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Whether, as a youth of twenty-two, Verlaine truly felt himself to have been born under the malevolent sign of Saturn, foreboding, this early in his life, of the dual nature of his conflicted personality, or whether this was only the aesthetic, self-indulgent posturing of an adulator of Baudelaire and his "flowers of evil," the fact is, his Poemes saturniens really have very little "saturnine" about them except for the volume's title and a brief self-conscious liminary poem. Read the first page
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Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
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Customer Reviews
However, I am always struck by two possible problems. And with Shapiro they are both evident in the extreme: firstly, the problem of rhyme. Having read on the back cover that his 'skillfully rhymed formal translations are outstanding', I was bitterly disappointed as I ventured inside. Concision is lost as surplus words are employed to achieve simple rhyming patterns, and phrases lose their clarity as they become overly cumbersome. It seems that for the sake of the surface structure, it is worth sacrificing the core structure - thus distorting the unity of the piece itself.
The second problem is one of meaning. There is a tragic delicacy to Verlaine's work, which seems to be treated very crudely by Shapiro. Profound concepts are often completly overlooked, or even twisted into confusion. For example, in "La 'grand ville'! Un tas criard de pierres blanches..." (p.118) Verlaine writes:
'D'autant plus apre et plus sanctifiante aussi',
while Shapiro turns 'et' into 'yet':
'All the more bleak, yet sacrosanct...'
Presumably this is because Shapiro has no idea that bleakness can be tied intimately to holiness; that they do not need to be opposed.
This dismissive approach to the poet's spiritual struggle is made explicit in the biographical prose of the edition. This is particularly sad because many people read such passages as if they were factual.
As Shapiro takes on the role of chronicler, and his translations assume a muddy, shallow poeticism of their own, to what extent can we see this as an edition of Verlaine's poems?
(For anyone who wants to become more familiar with Verlaine, and has a limited grasp of French, this is still a good book to buy.)
What do I want, anyway? I want to find out what Verlaine's poems mean to me, and so what I really need is a good text and a good French-English dictionary. And like Jamie Craggs, I should add, don't let me put you off. This may be just what you want.
The notes at book's end , expaining some of the translator's decitions and choices, are quite interesting and worth reading, even though I don't always agree with his approach. ...
I felt scammed, and would return this if it weren't for my laziness. I never expected to complain about poetry translations because the process really is an art form and one that is very difficult, but this is simply too much.
Go to A. S. Kline's FREE Poetry Archive instead.
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