Tristan Corbière, poet-toad, toad-poet - It sings. - Horrible!!

The Toad

Some song on an airless night...
The moon tin-plates clear and bright
The cut-outs of gloomy greenery.

... Some song; like an echo dies,
Buried alive in that clump it lies...
- Finished: there in the shadows, see...

- A toad! - Why ever this fear
Of me, you old faithful thing?
Look: a shorn poet, not a wing,
The mud lark... - Horrible to hear! -

... It sings. - Horrible!! - Horrible, why?
Don't you see its eye's bright look?...
No: gone, cold, to its stone nook.
.   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .
Goodnight - that toad is me. Goodbye.

                                                  This evening, 20th July

This is again, Tristan Corbière via Peter Dale.  However much the translator indulges himself, Corbière indulges himself more.  Those double exclamation marks, for example, are Corbière's.

I hope this poem gives some idea of how much fun Corbière can be - the croaking toad as "mud lark" and "shorn poet," for example, or the foliage as tin-plate cut-outs.  Some of his virtues are those of many great poets.  

I perhaps overemphasized his incomprehensibility yesterday.  Or perhaps not.  Corbière was an amazing oddball.  But then the oddest thing is that he ends up in the main stream of French poetic tradition.  It's Corbière and Rimbaud and Apollinaire who are important enough that someone bothers to tote them over into English so I can read them.  Who were the normal French poets?  What happened to them?

I know no Art - gleefully bewildered by Tristan Corbière

It's been a few weeks since I finished Les Amours Jaunes (1873) by Tristan Corbière.  I've considered and abandoned a number of approaches to the book.  I still don't have one.  It's all too ker-ay-zee.

I'll give you a for example, from the second poem in the book, "That," which begins a section entitled "That."  In French, "Ça."  After the title, there is an epigram, a useful quotation that will surely help me understand the poem:

What?...
SHAKESPEARE.

Ah, one of my favorite Shakespeare quotations.  With that helpful hint, let's begin:

Essays? - Pooh, I never have essayed!
A study? - Never plagiarized, idle hound.
A tome? - Too behind-hand to be bound...
Articles? - Sadly, no. It's not well-paid.

And on like this for six more stanzas, telling us what he is definitely not writing: poems, light pieces, a masterpiece.  He ends:

It's a fluke, and right or wrong, by chance's part...
Art doesn't recognize me.  I know no Art.

Then, in the crowning touch, Corbière dates and places the composition of the poem, as is traditional:  "Police Headquarters, 20th May 1873."  Very funny. So his book is two hundred pages of non-poetic non-art. 

I'm reading the translation of Peter Dale, Wry-Blue Loves (2005), published by the marvelous Anvil Press.  Dale is quite free with his translation, trying to enter into the spirit of the thing more than the sense, which is often only barely there in the French to begin with.  But please note that every punctuation mark, every orthographic oddity, is followed punctiliously, including the ellipses in the above excerpts and the lines of dots Corbière sometimes inserted between stanzas.  Corbière loved dots.   I don't know what a translator should do with these loopy things.  Dale seems all right to me.

These stanzas, from "I Sonnet," are not exactly typical, but might show what I mean:

- Sacred telegram - 20 words. - Help, step on it...
O Muse of Archimedes! (Sonnet; it's a sonnet.)
- The proof of any sonnet's adding one:

- I put 4 and 4 = 8! Go on to con it
With 3 and 3! - Let's hold Pegasus strictly on it:
'O lyre, O delyrium, O!...' - Sonnet - 'Shun!

That last word is substituting for "attention" - Dale ran out of syllables. Otherwise, that's pretty much what the French looks like.  Corbière tore French poetry to shreds and then stitched the pieces back together.  I can see how T. S. Eliot found real freedom in Corbière.  But he's got me stumped.  What a contrast to Victor Hugo, for example, whose verse I'm working on now.  With Hugo, I want to write about every third poem.  His poems are rich, overstuffed, even.  With Corbière, I laugh and then scratch my head.  What?  That!

Les Amours Jaunes is Corbière's only book.  Poor guy died two years later, age thirty.