Translations: Mallarmé by Auster, Rimbaud by Ashbery, Verlaine by Kirchwey

By Stéphane Mallarmé

Translated by Paul Auster

New Directions. 228 pp. $16.95

nolead ends nolead begins Illuminations
nolead ends nolead begins By Arthur Rimbaud

Translated by John Ashbery

W.W.Norton. 144 pp. $24.95

nolead ends nolead begins Poems Under Saturn (Poèmes saturniens)
nolead ends nolead begins By Paul Verlaine

Translated by Karl Kirchwey

Princeton University Press. 176 pp. $39.50

nolead ends nolead begins

Reviewed by John Timpane

The French Symbolist poets have exerted a huge influence on world poetry. Eliot, Yeats, and Stevens were among many who resonated to the Symbolists. In the last 170 years, poets as various as Rubén Darío of Nicaragua and Léopold Senghor of Senegal and, more recently, Vénus Khoury-Ghata of Lebanon and the Russian American poet Ilya Kaminsky have shown that the Symbolists are everywhere.

That presence will be bolder now with the three titles considered here. It's incredible all three appear so close together. Two - the Rimbaud and the Verlaine - give us new English versions of well-known monuments of Symbolist poetry. The Mallarmé is different, but no less moving or important.

No matter how I define capital-S Symbolism, someone will call me an idiot. But let's try. In the mid-19th century, poets began to explore new ways of calling forth states of feeling. They kicked at the traces of tradition. Did poetry always have to state things? Or could it evoke them, suggest them, create atmospheres of truth, thought, and emotion by wielding words, images, and symbols in new ways?

Their experiments extended to verse itself. Many poets began to write in new forms, or in what we once called "free" verse, or in prose poetry. They sought a flowing line for the seeming liquidity of thought and dream.

That movement, and the many different poetries it embraces, has become known as Symbolism. Rimbaud, Verlaine, and Mallarmé are three of its greatest names.

I can't say enough about John Ashbery's translation of Illuminations. Arthur Rimbaud wrote this astonishing collection when he was 19 or 20; it's mostly prose poems, dense, hallucinatory, bursting with novel gusto.

How often has a great poet in one language - also a master of a second language - translated an equally great poet? Not often. The effect is uncanny: Rimbaud's epoch-making poems come through in all their bizarre originality, their brusque, unsettling freshness. Ashbery has a terrific ear, a delicate touch with the nuances of Rimbaud's French. In "Democracy," what appears to be a street leader in a revolt speaks:

On to city centers where we'll nourish the most cynical prostitution. We'll massacre logical rebellions. . . . Well-meaning draftees, we'll adopt a ferocious philosophy; ignorant of science, sly for comfort; let the shambling world drop dead.

Rimbaud loves the energy of democracy but doesn't turn away from how stupid it is, how corrupt ("at the service of the most monstrous industrial or military exploitation"), how crummy. "Ignorant of science, sly for comfort" suits English, in tone and cadence, just as well as "ignorants pour la science; roués pour le confort" suits the French.

Ashbery works such subtle magic throughout. Rimbaud trains his light on city life (as in the fantastic, absurdly great "Cities I"), ineffable experience ("Mystical," or "Genie," which Ashbery in his preface calls "one of the greatest poems ever written"), sex ("H"), childhood, and war - and at no time does he make a single unambiguous statement. His art was to set the spirit in a new room. What an event is Ashbery's translation.

Karl Kirchwey is a professor and director of the Creative Writing Program at Bryn Mawr College. He's decided to attempt something unimaginable: translate Paul Verlaine's Poèmes saturniens into English while preserving the poems' original verse and rhyme schemes. Anyone who has tried to do such a thing knows how hard and unrewarding it can be.

This is Verlaine's first book, published when he was 22. It had two lives, the first when it first appeared, and again 30 years later, when French culture rediscovered Verlaine. Kirchwey chooses a decidedly stretchy definition of what constitutes rhyme. His choice reflects our moment, when poets employ rhyme across the spectrum of stretch - pure, slant, sight, squint, vague, near-cousin, three doors over.

But it's a smart, workable choice because it frees Kirchwey, himself a gifted, resourceful poet, to let his resources run. I think these two stanzas of "Parisian Sketch" sound as much like Verlaine as you could possibly do in English:

The moon plated its shades of zinc

In blunted angles.

Shaped like a five, the wisps of smoke

Poured thick and black from the high gables.

The sky was gray. The north wind wept

Like a bassoon.

In the distance, a shivering wary tomcat

Howled in a strange shrill fashion.

Zinc rhymes with smoke, angles with gables, and so on. For some ears, it may take just a little imagination. But Kirchwey's translation helps preserve Verlaine's astonishing, muscular music, which, for me, very few previous translations get. It isn't exactly like Verlaine's music and doesn't have to be; its job is to present us with a usable image of that music, and this Kirchwey does brilliantly.

At last, we come to A Tomb for Anatole. Stéphane Mallarmé is a towering figure these days, a great-uncle to the "language poetry" movement, an austere and sometimes unavailing figure. But Tomb is Mallarmé as both a poet and an accessible, suffering man, and I am glad more readers will now know him that way.

In 1879, Mallarmé's second child, Anatole, died at age 8. The poet made a journal of 202 fragments, a sketch for a grand poem, trying to work some way through his loss. He left it unfinished, and Tomb was not published in French until 1961.

Translator Paul Auster, an accomplished writer, is leery of claiming these fragments as poetry. Well, of course they are. They are unfinished, yes, but they still strike with power:

                        (I

what do you want, sweet

adored vision -

who often come

towards me and lean

over - as if

to listen to secret [of

my tears] -

to know that you are

dead

- what you do not know?

- no I will not

This is more or less word for word. Auster pulls no tricks in translating these fragments; he simply lets us watch the poet as he struggles, struggles for a way to write in the midst of the worst of loss, of grief. The brackets around of my tears are pure Mallarmé - the poet angry with himself for indulging too much emotion. I find inexpressibly moving the way fragment after fragment inevitably breaks down:

                           (I

death - whispers softly

- I am no one -

I do not even know who I am

(for the dead do not

know they are

dead-, nor even that they

die

- for children

at least

- or

This strikes me as exquisite. It questions what cannot answer, tries to stretch beyond the knowable. Mallarmé, like any father, any mother, seeks to know his child in death, through death, past death. The struggle, heroic and ever-unfinished, is here. I like knowing Mallarmé this way.

A good translation should be both a serviceable approximation of the original and a book of good poetry in the new language. All three of these books are just that - a great addition to the poetry shelf.