French Transpositions

[Nick Capozzoli]

Here are two "translations" of two French poems that I'm submitting for comments by fellow
Lit-Netters:

Les Pas
after Paul Valery

Your steps, babes of sleep,
Sacredly slow take form
At my bedside, then proceed
In mute glacial calm.

Pure being, nothingness,
Whose hesitant steps are sweet!
All pleasures I can guess
Come on those bare feet.

If now your lips are pressed
And so prepared for this--
To feed a famished guest
The substance of a kiss--

Hasten not that act
Suspending life and death!
Waiting is my life, in fact
My heart is but your step.


Au Lecteur
after Charles Baudelaire

Folly, error, greed, and sin
Besiege the spirit. The body wastes;
Meanwhile we dine remorseful tastes,
As beggars feed their lice their skin.

Sins are fat, repentance lean.
To shrive us we demand a fee;
On the spattered road we wander free
With tainted tears to keep us clean.

On the bed where Satan Trismagy
Chants into our spellbound thought,
Will’s alloy, soon overwrought,
Distills away by alchemy.

The Devil tugs our guiding strings!
We’re charmed by that which is not well,
Descend each day a step towards Hell
Unmoved by blinding stench that stings!

Gigolos, we connive to suck
The martyred teats of antique whores,
Steal pleasure’s fruit from grocery stores
And mouth the orange that turns to muck.

Then swarming like a million worms
A crowd of vermin infests our brains.
Invisible filth within us reigns,
Breathes and fills our lungs with storms.

If boozing, pistols, arson, and rape
Have yet to stitch their tapestry,
Upon the sheet we call our destiny,
Alas we’re cowards who can only gape.

Among the jackals, panthers, scorpions,
Baboons, *****es, all kinds of snakes,
All yelping forms a monster takes
Within the zoo of our affections,

Is one most mealy, wicked, foul!
Such one who neither stirs nor roars
But sneers at the world through meaty jaws
Then swallows it in a yawning howl.

Boredom, by name! How his eyes smother
Dreaming of gallows, he smokes on his stool.
Reader, you know him, that cultured ghoul.
You hypocrite reader, my double, my brother!

[Jack of Hearts]

Your first translation makes some very strange reaches.

Stanza one, line one-- you create imagery that isn't there in the original. Though it is pretty, the line makes no actual reference to 'sleep.' Unless you think the words 'silence' and 'sleep' are implicit in each other in any language. This reader thinks only related?

S1L2 is another strange choice. 'Sacredly, slow take form' more correctly rendered as 'Saintly, slowly placed.' If you're trying to keep the syllable count, you're still short.

S1L3 and S1L4 at this point are part of a very loose translation, transposition or reading. In fact, this reader might not have been able to identify had he not been given the source.

"Vers le lit de ma vigilance
Procèdent muets et glacés."

"At my bedside, then proceed
In mute glacial calm."

lit. "Against the bed of my vigilance
procede mute and frozen."

You've essentially re-written those? Pretty, but why? Valéry didn't choose the image of a glacier, or sleep, even though he could have if he wanted to and, due to the similarity between the languages, it would've rendered into English just the same.

The rest of your Valéry translation continues much the same. Seems more like an inspired re-write than a translation-- and, as a translation, with it's inclusion of new imagery and omission of basic grammatical elements and syntax that render into English perfectly fine without losing any sense... franchment, it's just too heavy handed for this reader's taste.






J

[Nick Capozzoli]

Thanks for the critique! I know that these are not literal translations, which is why I called them transpositions. I got the glacier image from V's glaces, so it didn't exactly come out of "the blue" [ice]... And I was definitely loose with the syllable count...

BTW, when it comes to Valery translations I really like Janet Lewis' "Helen the Sad Queen." She got that one perfectly!