Mallarme

Cool - let me know how you find it!

I suppose it's really just the usual contradictions/tensions about translated poetry. If the french text wasn't there it wouldn't bother me at all - I'd just take the poems as they are. The presence of the original text forces me to view the translation as an imitation, in some way, rather than texts of their own. Though I re-read Edwin Morgan's essays recently, and he's very much a 'translation optimist', a sort of humanism to his approach.

I really just bought it for his 'constellation' style poems, which interest me, and which I like a lot, but I've been enticed by his standard verse. I guess I just need to keep at it.

i have never really made any headway with french poetry, probably because the old enough stuff obeys such different norms that i just don't get a feel for it in the supposedly hamstrung translations

i read some howard (?) translations of baudelaire recently e.g. and the conceptual universe made sense to me but aside from a sort of stateliness the translations seemed quite devoid of poetry

different norms than english poetry, i mean