Personal anthology: Paul Verlaine
Fall semester starts here next week (yes, even though it’s before Labor Day, and even though it’s still August). It’s been one of those workweeks where my planner has been pretty much solidly filled with appointments and meetings. And this weekend, I’ve got to work on an article I promised to contribute to an essay collection. My scholarly-writing muscles feel unflexed and flabby after all this time, and I’m rather looking forward to making myself sit down and write the thing, but it does make for minimal blogging. My brain is already tired.
So I’ll leave you with a poem by Verlaine I read in a bilingual anthology at least a decade ago, and liked so much (something about the upward movement of the voices in stanza 1 and the slow descent, through all those short lines, of the "apaisement" at the end: "calm" isn’t quite the right word) that it still comes back to me.
La Lune Blanche
La lune blanche
Luit dans les bois;
De chaque branche
Part une voix
Sous la ramée…O bien-aimée.
L’étang reflète,
Profond miroir,
La silhouette
Du saule noir
Où le vent pleure…Rêvons, c’est l’heure.
Un vaste et tendre
Apaisement
Semble descendre
Du firmament
Que l’astre irise…C’est l’heure exquise.
The White Moon
The white moon
shines in the woods.
From each branch
springs a voice
beneath the arbor.
Oh my beloved…Like a deep mirror
the pond reflects
the silhouette
of the black willow
where the wind weeps.
Let us dream! It is the hour…A vast and tender
calm
seems to descend
from a sky
made iridescent by the moon.
It is the exquisite hour!
I got the French text from Project Gutenberg and the translation — which is fairly literal, except astre is "star," not "moon" — from the Lied and Art Song Texts Page. I’m not surprised so many composers have set it to music.
I started this week. 😐
Beautiful poem. I’m not sure why the translator didn’t follow the line structure though – with the single lines between verses.
I’m not sure either. I did find another translation that kept the line breaks as they are in the original, but it strayed rather a ways from the sense of the poem.