plain face,
no charming smile, no violet eyes
and you say, yes, I will take you
I will love you, again."
What did I share?
ReplyDeleteThat strikes me a a damn good translation, not that I know anything of the original and my French only goes as far as being able to say, 'two large beers, please.'
My current favourite poem is this, by Sylvia Plath from my much loved 1968 (2nd) edition of Ariel:
The Arrival of the Bee Box
I ordered this, this clean wood box
Square as a chair and almost too heavy to lift.
I would say it was the coffin of a midget
Or a square baby
Were there not such a din in it.
The box is locked, it is dangerous.
I have to live with it overnight
And I can't keep away from it.
There are no windows, so I can't see what is in there.
There is only a little grid, no exit.
I put my eye to the grid.
It is dark, dark
With the swarmy feeling of African hands
Minute and shrunk for export,
Black on black, angrily clambering.
How can I let them out?
It is the noise that appals me most of all,
The unintelligible syllables.
It is like a Roman mob,
Small, taken one by one, but my god, together!
I lay my ear to furious Latin.
I am not a Caesar.
I have simply ordered a box of maniacs.
They can be sent back.
They can die, I need feed them nothing, I am the owner.
I wonder how hungry they are.
I wonder if they would forget me
If I just undid the locks and stood back and turned into a tree.
There is the laburnum, its blond colonnades,
And the petticoats of the cherry.
They might ignore me immediately
In my moon suit and funeral veil.
I am no source of honey
So why should they turn on me?
Tomorrow I will be sweet God, I will set them free.
The box is only temporary.
@Words and wine: Yikes, I'm terribly sorry Words and wine. Misaddressed reply. Only the second half of that was for Eryl.
ReplyDeleteZapping the erroneous comment as we speak.
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Yeah, Verlaine writes beautifully...
My translation doesn't actually do it justice.
I can quite relate to not being able to pin an all time favourite... that why I asked for well loved poems instead of favourites.
I'm going to need to chew on Bass's poem for a while... And come away, from the content, with ambivalent feelings. The writing works, clearly... Why is this poem your favourite?
This blog is certainly living up to its name, I'm finding all kinds of food for thought.
Thanks for sharing !*Words and Wine*!
@Eryl: Sorry for the mix up.
Oh by the way, latest update on the gmail filter thing! I've settled on the most hassle free approach: I've changed the filter to "skip the inbox entirely" so my "blog" label acts, in effect, like a separate box solely dedicated for blogmail. When I get an email update from blogspot, A number listing the number of new blog emails appears next to the label. The main inbox stays completely clear of blogmail.
_
Well I guess it was worthwhile if people who can't read the original enjoyed reading the tranz. You should have seen some of the English versions I found online...
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Hmm... Reading through the Bee box a couple times. Well, that is interesting! Still working on what it can mean, asides from the first means that leap out. It feels like a real world event seen through the Plath's poetic eyes, an expression of a dark but fascinated view of the world.
I've been hearing a lot about Sylvia Plath since I've started exploring blogs... I think I'm going to need to hit a bookstore soon.
Thanks for the gmail filter advice, again. Yes that is much better.
ReplyDeleteOn meaning in poetry: I watched the film Bright Star recently which is about the relationship between Keats and Fanny Brawne. In it Keats says:
"A poem needs understanding through the senses. The point of diving in a lake is not immediately to swim to the other side but to be in the lake, to luxuriate in the sensation of water. You do not work the lake out. It is an experience beyond thought. Poetry soothes and emboldens the soul to accept mystery."
If you just read Bee Box out loud and luxuriate in its sounds and images meanings will, probably, begin to show themselves. I am particularly fond of the line: 'I have simply ordered a box of maniacs.' It makes me laugh every time I read it. But I do think that's because of my reference points as much as anything. Plath is pretty strongly situated in the Anglo-Saxon tradition.
Remember what the little prince would do if he had an extra hour every day (from not having to drink water thanks to some miracle pill)?
ReplyDeleteFlip side though... If I had a lake available, I would swim laps, time myself, measure the lake.
Half joking set aside, yes, certainly on a primal level (what I meant by "first sense of meaning that jumps out") Bee Box is as clear as a story in prose.
It was the hidden meaning, the second meanings, the potential meanings, that I needed to think about... In texts, especially poems, every word can be a spinning shimmering prism, making every poem a potential kaleidoscope of moving and changing meaning. Sometimes, the first drawing of meaning is the only significant one, or at least the most significant. And from the handful of Plath's poems I've read today (there's an archive of 230 Plath poems online), I'm getting the impression that her's are of that sort; straight storytelling poems, poems that are paintings of scenes... Some lovely ones at that. Will read more, but not in one sitting a if it were some sort of task... Later, in a quiet moment.
That sentence from the movie goes radically against my perception of poetry and world view... I strictly think first and then maybe feel.
I don't need soothing, any more soothed I'd be in a coma... And mystery... For me, is ignorance. Nothing wrong in itself, but not a state to aspire being in. Rather one to continuously move away from (though never entirely succeeding, but that is irrelevant). Do you agree with the view of poetry from that quote? Incidentally, laughter is the fruit of the mind not of the senses... Asides from tickling I suppose.
There is probably a balance to be found there as well...
I definitely luxuriate in the sensations of poems first of all. I enjoy, or not, the sounds and images and then meaning asserts itself. And, I think, I'm pretty much like that will all of life, I feel first and then think. I've tried doing it the other way round but I only got myself in a pickle.
ReplyDeleteI think Plath's poems can be read as straight stories but there is a lot of underlying meaning. She was incredibly torn by being a good wife and mother and being an individual. It was much harder for women to live their own lives and be discrete individuals in those days. In one entry in her early journals (when she was about 18) she asked if she must give up her work to scramble a man's eggs, or something like that. Also, she was a bit of an outsider, an oddity, very self aware, and afraid of being subsumed, possessed and lost. I think a lot of that can be seen in the Bee Box: the poem's persona seems, to me, to be struggling with issues of power and gender.
I agree that if something is a mystery one must be ignorant of its properties. But I don't think accepting mystery means accepting ignorance, it just means accepting that we don't know everything there is to know. I like the idea of mystery because I like to explore and there'd be nothing to explore if everything had already been discovered.
As for laughter being the fruit of the mind, yes I agree to an extent but only as far as the mind is fed by the senses. I laugh at something usually for the sound it makes or because there's something off about its appearance, smell or taste, once I've analysed why I laughed it's no longer funny. Of course, there are major exceptions to this.
I don't remember what the little prince would do, I don't remember the little prince at all. So do tell.
Yes, the impression I'm getting, from the growing but still small number Plath's poems that I've read, is, as I said, that they are stories; but as is the case whenever a story is told by a person, it shapes to view of the person telling it... Plath seems to have a dark view of the world I've seen hints to that oppression you describe her as having had. But, she is also seems fascinated with with the world. And the combination of the two make it so interesting to read, at least for me.
ReplyDeleteHmm.. For me ignorance is like "bad" weather. A fundamental part of life to be accepted and provisioned against. In spots where it clears, I'll strip and go swim laps in the lake. I guess it's really not that far removed from what you said.
Ach... You don't remember the little prince? Go back to it! (Sorry, didn't mean to get all bossy, that was just a cry from the heart) It'll take you less than an hour, if read in parts, you could read a chapter in just a few minutes.
I'm not retelling it in my own words because I would be doing it disservice, I will however translate the original for you:
Chapter 23
"Hello," said the little prince.
"Good morning," said the peddler of newly invented thirst-quenching pills. Just take one a week and you won't need to drink anymore.
"Why are you selling those?" asked the little prince.
"Because they can save you a tremendous amount of time," the peddler said. "Our experts did the maths. You can save up to fifty-three minutes every week."
"And what do we do with those fifty-three minutes?"
"Anything you like..."
"Well, if I had fifty-three minutes to spare, I would softly walk up to a fountain..."
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Why so pale and wan, fond lover, prithee, why so pale?
ReplyDeleteA proposal in free verse for this sonnet (upon stumbling across thy more poetic version, yet afore reading it):
ReplyDeleteMy recurring dream
I often have this strange, persistent dream
Of an unknown woman, whom I love, and who loves me,
And who, each time, is neither quite the same
Nor quite someone different either, and loves and understands me.
For she understands me, and my transparent heart
To her alone, alas! ceases to be of concern
To her alone, and the dampness of my pallid brow,
Only she can refresh, with her weeping.
Is her hair dark, blond or red? – I don’t know.
Her name? I remember it being sweet and melodious
Like those of loved ones whom Life has exiled.
Her eyes are like the eyes of statues,
As for her voice, far-off, calm, and low, she has
The tone of cherished voices grown silent.
Lovely poem. If that's the translation, the original must be amazing.
ReplyDeleteThis is one of my favorites:
Bring me all of your dreams,
You dreamers
Bring me all of your
Heart melodies
That I may wrap them
In a blue cloud-cloth
Away from the too-rough fingers
Of the world.
- Langston Hughes
Yeah for all its teenaged angst and romantiloquence its a lovely poem.
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Your poem is soft and sweet... I can imagine many ways in which it might speak to you.
Thanks for sharing!