Language: French
Poet: Paul Verlaine
Translator: Keith Waldrop
Region: France
SHARE:
while dawn silences
Two poems from Before Wisdom: The Early Poems by Paul Verlaine, translated from French by Keith Waldrop
Translator’s Note:
The beginning of May 1874, Paul Verlaine—thirty years old, in prison—learned that his wife’s plea for a legal separation had been granted and that she would retain custody of their young son. Two hours later he sent for the prison chaplain and requested a catechism. Come June that same year he announced his conversion, and in August he confessed and took communion.
He had, of course, at the usual age, received religious instruction and taken communion. But already then, or shortly after, Verlaine was known to be dipping by preference into dirty books—well, probably not all that dirty, perhaps naughty, like Alexis Piron’s Ode to Priapus—and at the age of thirteen he stumbled across a copy of Baudelaire’s The Flowers of Evil. This is more extraordinary than it sounds; it was 1857, the year Baudelaire’s book came out—and was banned. To the adolescent Verlaine those scandalous flowers seem to have revealed immediately a sort of poem he could spend his life writing. (Ten years later he attended Baudelaire’s funeral.)
His fourteenth year, he mailed off to Victor Hugo the earliest of his still extant verses, “Death.” The lack of an answer from the master in exile, while it may have rankled, did nothing to stop further production. He was now, and for good, Verlaine the poet, unsuccessful though he might be in everything else.
An icon of fin de siècle French poetry, Paul Verlaine (1844–1896) was a major influence on the Symbolist and Decadent movements, and a troubled and often violent alcoholic. A book of love poems for his wife Mathilde was followed by a tempestuous relationship with Arthur Rimbaud that ended with his attempted murder of the younger poet, after which Verlaine spent two years in prison. He wrote as musically of sex and sensuality as of religious innocence and spirituality. His poems were set to music by composers such as Debussy and Fauré, and his lyricism and lifestyle inspired many generations of poets from Boris Pasternak to Patti Smith. He died in poverty in Paris at the age of 51.
Keith Waldrop is the author of more than twenty poetry collections, including Transcendental Studies: A Trilogy, which won the National Book Award for Poetry in 2009, and an inspired translator of French poetry from Charles Baudelaire to Edmond Jabes, Claude Royet-Journoud, and Anne-Marie Albiach, honored by the French government as a Chevalier des arts et des lettres. He has also published the acclaimed memoir Light While There is Light (Sun & Moon) and a collection of his collages, Several Gravities (Siglio). For more than fifty years, with Rosmarie Waldrop, he ran the legendary small press Burning Deck. He lives in Providence, Rhode Island, and is a professor emeritus of Brown University.
Nuit du Walpurgis classique
C’est plutôt le sabbat du second Faust que l’autre.
Un rhythmique sabbat, rhythmique, extrêmement
Rhythmique. — Imaginez un jardin de Lenôtre,
Correct, ridicule et charmant.
Des ronds-points ; au milieu, des jets d’eau ; des allées
Toutes droites ; sylvains de marbre ; dieux marins
De bronze ; çà et là, des Vénus étalées ;
Des quinconces, des boulingrins ;
Des châtaigniers ; des plants de fleurs formant la dune ;
Ici, des rosiers nains qu’un goût docte effila ;
Plus loin, des ifs taillés en triangles. La lune
D’un soir d’été sur tout cela.
Minuit sonne, et réveille au fond du parc aulique
Un air mélancolique, un sourd, lent et doux air
De chasse : tel, doux, lent, sourd et mélancolique,
L’air de chasse de Tannhauser.
Des chants voilés de cors lointains où la tendresse
Des sens étreint l’effroi de l’âme en des accords
Harmonieusement dissonnants dans l’ivresse ;
Et voici qu’à l’appel des cors
S’entrelacent soudain des formes toutes blanches,
Diaphanes, et que le clair de lune fait
Opalines parmi l’ombre verte des branches,
— Un Watteau rêvé par Raffet ! —
S’entrelacent parmi l’ombre verte des arbres
D’un geste alangui, plein d’un désespoir profond ;
Puis, autour des massifs, des bronzes et des marbres
Très lentement dansent en rond.
— Ces spectres agités, sont-ce donc la pensée
Du poète ivre, ou son regret, ou son remords,
Ces spectres agités en tourbe cadencée,
Ou bien tout simplement des morts ?
Sont-ce donc ton remords, ô rêvasseur qu’invite
L’horreur, ou ton regret, ou ta pensée, — hein ? — tous
Ces spectres qu’un vertige irrésistible agite,
Ou bien des morts qui seraient fous ? —
N’importe ! ils vont toujours, les fébriles fantômes,
Menant leur ronde vaste et morne et tressautant
Comme dans un rayon de soleil des atomes,
Et s’évaporent à l’instant
Humide et blême où l’aube éteint l’un après l’autre
Les cors, en sorte qu’il ne reste absolument
Plus rien — absolument — qu’un jardin de Lenôtre,
Correct, ridicule et charmant.
Classical Walpurgisnacht
The black sabbath of Faust (Part Two, not Part One),
A rhythmic sabbath. Rhythmic. Extremely
Rhythmic!—Imagine a Versailles garden,
Correct, ridiculous, comely.
Roundabouts; fountains at the center; straight
Paths; marble genii; bronze marine
Deities; Venuses scattered here and there;
Quincunxes; a bowling green;
Chestnut trees; fields of flowers outlining a down;
Here, dwarf roses someone of taste has grown;
Farther on, yew trimmed triangular. And all this
Summer evening, the moon.
Midnight strikes, out of this courtly park is borne
A melancholy song—a dull, slow, sweet hunting
Song, like the sweet, slow, dull melancholy of
Tannhäuser’s hunting horn.
Veiled songs from distant horns, the caressed
Senses embracing the frightened soul, all
Discords drunk into harmony at
The hunting horn’s call.
Suddenly diaphanous bleached-out forms
Intertwine, which the moon makes glow
Opalescent among green-shadowed branches
—Raffet* dreaming a Watteau!—
In languid gestures of profound despair
They intertwine among a tree’s green branches,
Then, among monumental bronze and marble,
Execute slow round dances.
—These restless specters then, are they the poet’s
Drunken idea, or his regret, or his confession said?
Are these restless specters an organic rabble
Or simply the dead?
Is it your remorse, you idle dreamer, that has led
To this horror, or your regret, or your thought, huh?
All these specters gripped by a clinging vertigo,
Or just some mad impulse of the dead?
Never mind. They’re always there, feverish phantoms
Dancing a vast mournful round, skating
Like motes in a ray of sunshine and then
Evaporating
Moist and cadaverous, while dawn silences, one after
Another, the horns, until there’s nothing to expect,
Absolutely nothing but a garden like Versailles,
Comely, ridiculous, correct.
* Denis-Auguste-Marie RAFFET (1804-1860), French painter, famous for his lithographs of soldiers.
Crépuscule du soir mystique
Le Souvenir avec le Crépuscule
Rougeoie et tremble à l’ardent horizon
De l’Espérance en flamme qui recule
Et s’agrandit ainsi qu’une cloison
Mystérieuse où mainte floraison
— Dahlia, lys, tulipe et renoncule —
S’élance autour d’un treillis, et circule
Parmi la maladive exhalaison
De parfums lourds et chauds, dont le poison
— Dahlia, lys, tulipe et renoncule —
Noyant mes sens, mon âme et ma raison,
Mêle, dans une immense pâmoison,
Le Souvenir avec le Crépuscule.
Mystic Twilight
Reminiscence and the dusk
Glow red and tremble as the horizon’s
Ardent hope springs up
In a mysterious garden
Where profuse flowering
— Dahlia, lily, tulip, buttercup —
Proliferates along lattice-work
And thrives in sick effluvia from
Hot and heavy scents, whose poisons
— Dahlia, lily, tulip, buttercup —
Drowning my senses, my soul, my reason,
Mix in one boundless swoon
Reminiscence and the dusk.
These poems are excerpted from Before Wisdom: The Early Poems (World Poetry Books, 2023)
