Les Fleurs du Mal (1857) Translated by Will Stone. ◊ Spleen luvius, exasperated with the whole city, Tips from his urn torrents of dismal cold Over the ghastly tenants of a nearby cemetery, And on the fog bound suburbs unrelenting mortality. My cat, her mangy wasted body […]
By Béatrice Douvre. Translated by John Taylor. ◊ arewell to inset words, to glorious words. Here, a place drunk with blossoming, the enameled field of living. The green water is a face effaced by confines. Farewell to inset words, to glorious words; the voices change, the sad steeples shift while floating. Snow in the brown […]
Nine fragments for Juan Carlos Ceci. By Franca Mancinelli. Translated from the Italian by John Taylor. he rain—dense fabric in which we are generated from a warm color and a cold color. la pioggia—tessuto fitto dove siamo generati da un colore caldo e un colore freddo. ◊ ater bears fruit on the picked stems […]
By Jean Frémon. Translated by John Taylor. E WERE ALONE in the gardens of the hotel, awaiting fruit cocktails that were not arriving. After the many years that I have come to this country, I should know that time is not the same here as elsewhere, that showing one’s impatience is the height of […]
Saturday, 20 January 2024
By Pierre Jean Jouve. Translated by Will Stone. Snows he wind of afternoon on the highest day of the year breath, coldness and warm impetuosity. The snows cannot loosen their dark noose, the pink mountain in peace reveals its rocks, makes known its immensity, informs all of its immortal death. The sky is forbidden […]
Zsuzsanna Gahse: ‘These children,
these siblings, had known one another
for a long time, naked, so to speak,
from the outset, or, at the latest,
from the onset of their first memories.’
Yves Bonnefoy: And always to quays at night, to bars, to a voice saying I am the lamp, I am the oil.
Hoyt Rogers: ‘I have the impression that we never fully hear the tonal subtleties of each other’s languages. Probably I want to imagine stronger accents in French than really exist for you as a native speaker, whereas I note in your English versions that you soft-pedal the metrical beats, as though our language were as mildly accentuated as yours. Most of the time, when you find me slightly altering the semantics in a verse, I am in quest of a prosodic fit—not just ignorant of the faint modulation in meaning.’
G.S. Robertson: ‘Athens, all hail! Hail, O rejoicing throng!
And from our lips receive the tributary song.’
Hoyt Rogers: ‘…there’s no such thing as a perfect translation. If readers have little or no French, then we owe them—not a word by word translation like those old interlinear texts we used to crib with in Greek class—but the best poem the translator is capable of making while staying true to the basic meaning, and above all the spirit, of the original. To paraphrase the parting shot of [Peter] Riley’s review, when I am reading a translation of poetry from a language I don’t know, I’d rather be overpaid than shortchanged. I want to know what the poem says; but to some degree, I also want to know what it connotes, what it evokes, and how it would sound if the poet had written it in English. In poetry, some things are lost in translation; but as with Bonnefoy’s version of Yeats, quoted earlier, other things are gained. In any case, there is far more to poetry than a simple string of words.’
Selections from El HOMBRECITO Two Dominican Poets: Frank Báez and Homero Pumarol Selected, Translated, and Introduced by Hoyt Rogers. FRANK BÁEZ AND Homero Pumarol might both be described as homegrown versions of Junot Diaz: native Dominican authors rather than a son of the diaspora like Diaz, but with the same hip originality and with-it verve. […]
Alain-Fournier: Firstly…no…well…in the evening…perhaps…
I will dare to take her hand, le petit pas;
If this takes too long, and the evening is fresh,
I will speak the truth until I’m out of breath,
And her eyes will be wet with words so tender
And with no-one overhearing, she will answer.
Marco Genovesi: ‘La piazza era buia, quella notte. Quasi tuti i lampioni erano spenti, fatta eccezione per due o tre. Il vento spazzava via tutto quanto. Gelido, assassino, veniva dal nord, dove ghiacciai affilati ringhiavano dall’inizio dei tempi in una notte eterna, mentre i palazzi di marmo e i colonnati della piazza stavano immobili, indifferenti all’inverno che infuriava.’
Marco Genovesi: ‘She turned another page, but then it seemed as if a hunch had started tickling her brain. She swiveled around and saw somebody walking along the street. He wasn’t from the neighborhood, and from the way he was dressed he probably came from the North Side, with its working-class houses of concrete, clumps of stores with bullet-proof glass, asbestos wrecks dumped in the parks, and factories with barred doors and broken windows.’
Hoyt Rogers: ‘By systematically reducing his vocabulary and syntax to the lowest possible common denominator, Genovesi declares his independence from the Italian rhetorical tradition. He has taken this approach in his novel and his short stories as well as in his poetry, and it will be interesting to see how he develops his work from here. ‘
Translating André du Bouchet.
Hoyt Rogers: ‘…there’s no such thing as a perfect translation. If readers have little or no French, then we owe them—not a word by word translation like those old interlinear texts we used to crib with in Greek class—but the best poem the translator is capable of making while staying true to the basic meaning, and above all the spirit, of the original. To paraphrase the parting shot of [Peter] Riley’s review, when I am reading a translation of poetry from a language I don’t know, I’d rather be overpaid than shortchanged. I want to know what the poem says; but to some degree, I also want to know what it connotes, what it evokes, and how it would sound if the poet had written it in English. In poetry, some things are lost in translation; but as with Bonnefoy’s version of Yeats, quoted earlier, other things are gained. In any case, there is far more to poetry than a simple string of words.’