François Villon is universally recognized as one of the greatest of all French poets – and not just by the French. Some critics argue that Villon's treatment of the lawyer (who, like Villon, was accused of several crimes and once even imprisoned in the Châtelet) suggests a sympathetic position. 4 As Karl Uitti has argued, “the fist (did) and the maar (drunk) of the [last] envoi [of the last ballad] bring and respond to our puzzle about the missing preterite in the initial huitain of the Testament….
The word was also often used as a nickname for prostitutes during this period, a possibility that connects it to Flora and Thaïs from the first stanza. Although black comedy exegesis of the Testaments are the main body of scholarship, almost all of them are interpretations and translations. This is the most intense form of reading I have experienced, as it involves intense decreation.
Villon and the Victorians: Influence and Legend,” Bulletin of the Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association.
On Translating an Anthology of Persian Poetry
ALI ALIZADEH
I hope that by addressing both the pleasures and perils of (co-)creating this anthology, this article will make a contribution to the understanding and evaluation of the possibilities as well as potential problematics of the current translational turn in the production and dissemination of poetry. In the case of the aforementioned poem by the Iranian modernist Yushij, for example, by translating his poem. Qoqnoos” (“Phoenix”) I became aware of the thematic as well as the formal connection between Yushij's writing – and potentially between the modernist movement in Iranian poetry – and the work of European modernists such as Stéphane Mallarmé, who also used bird and/or mythological motifs in his equally enigmatic work.
To answer this demand, we needed not only to analyze the form and content of the original works, but also to decipher and accept, as Benjamin would have it, the original poem's “intended effect” (77). The work of the aforementioned religious, Sufi poets, for example, presented a great challenge to my personal, atheistic/materialistic sensibilities. The fundamental difference between my subjectivity and that of the many poets selected and translated for our anthology could be understood as what Adele D'Arcangelo has described in the context of her own translation of contemporary prose across linguistic, cultural and generational divides, as an "element of limitation". or “gap” (93).
In the case of English translations from languages that use the Latin script—given my own experience reading bilingual versions of Dante, Rimbaud, and Neruda, among others—an Anglophone reader might compare and contrast the translator's version with the original text, albeit successfully, as the reader is able to identify— if not understand - the words and syntactic units of the original text, because the original text uses the same alphabet as the English language reader. Such a reader might notice the underlying accuracy of the translated version—even if the notion of accuracy is extremely tentative—which would lead the reader to develop a relationship and trust in the translator's version, however justified. This, I believe, is one of the main reasons why our anthology has hardly been reviewed or discussed since it was published by a well-known British publisher.
How little response there is to our anthology is demonstrated by a brief citation of the only two existing reviews of the publication, if they can be called reviews at all. In two paragraphs on the book by David Hart in the October issue of Stride Magazine, the reviewer comments on the introduction to the anthology and one of the two included poems by a contemporary Iranian diaspora writer, a poem originally written in English and therefore appears in our anthology untranslated without an accompanying Farsi text. The reviewer therefore expresses confusion that we have not included a medieval poet who was "rated by Bunting as one of the greatest".
Poetry out of Nothing
SIMON WEST
I am composed of the formal and the material; and none of them will vanish into non-existence, as none of them came into being from non-existence. It is a rough and ready truth, perhaps unsatisfactory to the philosopher, but serviceable enough, especially when given a convincing voice in the good sense of Kent or the sharpness of the Fool. The twisted empty places, the emptiness, are now filled with the breathing of the child that was not there until recently.
But Coleridge's rhetorical high pitch as he reaches the poem's climax is hard to enjoy today. What her sisters have just said leaves her speechless and acutely aware of the enormous struggle she must undertake to speak with any semblance of sincerity. She finds herself on a stage that has had its fair share of the empty rhetoric of playful dissimulation and self-aware deception.
In a sense, the poem is not an end in itself, but rather an opening to what lay behind the writing of the poem and its language: an experience of the world. Bonnefoy does not solve such problems by talking about the need for affinity between poet and translator. It was as if Pound lived between two worlds: his own and that of medieval Florence.
Suddenly, neither the original nor the translation exist independently of each other, and we are never quite satisfied with the neeebe other. On the one hand, the hero, who must recall his work from. And secondly, Lucretius' view that poetry, like translation, emerges from pre-existing atoms of the world.
JAN OWEN
I emailed a few unclear lines to French translator friends for clarification; in stanza three of "Le Cygne," "The Swan," for example, Baudelaire recalls the old Carrousel and uses the phrase "brillant aux carreaux, le bric-a-brac confus." After some advice and some checking, I finally got it: "Tangled black-a-brac that shines in the windows." The translator's relationship with the writer and his or her text is complex: intimate, admiring, ambivalent, exasperated, celebratory, and although you have more freedom when the author is dead, you have less help.
Half of the last line of 'A Une Passante', 'To a passing woman', literally translates as 'O thou whom I might have loved', using the well-known 'toi' towards the woman, and also the literary form of the past conditional in “toi que j'eusse aimée” which gives a formal but delicate tone, a melancholic distance. At the same time, the necessary agreement of the past participle 'aimée', 'beloved', with the object of desire, the passing woman, strengthens the intimate linguistic bond between her and the narrator. Its ongoing tendency is to convert the world's rich diversity into manageable, intellectual categories.
And Laurence Sterne says in his Sentimental Traveller: “All that can be said against the grandeur of the French sublime. Although the literal translation, "a wardrobe in an empty house" is good for the bad poem "Le Flacon", the compliment offered to the young woman in "La Belle Navire" seems heavy: "that proud bosom is like a beautiful wardrobe... wardrobe full of good things and secret joys.” In “Le Balcon,” “The Balcony,” stanza three, I believe I have kept close to the tone, while I have juggled the words and phrases very freely.
I moved towards the tangible in Bohémiens en Route, Gypsies on the Move; the literal translation would be "the familiar empire of the shadows of the future", I made it "whose empire is the dark terrain of tomorrow". While working on these translations from Les Fleurs du Mal, I have come to appreciate aspects of Baudelaire's character and work that seem to receive less critical attention, the sensitivity and tenderness, say, found in some of the love poems and in the parts of "Les Petites Vieilles". One of the last poems I translated was the first I read: "Une Charogne", "A Corpse".
ALICE WHITMORE
These last three books form a trilogy, of which Los Planetas is, in Yaxkin's own words, "el tercer libro, o nave" [the third book, or the ship] (personal communication).1 Yaxkin is also a founding member of Red. de los poetas salvajes [Wild Poets Network], a community of emerging poets and artists based in Mexico who publish and share their work online. One of the most interesting aspects of Red de los poetas salvajes is its largely online presence. Indeed, technology and the incorporation of modern communication media into the realm of art and poetry is one of the major recurring themes in Yaxkin's work.
The complex web of creativity that is Yaxkin's Red exists within the only truly untamed medium left, one impervious to censorship, the demands of the publishing industry, and the passage of time. Needless to say, the indefinite and diverse nature of the Internet cannot be replicated on paper. There are several references to theoretical physicists and philosophers, and scientific or mathematical terminology is often woven into the fabric of the poetry.
Difficult elements in this passage include the invented word arreversado, the repetition of the letter v and the sound -ados, the strange choice of the word primeramente (similar to the use of first instead of first), and the relationship between the words verso and versados. 3 For examples, see the website of the Red de los poetas salvajes: reddelospoetassalvajes.blogspot.com (in Spanish). Nevertheless, I ultimately chose to prioritize the sound of the entire stanza over my preference for individual words.
Fortunately, the word first suited the rhyme of the stanza better than its clumsy cousin, so I also decided to ignore Yaxkin's unusual word choice in this case. Although Yaxkin's poetry conforms neither to rhymes nor to any strict poetic meter, it has a distinct musicality and resonates strongly when spoken aloud.4 Yaxkin himself draws clear parallels between the composition of music and poetry: "I compose mud," he writes in the opening the song Los Planetas, "and the symphony orchestra of the prelude". Fortunately, however, Yaxkin had the mercy of guiding me through some of the more complex terrain of poetry.
Unable to capture all of Yaxkin's paradoxical concepts in one word, I eventually decided that the stanza as a whole managed to convey the sense and self-contradictory feel of the original. 4 Yaxkin and other members of the Red de los poetas salvajes often perform their poetry aloud.
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