The Modern French poets of the 19th century - “Read me, to learn to love me.”

One good reason that these posts do not get written is that I start poking around in the texts themselves, and since I now want to race through post-Romantic French poetry, I find myself a bit crushed.  Charles Baudelaire, Paul Verlaine, Arthur Rimbaud, Stéphane Mallarmé – it is all so wonderful.  And those are just the giants of the period.

In his “Épigraphe pour un livre condamné” (“Epigraph for a condemned book”), Baudelaire urges his “quiet” and “sober” readers to throw away his book Les Fleurs du mal, leaving it to those who know how to plunge their eyes into the gulfs.  “Lis-moi, pour apprendre à m'aimer” – “Read me, to learn to love me.”

Well, we sure did, even many of us who have never read him. Baudelaire and Les Fleurs du mal (1857) are the beginning, or the beginning of the end if you think it was a wrong turn.  It is because of Baudelaire that Modernism is Modern.

There are many aspects to Baudelaire, even within Les Fleurs du mal; I guess my preferred Baudelaire is the one who brought Romantic ideas about nature to the city.  Romantic in theory, since the young French Romantics have a pretty darn tenuous relationship with actual living nature.  They are awful citified.  Baudelaire is really looking around and writing about what he sees.  If he lived in Jura and wrote about bird’s nests and yeast, he would have been a Romantic, but he lived in Paris and wrote about apartment buildings, which is Modern.

Paris change! mais rien dans ma mélancolie
N'a bougé! palais neufs, échafaudages, blocs,
Vieux faubourgs, tout pour moi devient allégorie
Et mes chers souvenirs sont plus lourds que des rocs.  (from “Le Cygne”)

Paris changes! but nothing in my melancholy
has moved! new palaces, scaffolding, blocks,
Old neighborhoods, for me it all becomes allegory
And my memories are heavier than the rocks.  (from “The Swan”)

I read Les Fleurs du mal in French about a year ago, so I can sympathize with the French students clawing through it for the Bac.  It is pretty hard in places.  Mallarmé is probably still too hard for me, I mean if I am trying to understand him.  Tristan Corbière is too hard, the language too crazy.  Jules Laforgue looks about right.  Arthur Rimbaud is clearly within my level.

The easy one is Paul Verlaine.  Much of his best work, entire (miniature) books, are readable by someone with a semester of French, a real beginner.  The beauty of his sound is audible.  He generally does not use too many words.  They are often such an obstacle to the language-learner, the words.  Verlaine felt like a reward.  When I could not read very much, I could read him.  I have read his first four books in French – “books,” they are such little things – and will keep going someday.

Anyway.  It’s all a marvel.  A rupture.  The beginning of “make it new,” the beginning of  poetic tradition that has stretched with real continuity until – I am not sure.  Possibly not today.  Poetry has a large place in French culture; contemporary poetry, maybe not much at all.  Who knows what will happen.  Meanwhile, French high school students will spend this spring cramming Hugo, Baudelaire, and Apollinaire.  Good luck.

White-eyed and poisonous-finned, shark-toothed and serpentine-curled - the best books of 1866

The best book of 1866 is so obvious that it is barely worth disagreeing, but as Raskolnikov says himself, “The wrong form, you mean – the aesthetics aren’t right!” (VI.7, tr. Oliver Ready).  My favorite book of 1866 is not Crime and Punishment but Victor Hugo’s staggering and preposterous man-against-nature – man-against-hurricane – man-against-octopus – epic The Toilers of the Sea, illustrated above.  The steamboat pictured is about to get stuck on a strange rock formation, and the hero will spend most of the novel fighting everything Hugo can throw at him to get it moving again.  “Then, taking up in the hollow of his hand a little water from a pool of rainwater, he drank it and cried to the clouds: ‘Fooled you!’”  That’s right, he is insulting the clouds, defying the cosmos, as one does in a Victor Hugo book.

Dostoevsky wrote The Gambler this year, too, alongside Crime and Punishment, under contractual conditions that would have crushed most writers.  Now there is some kind of heroism.  I would like to read a Victor Hugo novel about Dostoevsky writing Crime and Punishment and The Gambler.

Henrik Ibsen’s Brand is from 1866, as well, about another defier of the cosmos.  Brand, Raskolnikov, and Hugo’s hero – big characters in big stories.

I do not believe I have read any English-language novels from the year.  Wilkie Collins’s Armadale, George Eliot’s Felix Holt, and Elizabeth Gaskell’s Wives and Daughters, just barely unfinished, would be likely candidates for the Booker Prize, if there had been such a thing.  Gaskell had never won the prize, beat by Thackeray, Dickens, and Trollope, so I think she picks this one up posthumously.  I am just making this up.  Like I care about prizes.

It was a broadly interesting year for poetry.  Paul Verlaine published his first book, Poèmes saturniens, which I have only read in part, and of course in English.  The French looks like this, from “Chansons d’automne,” one of Verlaine’s best-known poems:

Les sanglots longs
Des violons
     De l'automne
Blessent mon cœur
D'une langueur
     Monotone.

Lip-smacking French verse.  Those first three lines, those vowels, those nasalizations.  Maybe the poem also means something.

Algernon Swinburne’s first books of lyrics, Poems and Ballads, appeared, ruining English poetry for decades until austere, brutal Modernists dynamited and carted off his lush, sweet gibberish:

from Hymn to Proserpine

Where beyond the extreme sea-wall, and between the remote sea-gates,
Waste water washes, and tall ships founder, and deep death waits:
Where, mighty with deepening sides, clad about with the seas as with wings,
And impelled of invisible tides, and fulfilled of unspeakable things,
White-eyed and poisonous-finned, shark-toothed and serpentine-curled,
Rolls, under the whitening wind of the future, the wave of the world.

It is like The Toilers of the Sea turned into English verse.  Swinburne was Hugo’s greatest English champion.

Christina Rossetti’s second book, The Prince’s Progress and Other Poems seemed like a paler version of her brilliant first book, but I’ll note it, at least.

In the United States, Herman Melville published Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War, his debut as a poet and his first book in a decade, the first of all too few volumes of poetry.  Even more surprising somehow is James Greenleaf Whittier’s nostalgic, ironic “Snow-Bound,” surprising because Whittier was generally such a bad poet, but one who occasionally wrote a great poem.  Whether the torments inflicted by the poem on several generations of schoolchildren are to the demerit of Whittier I leave to the conscience of the individual reader.  Those days are long past.

the flicker, not the flame - E. A. Robinson's favorite poets

Edwin Arlington Robinson made a useful move in The Children of the Night (1897), which I remind myself is his first (and also second) book – he included a series of poems paying tribute to his influences.  Perhaps “tribute” is not the right word.  They are mostly sonnets, scattered through the book, just like the Tilbury Town poems.  They are character sketches, except the drunk is not an inhabitant of a little Maine town but is Paul Verlaine, dead in 1896:

Why do you dig like long-clawed scavengers
To touch the covered corpse of him that fled
The uplands for the fens, and rioted
Like a sick satyr with doom’s worshippers?  (from “Verlaine”)

It’s an attack on gossip about artists, really – “let the worms be its biographers.”

The other poems about writers: “Zola,” “Walt Whitman”, “For Some Poems by Matthew Arnold,” “For a Book by Thomas Hardy,” “Thomas Hood,” and most importantly “George Crabbe.”

Hardy is a kindred pessimistic spirit, although I would not guess that from the poem, which is almost cheery:

Then, through a magic twilight from below,
I heard its grand sad song as in a dream:
Life’s wild infinity of mirth and woe
It sang me…

But of course it cheers the pessimist to meet someone who feels the same way.  Earlier he says that Hardy helps him escape pursuit by “hordes of eyeless phantoms,” whatever that means.  I wish I knew which book Robinson meant, but the answer is likely any of them, all of them.  That line about “mirth and woe” is a fine tribute.

George Crabbe is Robinson’s great precursor , at least of the Tilbury Town poems.  Crabbe’s books The Borough (1810) and Tales (1812), among others, describe small town life in England.  Crabbe’s stories are not universally grim, but the best ones like “Peter Grimes” sure are.  He usually needs three to four hundred lines to tell a story, a contrast with Robinson’s sonnets.  He is highly readable.

The most depressing thing about Robinson’s “George Crabbe” is his sense, likely true, that Crabbe is unread:

Give him the darkest inch your shelf allows,
Hide him in lonely garrets, if you will, -

My volumes of Crabbe are on the most prominent shelf in the house, between William Cowper and Rubén Darío, but set that aside:

Whether or not we read him, we can feel
From time to time the vigor of his name
Against us like a finger for the shame
And emptiness of what our souls reveal
In books that are as altars where we kneel
To consecrate the flicker, not the flame.

I have been revisiting Crabbe to remind myself of what he is like, and I think Robinson is overegging the pudding a little there, but I suppose he is also thinking about himself, unknown and self-published.

The poems about poets are not as vivid as the Tilbury poems but they sure are useful.  Editions of Robinson’s selected poems neglect these poems, including just a few of them, or none.  They are not the best reason to read Robinson, but are a good reason to read The Children of the Night as such.

The incomprehensible Paul Verlaine

Paul Verlaine's clarity has surprised me.  Compared to the esotericism of Gérard de Nerval or the wild lingusitic play of Tristan Corbière - I hope to write about him soon, if I can figure him out - Verlaine is straightforward.  I thought the French Symbolists were going to be sweat-on-the-brow difficult.  Some are, but some are not.  Verlaine is not.  Overall.  Let's be careful here.  This is what I mean:

Landscape

Saint-Denis's a dirty stupid stretch of land.
Still, that's where one day I took my lady friend.
We were out of sorts, and bickering.
A flat sun plastered butter-rays
On a plain as dry as toast.
It wasn't long after the Siege.
Some flattened 'country houses'
Hadn't been rebuilt. Others looked like stage sets.
Scrawled on unexploded shells embedded in pilasters
Ran these words: 'Souvenir of the Disasters'.  (1884, tr. Martin Sorrell)

I'll remind myself that Verlaine's poem has a regular meter and rhymes .  But otherwise, this is pretty much the poem.  The flat sun buttering the toast-like plain is wonderful.  The engagement with history, with the 1870 Siege of Paris, is easy to grasp.  The explicit link between the lovers' quarrel and the destruction of Paris is unmysterious.  The poem itself becomes another souvenir of the disasters.  There is no shortage of meaning in the poem, in its substance and imagery, but it is not cryptic. 

Perhaps my two translators are protecting me from the obscure Verlaine.  I doubt it, but it's a Subject For Future Research.

I have been enjoying the incomprehensible Paul Verlaine in another format entirely, a group of song settings by Claude Debussy, as performed by Dawn Upshaw on a 1997 recording called Forgotten Songs: Dawn Upshaw Sings Debussy.  My understanding of spoken French is quite bad, but I can hardly understand a word of Verlaine in these songs, even while trying to read along.  I can comprehend the first line of "Fantoches" - the name "Scaramouche" stands out in French - but that's about it.  And then at the end of that song, she begins squawking like the nightingale in the poem, which is amusing.  So it does help to know what the song is about.

Ma femme suggests that I blame Debussy, not Upshaw or Verlaine.  She says that she can't understand the words either.  With the French poem in front of me, it becomes clear how Debussy breaks apart and twists individual words, and how little interest he has in Verlaine's meter.  His own idiosyncratic melodic and rhythmic concerns have priority. 

The songs, and Upshaw's singing, are beautiful, and I can recommend the recording - try to hear someone's version of "Mandoline," at least.  Debussy didn't help me much with Paul Verlaine.  Luckily, I don't think I needed too much help.

Here beneath the secret of these trees - Verlaine and Rimbaud in Belgium

Paul Verlaine is hard to grasp or pin down, I find, because of the variety of his work.  He made wild swerves from book to book.  Fêtes Galantes was preceded by a volume of pornographic poems and followed by a book of poems celebrating the joys of his upcoming marriage.  That marriage turned out to be, let's see, complicated.  So the book after that, Romances sans Paroles (1874) contains, among many other curiosities and wonders, a number of poems about how Verlaines would like to reconcile with his wife.  Some of the other poems are about his adventures in London and Belgium with his lover Arthur Rimbaud.  Thus the unlikelihood of a reconciliation.

Did I mention that Romances sans Paroles was published while Verlaine was in a Belgian prison, for having shot Rimbaud?  Verlaine is hard to pin down.

Having indulged in Belgium-bashing with Baudelaire and Brontë, I thought I would share a pro-Belgium poem of Verlaine's, a Belgian idyll from Romances sans Paroles:

Brussels

Simple Frescos II

The path goes on and on
Beneath the sky, sacred
Because pallid.
You know, we'd feel so good
Here beneath the secret
Of these trees.

Some well-groomed gentlemen
Friends surely
Of the Royers-Collards,
Head towards the chateau.
I'd find it good
To be these old men.

On the white chateau
Ending sun declines.
Down one elevation;
Fields on every side.
Why can't our love hide
In there somewhere?

The literal translation is by Martin Sorrell.  The original has a regular five syllable line, and rhymes AABCCB.  Shapiro slips a CC in at the end there.

Verlaine has some fine anti-Belgian poems as well.  I mean, the guy spent eighteen months in Belgian prisons!  But the above poem is more typical, as is this one:

from Walcourt

Bricks, tiles... How sweet
Such cozy cover,
Charming retreat
For man and lover!

That's the poetical Norman Shapiro.  The French is, unfortunately for him, perfect, barely there:

Briques et tuiles,
Ô les charmants
Petits asiles
Pour les amants!

Two translators, two Paul Verlaines.

I have been reading two different translations of Paul Verlaine's poems.  They're oddly similar, and quite different.  Selected Poems, tr. Martin Sorrell, Oxford World's Classics, and One Hundred and One Poems by Paul Verlaine, tr. Norman Shapiro, University of Chicago Press.

Both books provide an overview of Verlaine's poems.  Verlaine published something like twenty books of poetry in thirty years.  No complete Verlaine exists in English, and neither translator thinks that such an edition is a high priority.  Plenty of bad Verlaine poems, it seems.  Neither editor includes a single example of Verlaine's forthrightly pornographic poems, although they both include some fairly smutty stuff, like the 1893 "And now, buttocks!":  "They're oval, almost, \ Almost round. Opal, \ Amber and pink tints" and so on.  That was Sorrell.

But both translators argue that previous collections are too hard on Verlaine's late poems, even if they only rescue one or two from any given book.  Shapiro includes handy little descriptions of each volume, along with increasingly dissolute portraits or drawings of Verlaine.  The biography is tied right up against the poetry.

Both books were, oddly, published in 1999.  Were the two men rivals?  Do they secretly hate each other?   I'll bet the simultaneity helped them get reviewed - both books could be covered in a single piece, like this one.

The translators operate on different principles, which is why I read both books.  Sorrell is more literal and more likely to abandon poetic form.  As a result his versions sound more Modernist.  Shapiro keeps the rhyme, always, and the form, as much as possible, but bends the sense of the poem any which way.  Neither, though, is dogmatic.  They're following guidelines, not rules, and both include facing-page French.  I liked both books, a lot.

I'm still in Fêtes Galantes (1869).  The last stanza of "Les Ingénus":

Evening would fall, the autumn day would draw
To its uncertain close: our belles would cling
Dreamingly to us, cooing, whispering
Lies that still set our souls trembling with awe.  (Shapiro)

Evening fell, autumnal, indeterminate.
The lovely girls in a dream on our arms
Murmured such empty words so low
That ever since we've trembled with delight.  (Sorrell)

One can reassemble the pieces.  Both translators have most of the pieces, although literal Sorrell somehow loses "our soul" ("notre âme") - the "we" seem to have a single soul.  That soul "tremble et s'étonne" - "trembles and is surprised,"  which is not quite English.  So Sorrell swerves one way, with a more playful, sexy choice ("delight"), while Shapiro tries a different, perhaps more spiritual tone ("awe").  Neither is exactly Verlaine; both are part of Verlaine.

So that's why I read both books.

This one hour, now spun and gone - a lawn ornament saddens the Italian clowns

A bit more of Fêtes Galantes, the shortest poem from the two translations I read.

The Faun

An ancient terra cotta faun
Laughs on the green: sign, probably,
That something will rain woe upon
These moments of serenity

That led us here, and led us on,
You, me - nostalgic pilgrims, we -
To this one hour, now spun and gone
Midst tambourines' cacophony.

This is Norman Shapiro's version.  Martin Sorrell's version is a bit more literal but abandons rhyme and sound.  Shapiro not only rhymes but successfully mimics some of the internal assonances (although "Qui m'ont conduit et t'ont conduite" is an unmatchably lovely bit of French).  Plus, his version is a better English poem.

Without the surrounding poems in Fêtes Galantes, the reader would not know that Verlaine's poem is in the same Harlequin world as yesterday's "Fantoches."  Only the "turning flight of the sound of the tambourines" reminds us of the commedia dell'arte characters.  But the context lets us put the you and me, the melancholy pilgrims, in carnival costumes.  In the line of French up above, the adjective endings tell us that the "me" is male and the "you" female (that's right, yes?), a distinction lost in English.  So the French has a little more sex in it.

The laughing statue takes us back to Rome, or Greece, back to the pastoral poetry of Theocritus, perhaps.  Why is his laughter out of place, why does it sadden the poor shepherds after their hour of dancing and music and so on?  He reminds them of the passage of all things, I suppose.

One word in the French is a curiosity to me.  Shapiro has "Laughs on the green" for "Rit au centre des boulingrins."  My little dictionary does not contain "boulingrins," but a moment of puzzling revealed its meaning and gave me a little laugh.  At least, unlike "parking" and "week-end," the French adopted their own spelling for "bowling green."

Scaramouche and Pulchinella making evil plans together - Paul Verlaine's Fêtes Galantes

The poems in Paul Verlaine's Fêtes Galantes (1869) are about commedia dell'arte characters prancing in the forest, chasing each other, playing music, frolicking.  It's inspired by Watteau, I am told.  Sounds great, I know.  By "sounds great," I mean, "who cares."

I was trying to describe the book to ma femme, who knew all about it already.  Finally, she said:  "Yes, a great book can be about anything."  Even prancing Italian clowns.


Weird as Puppets

Scaramouche and Pulchinella
Making evil plans together
Wave their arms, moon-silhouettes.

But the excellent Bolognese
Doctor's picking some of these
Special herbs among the grass.

His daughter with the pretty eyes,
In the arbour, on the sly's
Looking - semi-naked - for

Her handsome Spanish buccaneer
Whose sad affliction she can hear
Well noted by a nightingale.

That's translated by Martin Sorrell in the Oxford World's Classics Selected Poems (1999).  In One Hundred and One Poems by Paul Verlaine (also 1999), Norman Shapiro has:

Puppets

Polichinelle and his colleague
Sly Scaramouche, in some intrigue,
Dark-silhouetted, rave and rant.

Where did the moon go?  I have so many problems with both translations, and also like them both.  Verlaine himself begins:

Scaramouche et Pulcinella
Qu'un mauvais dessein rassembla
Gesticulent, noirs sur la lune.

Verlaine always rhymes - "lune" goes with "l'herbe brune," brown (or perhaps dry) grass, a short and simple word which both translators omit from their English.  Sorrell's nightingale is right, but it should not be "well not[ing]" the sailor's distress, but rather screaming its head off - "Clame la détresse à tue-tête."  Shapiro replaces the nightingale with a squakwing parrot.

These must be brutally hard to translate.  Reading the books together was immensely helpful, or so I hope.  I'm spending the week with Verlaine.  It's not all clowns and Spanish buccaneers.

The painting is Antoine Watteau's The Italian Comedians (c. 1720), owned by the National Gallery, but not on display.  So you can't go see it even if you trudge through the snow.

Who will denounce that criminal, Rhyme? - the ridiculous Bysshe Vanolis

Or "Ô qui dira les torts de la Rime?", which is a line from Paul Verlaine's "Art Poétique" (1884).*

Emily of Evening All Afternoon found The City of Dreadful Night maybe just a little bit ridiculous.  The rhyme grated on her.  Plus, the poem is ridiculous.

One reason I reread the poem so quickly was that I had a similar reaction, especially when I had just started it.  It took a certain adjustment in my angle of attack to really incorporate or absorb the rhyme.  Tennyson's In Memoriam (1850) required a similar little twist.  Serious subjects treated at length demand, in English, blank verse, right?  Or free verse.  Not rhyme.

Is this just Modernist or Miltonic prejudice?  I think not.  Rather, it's the penetrating effect of ridicule and parody.  It's "On a log \ Expiring frog" and the "Ode to Stephen Dowling Bots, Deceased," the reaction to a certain cloying Victorian sensibility.  Rhyme + serious subject = doggerel.  Even in Tennyson or Vanolis, even after my mental adjustment, there were rhyming pairs that really clanked together, rhymes that seemed lazy or in questionable taste: "mountains \ fountains," "casement \ basement," to pick a couple from early in The City of Dreadful Night.

Thomson's use of rhyme is pretty sharp, generally, and his use of form is varied.  The parodic response to Dante I mentioned a couple days ago is actually in rhyming triplets, a parody of Dante's terza rima.  Canto IV, a journey through a terrifying wasteland, is in a strange nine-line stanza that I don't recognize.  Maybe it's a parody, too, of Spenser?  It's also like a ballad, with the extra first line and the closing couplet repeated in every stanza:

As I came through the desert thus it was,
As I came through the desert: All was black,
In heaven no single star, on earth no track;
A brooding hush without a stir or note,
The air so thick it clotted in my throat;
And thus for hours; then some enormous things
Swooped past with savage cries and clanking wings:
                   But I strode on austere
                   No hope could have no fear.

Like a good ballad, the emotional effect builds with every repetition.

Any work, fiction or verse, that attempts the sublime risks the ridiculous.  Often, they are one and the same - the sublime sometimes requires the ridiculous.  I'm thinking of Thomson's predecessor, the death-soaked Thomas Lovell-Beddoes, or Thomas Bernhard's novels, or John Webster's plays.  Since we don't really live in those worlds, most of us, I hope, they can seem absurd.  Bracing, but absurd.  One reason I wanted to mention Thomson's letters to George Eliot is that they indicate that the poet had some self-awareness of his ludicrousness.  Maybe not a lot, but some.

I should point out that Paul Verlaine's attack on rhyme is just a gag.  Verlaine, like Baudelaire, always rhymes.  I can say, with the confidence of ignorance, that he must be among the deftest rhymers in French poetry.  He makes it all look so natural, like it's just a heightened version of ordinary writing, like the rhyme words just happen to have fallen in the right spots.  Verlaine has his own fair share of poems of anguish and despair, all rhyming.

* Translation courtesy of Martin Sorrell, in Paul Verlaine, Selected Poems, Oxford World's Classics, 1999.  Norman Shapiro, in One Hundred and One Poems by Paul Verlaine, University of Chicago Press, 1999, has "Rhyme! Who will its infamies revile?"