- Paperback: 248 pages
- Publisher: University of California Press; Bilingual edition (1 July 1992)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0520012984
- ISBN-13: 978-0520012981
- Product Dimensions: 17.8 x 11.2 x 1.8 cm
- Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1 customer review)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 1,900,128 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- See Complete Table of Contents
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Review
"The preface and notes afford the soundest and most suggestive brief critique of Verlaine's work that I know of in English."--"Saturday Review
Product Description
Poems selected from Verlaine's first six books of verse are presented in the original French as well as in English translation.
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
This is a parallel text version of Verlaine's poems and an English translation by Martin Sorrell, who is a Reader in French and Translation Studies at the University of Exeter. I 'did' Verlaine at school (I bet there's not many people can write that), and, surprisingly, I've loved Verlaine's poems ever since, never having lost the schoolboy's infatuation with what I perceived as sophistication: `Elle avait des façons vraiment de désoler un pauvre amant'! My French isn't so good now, and I thought this would be just what I wanted. I bought it, wrote a review, and later realised that the review was unfair, because it was not criticising the book that Sorrell has produced, but criticising it for something that it isn't, and probably Sorrell never intended it to be. This book is a `poetic' translation, not a literal translation, and a moment's thought should have shown me that a literal translation wouldn't have been very attractive, and, anyway, what would a literal translation of a particular word be? There are many possible translations of some words. Sorrell translates 'le mielleur de mes biens', in one of Verlaine's best-known poems, Dansons la Gigue as `my greatest consolations'. That isn't the word I would prefer, and my dictionary has several pages on 'bien'. But that's the word Sorrell prefers, and it is poetic. Verlaine writes `Je me souviens, je me souviens', which Sorrel translates as `I remember - oh and how-'. What's wrong with `I remember, I remember'? The meaning of a poem is what the reader thinks it is, just as much as the poet or the translator, and to really work at the meaning of a Verlaine poem, if you're like me, what you need is a good text and a good French-English dictionary, especially when thinking about what 'le mielleur de mes biens' means. However, don't let me put you off. This may be just what you want. It is poetic, and that is a great achievement.
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
5 reviews
25 of 33 people found the following review helpful
A Case of Confusion
27 Jun 2000
Format:Paperback
[...] At any rate, for those who are not familiar with the movement, I would suggest reading, in this order: Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Verlaine and Mallarme, as that is the sequence in which they came to the fore of French Lit (though you could make the case that Veralaine and Rimbaud were contemporaneous, I would suggest that Verlaine's most important work came after his interchange with Rimbaud). Since these are the most influential French poets of the modern era, and had an impact on every modern "movement" that occured in literature thereafter, you can not go wrong with any of them. There are those who contend that poetry especially is lost in translation. I would agree, yet all these poets are represented by "facing" texts these days. The original text is mirrored by the translation on the opposite page. Oxford and Penguin both are good choices. The translators are uniformally well-educated and erudite, the printing is excellent and the overall scholarhip, including introductions, is top-notch. You can't go wrong with these editions.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful
A Singing of "Soleils Couchants"
10 Oct 2011
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
This is the poem in the original French:
Une aube affaiblie
Verse par les champs
La mélancolie
Des soleils couchants.
La mélancolie
Berce de doux chants
Mon coeur qui s'oublie
Aux soleils couchants.
Et d'étranges rêves
Comme des soleils
Couchants sur les grèves,
Fantômes vermeils,
Défilent sans trêves,
Défilent, pareils
À des grands soleils
Couchants sur les grèves.
This is Martin Sorrell's English translation for this Oxford World Classics edition:
Setting Suns
A sickly dawn
Spreads over the fields
The sadnesses
Lull with soft songs
My heart lost in
The setting suns.
And then strange dreams
Which seem like suns
That set on shores
Vermilion ghosts
Drift endlessly
Reminding me
Of mighty suns
That set on shores.
This translation, to my mind, goes a fair way to destroying the poem. The four stars are for Verlaine's poems, given in the original French here, and emphatically not for Sorrell's translations. In his introductory "Note On The Text And Translation", Sorrell states that other translations suffer from an "over-reverence for the original" and seem "stuck in the past" whereas he seeks to produce "poems appropriate to the climate of late twentieth-century English-language writing."
When I first heard this poem, it was in Paris in 2005, sung by a Sorbonne student to a guitar. Every subsequent time I heard the poem whilst in France it was in a song, often accompanied by a guitar, piano or, one time, a synthesizer. All of these versions showed a deep "over-reverence?" that the 21st Century French still have for the sad musicality of the poem, which Sorrell has stripped it of in this English translation, along with Verlaine's other poems.
It's been 5 years, since I broke with my Francophone girlfriend, since I've had occasion to converse in French, so apologies for the accent being a bit off. Further, I'm very far from being a professional musician or singer, but I hope I convey here, in my rendering of it, the echoes of what I heard in France.
The listener/reader will follow her/his own sensibility in judging whether my rendition or Sorell's butchering, I mean translation of the poem into a sort of English is the more affecting.
Une aube affaiblie
Verse par les champs
La mélancolie
Des soleils couchants.
La mélancolie
Berce de doux chants
Mon coeur qui s'oublie
Aux soleils couchants.
Et d'étranges rêves
Comme des soleils
Couchants sur les grèves,
Fantômes vermeils,
Défilent sans trêves,
Défilent, pareils
À des grands soleils
Couchants sur les grèves.
This is Martin Sorrell's English translation for this Oxford World Classics edition:
Setting Suns
A sickly dawn
Spreads over the fields
The sadnesses
Lull with soft songs
My heart lost in
The setting suns.
And then strange dreams
Which seem like suns
That set on shores
Vermilion ghosts
Drift endlessly
Reminding me
Of mighty suns
That set on shores.
This translation, to my mind, goes a fair way to destroying the poem. The four stars are for Verlaine's poems, given in the original French here, and emphatically not for Sorrell's translations. In his introductory "Note On The Text And Translation", Sorrell states that other translations suffer from an "over-reverence for the original" and seem "stuck in the past" whereas he seeks to produce "poems appropriate to the climate of late twentieth-century English-language writing."
When I first heard this poem, it was in Paris in 2005, sung by a Sorbonne student to a guitar. Every subsequent time I heard the poem whilst in France it was in a song, often accompanied by a guitar, piano or, one time, a synthesizer. All of these versions showed a deep "over-reverence?" that the 21st Century French still have for the sad musicality of the poem, which Sorrell has stripped it of in this English translation, along with Verlaine's other poems.
It's been 5 years, since I broke with my Francophone girlfriend, since I've had occasion to converse in French, so apologies for the accent being a bit off. Further, I'm very far from being a professional musician or singer, but I hope I convey here, in my rendering of it, the echoes of what I heard in France.
The listener/reader will follow her/his own sensibility in judging whether my rendition or Sorell's butchering, I mean translation of the poem into a sort of English is the more affecting.
Selected Poems (Verlaine), Oxford
26 Feb 2010
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
This book is a treasure for for me, in itself and as aid in understanding French. Reading slowly, with dictionary in hand, I sometimes am about overcome with pleasure of actually reading French poetry. And Verlaine's poems are often quite special. I love the book and take it with me.
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