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.
It’s all as dreadful as the antics
Of
the German High Romantics,
And it goes about as far—about
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
ain’t.
And
their stories: Jules Laforgue
Ended
up inside a morgue—
Couldn’t
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.
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 you’d 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.
The
reader, like the author, should consider himself free
Author’s
note:
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
