Ungelded Texts

  Jules Laforgue (1860-1887) was an avant-garde French poet, one of the many who came from Uruguay (Isidore Ducasse, Comte de Lautréamont, and Jules Supervielle are also of their number).  His highly-strange poetry has been claimed to be both Symbolist and Impressionist.  The poem translated below is one of the many given the title "Dimanches" ("Sundays") in Laforgue's collection The Flowers of Good Will  (1890); the English title is my own.  I kept loosely-rhymed couplets in the quatrains, as in the French, and I replicated the ABBABA rhyme scheme of the second sextet, but I rearranged the rhyme scheme of the first sextet (ABBABB in the French; ABBCCB in my translation).  Occasionally I rejiggered the words and order and compressed lines in order to match the structure and rhyme.  "Pitman" is an etymological rendition of the French Fossoyeur  ("gravedigger"). It's Autumn It’s autumn, autumn, autumn… The grand gale and its train! Yearly c...

  César Vallejo (1892-1938) was an avant-garde Peruvian author, best-known for his poetry.  Only two books of his poetry were published during his lifetime: Los heraldos negros  (1919) and Trilce  (1922).  The poems in Trilce  are famous for their oddity of syntax and language.  Below my translation, I give the original Spanish of this poem. Trilce  XXIX Buzzes bottled boredom beneath the unproduced moment and cane. A parallel passes to thankless line broken of joy. Stranges me each firmness, fastened to that water that ebbs, that laughs steel, cane. Thread retempered, thread, thread binomial where will you ravel,  knot of war? Armor this equator, Moon. *** Zumba el tedio enfrascado bajo el moment improducido y caña. Pasa una paralela a ingrata línea quebrada de felicidad. Me extraña cada firmeza, junto a esa agua que se aleja, que ríe acero, caña. Hilo retemplado, hilo, hilo binómico ¿por dónde romperás, nudo de guerra? Acora...

 Paul Claudel (1868-1955) is best-known for his plays and for his poetry collection Five Great Odes .  Two of his lesser-known works, though, are short collections of adaptations of Chinese poems, fittingly titled Little Poems After the Chinese  and Other Poems After the Chinese .  Both collections include French poems, but the former collection also includes English versions, which Claudel claimed to have translated based on his French versions.   If they are taken as strict translations of the French poems, they are quite poor, quite inaccurate.  They go far too far off on their own.  As adaptations, though, or as "poems inspired by," they are excellent, often, I think, much better poems than the French they are supposedly based on.  (I do not have the Chinese originals of these poems, nor can I read Chinese, so I cannot compare: perhaps the English versions are closer to the Chinese than to the French.) For instance, one of the poems, from...

Supreme Confession Azorín  (1873-1967) If I had to summarize my mental life from four years old (1877) to this moment (1959), I would do it in two words: “the concrete.”  And I would clarify: “necessity of the concrete, of the definite fact, of tangible things.”  I detest vague dissertation.  For me, in the novel, in poetry, there are neither classics nor romantics.  There are men who feel the concrete and know how to express it.  Prose can run clear and pure; it will leave no wake if it is not concrete.  We will not even bee able to read it without fatigue.  Novelistic precepts do not exist.  No one can say how a novel has to be.  It is almost always applauded by mental contagion.  And if the novel comes from afar, so much the better.  In poetry, could there be anything more vague and insipid than the “Song to Teresa”?  What an interminable and arid road!  What tautology!  And I will say it brutally: What vile...

  Introduction Jean Sénac (1926-1973) was a Francophone Algerian poet and correspondent of Albert Camus.  Many of his poems, such as this one, deal with the struggle for Algerian independence.  His murder remains unsolved to this day. The persons mentioned in this poem are Henri Alleg (1921-2013), a journalist who was arrested and tortured by the French government; Djamila Bouhired (b. 1935), a revolutionary who, at the time of this poem (1957), had been sentenced to death for an alleged terrorist bombing, though her sentence was later commuted to prison time; and Larbi Ben M'hidi (1923-1957), a prominent revolutionary and founder of the Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN), who had recently been arrested, tortured, and executed by the French government. This poem was written in 1957 and first published in Sénac's collection Matinale de mon peuple  (1961). The Bearers of News How beautiful are the bearers of news! They will say: “Peace in Algeria!” We will know...

  Introduction Alfred Jarry (1873-1907) was an eccentric writer, best-known for his series of plays centered on the character of Ubu, with the first play, Ubu Roi  (1896), being his most famous work.  He wrote much else as well: novels, poems, essays, many relating to his concept of 'pataphysics.  (The leading apostrophe is part of the spelling.)  Like most writers, he also wrote many occasional bits, articles and reviews and the like, in order to actually keep food on the table.   The review translated here—first published n La Revue blanche , No. 180 (December 1, 1900)—discusses the 1900 collection Contes et nouvells, suivi de Théâtre (Stories and Tales, Followed by Plays)  by Rachilde, the pen name of Marguerite Vallette-Eymery (1860-1953).  Though a woman, she typically described her literary persona as masculine: "Rachilde, man of letters"; so Jarry uses masculine pronouns to refer to her here, though he knew her fairly well and correspo...