What follows this introduction is his choice of his own poems transposed into French There is today no possibility of deducing any guiding principle of selection, nor of assigning to them with certainty a specific date of completion. Nearly forty years later Gascoyne’s poem, ‘Arbres, bêtes, courants d’eau’, dedicated to his friend Salah Stétié, was published in Poésie 92. 1954, together with draft translations of five poems by Fred Marnau.
His poem ‘Qu’est-ce que la Décadence ?’ and his French versions of three of Kathleen Raine’s poems were published in 84 (mars, 1950) another Raine translation appears in a notebook from c. It seems likely that the influence of the poetry of Jouve and their mutual regard for Berg’s music was a factor here and, given Gascoyne’s truly European sensibility, he may have wished to put into practice his understanding of French poésie as distinct from the English word ‘poetry’. When I put this question to him on his eighty-fifth birthday in 2001 he answered straight away : ‘Because there were things that I wanted to say in French at that time’.
Why he chose to return to the abandoned project some three years later and then composed the long poem in French is difficult now to ascertain. It was published as ‘Strophes Elégiaques à la mémoire d’Alban Berg’ the following year in Cahiers du Sud. He considered his English poem ‘unsatisfactory’ and began a French version in the summer of 1939 after his return to his parents’ home in England. That summer, only months after the composer’s death in 1935, Gascoyne wrote ‘Elegiac Stanzas in Memory of Alban Berg’ in two drafts : the first is in five sections, the second, incomplete, in three.
When Man’s Life is this Meat was published in May of that year, he dedicated a copy to Georges Hugnet the back page was inscribed with a manuscript poem in French written by hand, ‘Eau Sifflée’. One of the earliest of his many notebooks (c.1936) contains the titles of a sequence of poems in French, ‘Les Aréopages tombent’ : this proposed collection comprises four self-translations, ‘La Cage’, ‘L’Image même’, ‘La Fin est près du début’ and ‘La Vérité est aveugle’, together with a list of twenty-seven other poems, several of which have already been written, as he indicates. At various times in his development as a writer, Gascoyne not only translated the work of 20th century French poets, notably Eluard and the Surrealists, and Pierre Jean Jouve, but chose to write original poems in French, occasionally to translate those of fellow poets and friends and to self-translate several of his own into that language. GASCOYNE TRANSLATING/TRANSLATING GASCOYNEĭavid Gascoyne’s lifelong engagement with France and the burgeoning of what would become an extraordinary sympathy with its language, its culture, and particularly its poetry, began in the 1930s.
0 kommentar(er)
