Poems under Saturn (French and English)
Paul Verlaine ; trans by Karl Kirchwey
Princeton, 2011
841 V521p
excerpt:
But when she loved, the waves of lust would
Overflow, as vermilion blood
Does from a wound and smokes and boils from
A cruel body absolved by its own crime:
The torrent would break the dikes of the soul,
Down thought, everything turned
Upside down in its way, and rebound
Like a flame devouring and supple,
And then run cold.
Poems Under Saturn is the first complete English translation of the collection that announced Paul Verlaine (1844-1896) as a poet of promise and originality, one who would come to be regarded as one of the greatest of nineteenth-century writers. This new translation, by respected contemporary poet Karl Kirchwey, faithfully renders the collection's heady mix of classical learning and earthy sensuality in poems whose rhythm and rhyme represent one of the supreme accomplishments of French verse. Restoring frequently anthologized poems to the context in which they originally appeared, Poems Under Saturn testifies to the blazing talents for which Verlaine is celebrated. -publisher
Paul Valery on Verlaine:
"His verse, free and moving between the extremes of language, dares stoop from the most delicately musical tone to prose, sometimes to the basest of prose, which he borrows and adopts deliberately."