a question from tess
Tess recently wrote me with this question: How do you choose the poems you translate? Or rather, why choose this one?
To be honest, Tess, it really comes down to poems I've either read in translations and thought, "hmmm … that is sort of interesting I wonder what it was like in the original?" or stumbling upon a poem that just blows the top of my head off and thinking, "wait until I share this with my friends … in English!"
Baudelaire's Don Juan aux enfers is an example of the first. I love Mozart's Don Giovanni and at some point probably tried to find as many Don Juan poems as possible. I recall reading Roy Campbell's 1952 translation and thinking, "those are some really outdated words in this poem." For example, in the first stanza Baudelaire writes:
Un sombre mendiant, l'oeil fier comme Antisthène,
D'un bras vengeur et fort saisit chaque aviron.
Campbell translated that as: Proud as Antisthenes, a surly knave/ With vengeful arms laid hold of either oar. Now, I know that Campbell used the term knave because he rhymed it with subterranean wave. Still, it sounded cluncky to my ears. I tried: Charon, gruff in Antisthenes' manner,/ then pulled with vengeful arms on his long oars. I was rhyming manner with underground river. These small differences are, to me, what keeps a poem fresh.
But who is right? I would say any translation that brings forth the "spirit" of the poem is successful. For some readers Campbell's choice of words will strike the right cords. For other, I hope, mine or another translator's.
There is another reason I picked this poem. I wanted to wrap up the three or four poems of Baudelaire's I liked before I stop my translations for good; you see, am growing to loath the man! His sexism! His racism! His poem: Une nuit que j'étais près d'une affreuse Juive … which gets translated by Jacques LeClercq as: One night I lay, a hideous Jewess at my side … (1958) to which I have been musing about for a while. I even started my own response with: Baudelaire, I was that Jew, you bastard … but, no …
… No. I understand Baudelaire was no better or worse than many other poets. He wa a product of his time and place so picking on him when T.S. Eliot and Charles Bukowski go free does not seem fair. In short, I have boxed up all my Baudelaire books and sent them off to my local Goodwill shop. Someone, somewhere, might find more pleasure from the poems than I did.
I hope that answers your question, Tess. Cheers!