Owen declares that her aim was \u201cto turn Baudelaire\u2019s French poems into convincing English poems while keeping as close as I could to the original texts.\u201d On the whole she seems to me to have succeeded very well in both aims. Her translations give real pleasure as a collection of poems in English. You don\u2019t need to be able to read the French facing pages to receive a strong sense of Baudelaire\u2019s power. If you can, of course, you\u2019ll be in for pleasures that are probably simply beyond the reach of translation from French into relatively rhyme-poor English. In \u201cParfum Exotique\u201d, for example, the lovely, lingering effect of the rhyming of \u201ctamariniers\u201d with \u201cmariniers\u201d at the end depends not only on the fullness with which these words echo each other but also on the way they weave together the sounds of the other rhyme words of the sestet. The result isn\u2019t merely a pleasing pattern of sound, it\u2019s an auditory underpinning and acting out of different aspects of the poem\u2019s meaning, both the blending of sight, sound and smell that the sestet describes, and the speaker\u2019s increasing absorption in his dream.<\/p>\n
In other ways, the translation of \u201cParfum Exotique\u201d seems to me highly successful. On the other hand, despite accuracy in representing its prose sense, Owen\u2019s translation of the lovely \u201cL\u2019invitation au voyage\u201d fails to reproduce the poem\u2019s feeling not because she moves too far from the structure of the original but because she tries to stay too close to it. She does so by using very short lines, all rhyming, three quarters of them with the adjacent line. This shows technical skill, but the result is a brisk, mechanical canter, at odds with the lingering, voluptuous, incantatory qualities of the original. I suspect that any translation of this poem that stayed so close to Baudelaire\u2019s own form would strike the same problem because English just isn\u2019t used to such closely packed rhyming except in light verse. The only English version that seems to me to come close to the feeling of the original is by Richard Wilbur. He uses three and five foot lines, instead of Owen\u2019s two and three foot ones. This makes for rhythmical variety and gives the poet space to recreate Baudelaire\u2019s subtly shaded, blurred and melting transitions between images, letting each float for a moment of glittering lyrical suspension instead of being driven on by enjambment.<\/p>\n
The more concentrated a poem is, the greater these difficulties will be. Not surprisingly, the most undiluted successes are sometimes in less densely textured poems, like \u201cMusique\u201d. In this startling variation on the sonnet form, Baudelaire writes in alternating twelve and five syllable lines, and gives the whole a shockingly original emotional structure by delaying the volta, or turn, which would normally come at the start of the sestet,\u00a0 till a quarter of the way through its penultimate line. Here, Owen\u2019s decision to cleave closely to the form of the original is triumphantly vindicated.<\/p>\n
This is one of many poems where Owen fuses sense with expressive English sound, honouring\u00a0 Baudelaire\u2019s essential meaning and supporting it where necessary with sensitive inventions. Her translation of \u201cAvec ses v\u00eatements ondoyants et nacr\u00e9s\u201d is an example. The first stanza evokes the swaying movement of the woman\u2019s body within her gown and the gown round her body. The rapid run of syllables within the two parts of each line, contrasting with momentary stillness between phrases and at the line ending, suggests the alternation of swinging and suspension as a swing one way reaches its end before reversing itself:<\/p>\n
Her undulating gown\u2019s like mother-of-pearl
\nso even when she walks you\u2019d think she danced,
\nthe way long temple cobras will uncoil
\nand sway before their handler\u2019s wands, entranced.<\/p>\n
The next two stanzas introduce a range of dehumanizing vistas, comparing the woman\u2019s indifference to that of deserts and the sea, her polished eyes to minerals, her whole ambiguously chilling and seductive power to inviolate angel and timeworn sphinx. Owen\u2019s concluding tercet consummately draws together conflicting strands of feeling:<\/p>\n
and through that gold and steel and diamond light
\nglitters the sterile woman\u2019s majesty,
\na cold white star contracting endlessly.<\/p>\n
In contrast to the effect in my previous quotation, the relentless tread of stresses here and the hard clarity of the phonetic transitions seem to embody both the coldness of Baudelaire\u2019s present gaze and the woman\u2019s own indifference. Placed at the end of the poem and emphasised by the eye-catching rhyme with \u201cmajesty\u201d, \u201cendlessly\u201d brilliantly evokes the slow dwindling of the star, the word itself dying away from its strong initial stress so that the whole poem seems to fade into the white space and silence surrounding it. The whiteness of the star and its contracting are Owen\u2019s inventions. Their enduring connotations restore a power that technological change has taken from Baudelaire\u2019s own imagery: if sea and desert no longer seem as terrifyingly vast as they did, the image of a white dwarf star invokes the overwhelming perspectives of astronomical space and time.<\/p>\n
The level and completeness of Owen\u2019s success inevitably varies from poem to poem. The task she\u2019s taken on is ultimately as impossible as it\u2019s vital. Overall, though, this book has given me a great deal of pleasure. It\u2019s an excellent introduction to Baudelaire for the reader who doesn\u2019t know him at all, and a valuable addition to the library of someone who does.<\/p>\n
I would like to thank Peter and Ann Sansom for permission to reprint this review, which appeared in The North 57.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Owen declares that her aim was \u201cto turn Baudelaire\u2019s French poems into convincing English poems while keeping as close as I could to the original texts.\u201d On the whole she seems to me to have succeeded very well in both aims. Her translations give real pleasure as a collection of poems in English. You don\u2019t […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[46],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1821","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-charles-baudelaire"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1821"}],"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=1821"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1821\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1826,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1821\/revisions\/1826"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1821"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1821"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1821"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}