In the travel pieces, Berlin, the City, and the Court, Laforgue (who was reader to the Empress Augusta for five years) presents German royalty, militarism, and taste in a set of beautiful neat miniatures, always ironic, naturally. Then comes an article written to introduce a show of French impressionists to Berlin. The banker, Charles Ephrussi, one of the first to encourage the impressionists and collect their paintings, was Laforgue’s friend, and Laforgue knew and understood his contemporary painters better than poets frequently do. (It was Ephrussi who obtained the post of reader for him.) If, as Mr. Smith remarks, Laforgue had odd ideas about the evolution of the eye, never mind — there was nothing the matter with his own. His poetry is filled with the same visual excitement as the impressionists’, and the eight and a half pages of Landscapes and Impressions often sound the way the impressionists look. But these pages also throw light on the poetry. I wanted to quote “Noon”:
One half the earth is lit by the sun, the other half black and spotted with fire, gas, resin, or candle flame.… In one place people are fighting, there are massacres; in another, there is an execution, in another a robbery … below men are sleeping, dying … the black ribbons of funeral processions winding toward the yew trees … endless. And with all this on its back, how can the enormous earth go on hurtling through eternal space with the terrible rapidity of a lightning flash?
This reminds us again that no poet has been so constantly aware of the whole solar system: burning, whirling, immense. Laforgue’s “ironic equilibrium” is like a seesaw; the solar system weights one end and our tiny planet, laden with his clowns, casinos, and pianos, lit by “fire, gas, resin, or candle flame,” the other. He never lets us forget outer space; it is the margin of his staccato lines.
The section of Literary Criticism consists of jottings on Baudelaire, Rimbaud, and Corbière. Of Baudelaire: “He was the first to write about himself in a moderate, confessional manner and to leave off the inspired manner.” Add to this his remark in a letter to his sister: “I find it stupid to speak in a booming voice and adopt a platform manner,” and obvious as it may seem, now, one has marked the shift in feeling that did more than anything else to transform English poetry after 1908.
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The letters are so good that I would like to see Mr. Smith translate a whole book of them sometime. But why does he say, “Few young poets have at any time written with such candor and gaiety”? It seems to me a good many have. (But then, I have just been reading Coleridge’s youthful letters, full of candor and gaiety, too, and he, by himself, may seem like quite a few.) At the age of twenty-one, Laforgue, poor and alone in Paris, writes to his favorite sister: “My depression began to constitute a sort of artistic joy.” And, “Life is gross, that’s true — but for heaven’s sake, when it comes to poetry, let us be elegant as the sweet william.…” Shortly after his marriage he writes: “We have a good fire, a lovely lamp, some good tea in the tea set the Empress had [?] given me.” Then, “You haven’t heard anything for a long while about my literary affairs.… you can be sure … that I have the right to be proud of myself; there is no literary man of my generation who is promised such a future.… Alas, how I long to get well.…” A month later he was dead of tuberculosis, at the age of twenty-seven. Because Laforgue is so quiet, so disciplined, so “ironic,” always, it is worse than Keats, almost — and yet one who accomplished so much, who did it so superlatively well, and to whom all modern poets owe such a debt, scarcely needs our pity.
To go back to the poetry. By now everyone knows how to review a book of translated poetry. First, one says it’s impossible. Second, one implies that the translator is an ignoramus, or if that’s going too far, that he has missed the plays on words; and then one carps about the inevitable mistakes. The first objection is still true: it is impossible to translate poetry, or perhaps only one aspect can be translated at a time, and each poem needs several translations. But Mr. Smith has made an exceptionally good try and I think his faithfulness to the French will impress most reviewers. But the quickness, the surprise, the new sub-acid flavor, have disappeared. Mr. Smith is too intelligent not to know this; he says:
Translating poetry is like converging on a flame with a series of mirrors, mirrors of technique and understanding, until the flame is reflected in upon itself in a wholly new and foreign element. Such an operation is rarely, if ever, successfuclass="underline" the manipulation of the mirrors depends to such an extent on the sensibility and skill of the translator.
Besides being a pretty image, this is a true one, as anyone who has ever tried translating poetry will know. But surely, besides sensibility and skill, it depends (about 50 per cent, I’d say) on luck: the possibilities of the second language’s vocabulary. Without luck the worst happens, the flame goes out, and we shouldn’t blame Mr. Smith when it does.
Lune, ô dilettante Lune,
A tous les climats commune,
Tu vis hier le Missouri,
Et les remparts de Paris,
Les fiords bleus de la Norwège,
Les pôles, les mers, que sais-je?
“Moon, oh dilettante Moon,
With all the climates in common,
You saw the Missouri yesterday,
And the ramparts of Paris,
The blue fjords of Norway,
The poles, the oceans, and what else?”
But if anyone thinks he could do better he should sit down and try. Some of the poems, those with longer lines and those in free verse, are more successful.
It is a pity the poems have not been printed bi-lingually, or at least with a facsimile or two in the poet’s curious, “artistic,” but legible hand-writing. The four sketches from the notebooks are worth seeing, but Laforgue seems to have been so much of a piece (or is this a delusion we have about certain poets? It seems true of Hopkins, too): letters, poems, life — even to his appearance, that surely there should be a picture of that reserved, composed young face under its top hat? And even if this is not a critical study, shouldn’t Verlaine’s influence at least be mentioned? And — this has nothing to do with Mr. Smith’s work, of course — the 1956 abstract water-color on the jacket doesn’t go at all with Laforgue’s sketches of 1885 inside.
Mr. Smith also says:
Laforgue was one of the few poets who could write convincing poetry around the tremendous discoveries of his age.… Laforgue was in so many respects in advance of his time that it is not surprising to find him writing poems one would not have thought possible until the present day.
I am not sure who that “one” is — but isn’t this putting the cart before the horse? Do our three or four great poets who were born around the time of Laforgue’s death, seventy years ago now, and who derive the most from him in one way or another, give us much more of what we are appalled to recognize as “our” time than he did? The truth may be, I think, that poetically we are now away behind it.
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This book should be most useful to: 1. very young, almost embryonic, poets and critics; 2. the more knowing reader whose languages don’t include French or who is lazy about reading it; 3. anyone at all curious about the difficult work of translation. These should read it and then, if they are also interested to the slightest degree in poetry, they should supply themselves with a French grammar and dictionary and the two volumes of the poems, published by Mercure de France, or even with the small volume in the Poètes d’aujourd’hui series, which skimps the poetry but is a fascinating little book, with pictures, and then, well — perhaps sign up at the nearest Berlitz School.