I\u2019m very much enjoying The Yellow Buoy <\/i>by the veteran New Zealand poet C. K. Stead. One little poem or section of a longer poem that leapt out at me was this from a translation of Jaccottet:<\/p>\n
Viper That\u2019s wonderfully alive with the movement of the reptile, of the water, of the poet\u2019s mind. The lack of punctuation speeds everything up, makes you feel that the impression\u2019s been caught and stabilised in all its transience and volatility. The idea of a cool kiss plays brilliantly against the menace of the viper.<\/p>\n It looks like a different poem in Jennie Feldman and Stephen Romer\u2019s translation, in their anthology Into the Deep Street<\/i>:<\/p>\n Slow-worm brisk as a trickle of water, Slow-worm with cool lips.<\/p>\n I have to say that that wouldn\u2019t have made me sit up as Stead\u2019s version does. The ending seems rhythmically inert, and \u201cbrisk\u201d seems an oddly dead way of translating \u201cvif\u201d in this context.<\/p>\n If you look at the French, you can see that where Feldman and Romer have gone step by step, Stead has shaken everything up:<\/p>\n Orvet vif comme un filet d\u2019eau, orvet des l\u00e8vres fra\u00eeches.<\/p>\n Stead\u2019s kiss extrapolates from both \u201cl\u00e8vres fra\u00eeches\u201d and \u201c\u0153illade\u201d (in the sense of amorous glance) to bring out an idea that\u2019s clearly there in the original. The way his whole poem is built round creating a sense of speed and elusiveness also recreates the nature of an oeillade in this sense (\u201cregard furtif lanc\u00e9 pour marquer la tendresse ou la connivance amoureuse\u201d).<\/p>\n In short, Stead has written a lovely little poem that in some ways shows how much better a radical approach to recreation can work than one which proceeds in a more pedestrian, point by point way. The abiding problem is that an \u201corvet\u201d is not a viper but a slow-worm, so that at the same time as marvellously recreating the original in some ways, Stead has absolutely changed it in another. How much this matters I really don\u2019t know. In theory, of course, all deviations from the original sense are betrayals of that original, but then all translation inevitably does involve deviation, not only because there\u2019s no exact correspondence of meaning and association between words in different languages \u00a0but also because so much of poetic expression depends on the non-semantic qualities anyway. How much it matters in practice depends on the circumstances of the reader. I could say it doesn\u2019t really matter to me if I have two beautiful, intimately related but different poems I can lay side by side, one in English and one in French. However, I still regret the slow-worm\u2019s metamorphosis into a viper, if only because the English words come so much more alive for me than the French ones do. If I were a better reader of French perhaps I could simply enjoy Stead\u2019s version as an inspired variation on<\/i> Jaccottet\u2019s poem, without feeling any hankering after a more faithful recreation.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I\u2019m very much enjoying The Yellow Buoy by the veteran New Zealand poet C. K. Stead. One little poem or section of a longer poem that leapt out at me was this from a translation of Jaccottet: Viper alive as running water gone as quickly as …….a quick glance …….a cool kiss That\u2019s wonderfully alive […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[33],"class_list":["post-1211","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-world","tag-british-poetry-2011-2012"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1211"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1211"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1211\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1352,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1211\/revisions\/1352"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1211"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1211"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1211"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nalive as running water
\ngone as quickly as
\n…….<\/span>a quick glance
\n…….<\/span>a cool kiss<\/p>\n
\nvanishing quick as a wink,<\/p>\n
\nplus vite d\u00e9rob\u00e9 qu\u2019\u0153illade,<\/p>\n