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POEMAS EN ESPAÑOL -- 2009: January 8, April 12, August 3 . . . . 2010: January 13 . . . . 2013: June 30, November 28, December 8 . . . . 2014: September 25, November 30 . . . . 2015: July 9, October 22 . . . . 2016: February 12, August 1, December 28 . . . . 2017: March 2, September 5 . . . . 2018: May 10, July 15, November 3 . . . . 2019: August 4, December 5 . . . . 2020: December 1 . . . . 2021: October 12, December 3 . . . . 2022: April 15, June 21 . . . . 2023: January 3, April 2, May 9, June 6.

Sunday, April 8, 2018

BOOK REVIEW BY AN ANONYMOUS BRITISH REVIEWER



BOOK REVIEW BY AN ANONYMOUS BRITISH REVIEWER
IN THE TIMES

An Anthology of French Poetry from Nerval to Valéry, in English Translation. Edited by Ángel Flores. Garden City, N. J.: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1958.


After due consideration,
I tried reading a translation
Of French poets from Nerval to Valéry;

And although the Gallic nation
Holds them all in veneration,
I confess that they are not my cup of tea.

Its as dreadful as the antics
Of the German High Romantics,
And it goes about as farabout as deep

In that dark and bulgy wood
Where the moonlight drips like blood
And the bushes stretch and clutch at you, and creep,

And where flowers that devour
Yawn open by the hour,
And monsters pursue you and weep.

They were all full of spleen,
If you know what I mean,
And if you read the volume you will see

Forty stanzas of angoisse
Ladled out like vichyssoise
As the entrée to a long course of ennui,

And the endless, sad complainte
That the living are all dead
In the head,
And the dead ...
Really aint.

And their stories: Jules Laforgue
Ended up inside a morgue—
Couldnt pay for a burial place;

While
Stéphane Mallarmé
Faded mystically away,
Like his symbols, into some interior space.

Poor Gérard, dit de Nerval,  
Suffered from le petit mal, 
And in his seizures entertained the ghost

Of a talking dead geranium
That resided in his cranium;
Then he hanged himself beneath a streetlamp post.

Enter Evil: Charles Baudelaire,
Who proclaimed himself the Heir
Of the Devil, after reading Edgar Poe;

Worst of all, poor Paul Verlaine,
Like Van Gogh, went insane,
And tried to kill his lover, Rimbaud.

(Save for jaunty, debonair
Prince Guillame Apollinaire,
They were really not the sort youd want to know.)

Now Baudelaire may have been
Quite the specialist in Sin,
And Rimbaud as Rambonctious as could be,

But after reading this anthology,
I can say without apology,
It offered no Illuminations for me.


Authors note:
The reader, like the author, should consider himself free  
To side with the Reviewer—or with les poètes maudits.






http://thisrecording.com/today/2009/12/9in-which-we-begin-to-roar-with-laughter-at-paul-verlaine-and...html

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