{"id":4352,"date":"2019-04-10T16:05:00","date_gmt":"2019-04-10T23:05:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/alteritas.net\/GXL\/?p=4352"},"modified":"2019-07-27T20:26:17","modified_gmt":"2019-07-28T03:26:17","slug":"my-drunken-boat","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/alteritas.net\/GXL\/?p=4352","title":{"rendered":"My Drunken Boat"},"content":{"rendered":"

Below the photo, my rhymed translation of Rimbaud\u2019s <\/i>Le bateau ivre. Comments follow the poem, as does a link to the original French.\u00a0<\/i>Without having discovered Rimbaud at 16, I probably would have taken to French and have sojourned in Africa anyway. But I was doubtless pushed along those paths by this 19th century and strictly adolescent poet, who abandoned poetry before he was 20, living out almost another two decades of travel and vagabondage, much of it in Ethiopia.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
With Rimbaud in Africa in 1968 – The Drunken Boat is in the purple edition in my left hand.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

*<\/p>\n

As I was being dragged down sluggish rivers
\nsuddenly I felt slip the ropes of my haulers.
\nWhooping redskins had emptied their quivers,
\nnailing them naked to stakes of many colours.<\/p>\n

I didn’t care a fig what happened to the crew
\nnor the cargo of Flemish wheat, English cotton.
\nOnce the drudges had ceased their ballyhoo
\nI let currents bear me where I\u2019d never gotten.<\/p>\n

That winter, dumber than the brain of a baby,
\nI crossed the furious chopline of tidal spew.
\nPeninsulas shorn from their shores maybe
\n<\/span>never know such triumphant tohubohu.<\/p>\n

S<\/i>torms then consecrated my transfiguration.
\nFor days I bobbed, a lithe cork on the chaos
\nof swells which send many to their damnation.
\nNever did I miss the guiding eye of a lighthouse!<\/p>\n

Green water soaked the timbers of my deck,
\nsweet as to a child the pulp of a sour apple.
\nSwills of blue wine and gushes of vomit broke
\nover me, ripping away rudder and grapple.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

At long last I bathed in the Poem of the Sea,
\n<\/span>infused with lustrous stars like the Milky Way
\nglowing through aquamarine depths whence float free
\npallid, pensive corpses who have seen their day.<\/p>\n

Delirium and pulsing rhythms more intense
\nthan alcohol, more boundless than our lyres,
\nbeget love\u2019s sullen, bitter rubescence
\nand tinge the indigo with sunset\u2019s ruddy fires!<\/p>\n

I knew dark skies ablaze with lightning shocks,
\nwaterspouts, backwash, undertow. I knew twilight
\nand dawn exultant as doves rising in flocks.
\nI have seen what others thought they had in sight!<\/p>\n

I saw plunging suns, blotched with mystic terror,
\nshining on strands of purple clotted clutter
\nand, like masked actors faced with tragic error,
\n<\/span>distant waves closing a shivering shutter!\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

And I dreamed a green night with dazzling snow,
\nkisses rising slowly to the eyelids of the main,
\nthe inner coursing of unknown saps aglow,
\nthe blue-yellow tones of a fluorescent strain!<\/p>\n

For whole months I followed like hysterical
\nherds the assault of swells on coral reefs
\nnever dreaming that Mary\u2019s chimerical
\nfeet could muzzle the Ocean\u2019s wheezy puffs!<\/p>\n

I crashed into fabulous Floridas where
\nflowers bore panthers\u2019 eyes in the skins of men.
\n<\/span>Rainbows like taut luminous bridles were
\n<\/span>tethered to squalid flocks beneath the sea\u2019s rim!<\/p>\n

I saw gigantic swamps in ferment, trawls
\nwhere a whole snagged whale rotted in mushy reeds!
\nThe precipitous collapse of waves in lulls
\nbetween storms which unleash chasms of cascades!\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Glaciers, silver suns, nacreous floods,
\n<\/span>skies on fire, foul harbors on brown shores of doom
\nwhere giant snakes smitten with bloodsucking slugs
\nflop like twisted trees, venting dark perfume!<\/p>\n

I would have loved to show a child the bream
\nswimming in this blue, these golden fish which sing
\nthe foam of flowers where I sought winter\u2019s dream,
\nthe ineffable winds on which I took wing.<\/p>\n

Sometimes feeling martyred, of zones and poles spent,
\nmy lurching was calmed by the sobbing of the seas
\ntendered like a purfled blossom posy meant
\nfor me to take as would a woman on her knees \u2026.<\/p>\n

Almost an island, my tossing deck aswarm
\n<\/span>with pale-eyed gulls oozing slime and gossip,
\nI sailed on, watching the drowned in a storm
\nslip away and sink ass-first into deep sleep!<\/p>\n

But, veiled by the cove\u2019s hairy head
\nthen cast by tempest into birdless azure,
\nI would never fish out those waterlogged dead.
\nNor would a square-rigger or man-of-war.<\/p>\n

Free, smoldering, from purple mist wrought,
\nI burst through the heavens\u2019 reddening wall
\nlugging sun-bathed lichens and cerulean snot,
\nexquisite conserves which hold poets in thrall.<\/p>\n

On I cruised, electric phases of the moon
\nlighting my mad bark, ushered by a black seahorse,
\nas July with its hammer blows of heat at noon
\nturned cyan skies into funnels of angry force.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

And I who, trembling, heard maelstroms roar and moan,
\nfifty leagues away, behemoth mating calls,
\nminer of yore of the deepest cobalt known,
\n<\/span>I grieve now for Europe and its crumbling walls.<\/p>\n

I saw archipelagos, atolls whose sidereal
\nempyrean can be glimpsed only from an isle.
\n\u201cO countless golden birds, O vigorous Real,
\nis it in these bottomless nights you sleep in exile?\u201d<\/p>\n

True, I wept too much. Dawns are full of horror.
\nEvery moon is atrocious; bitter, all suns.
\nAcrid love has brought but thrilling torpor.
\nO let my keel split! Take me where the sea runs!\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The chill murk of a puddle is all I wish
\nfor in Europe! Under a fragrant twilight sky
\na wistful child would crouch there with a flourish
\nto launch a boat frail as a May butterfly. \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

O Seas, I can no longer abide the aims
\nof merchant ships, their wakes and waves,
\nnor suffer the pride of flags and oriflames,
\nnor brook the horrid gaze of galley slaves.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

I have written elsewhere about my first encounters with Rimbaud (<\/em>Not All that Beat<\/a> Either<\/a>). A influencial high school teacher lent me a copy of the biographical potboiler <\/em>The Day on Fire<\/a>, which is still in print. He ‘explicitly hoped that I would find my way to emulating Rimbaud not in his precocious poetic achievement, a rather implausible prospect, but in his scandalous relationship with the older poet Paul Verlaine’.<\/em><\/p>\n

Soon I was parsing out the French side of the New Directions <\/em>en regard edition of <\/em>A Season in Hell. That translation was accompanied by the same translator\u2019s version of <\/em>The Drunken Boat. Louise Var\u00e8se, who was married to the early electronic composer Edgard Var\u00e8se, did a great job with both canonical texts. Like most translations of the latter poem, in rhymed alexandrines<\/a>, hers was in free verse, which made Rimbaud come across even more modern than he was and sought to be: as he famously said: <\/em>\u00a0il faut \u00eatre absolument moderne.<\/em><\/p>\n

Samuel Beckett put his version into unrhymed lines “of roughly equivalent rhythm\u201d to the alexandrines. His version can be found at the end of this academic comparison<\/a> of the French and Beckett\u2019s English.\u00a0<\/span><\/em>There was a Persian translation by Mohammad-Ali Sepanloo<\/a> as \u06a9\u0634\u062a\u06cc \u0645\u0633\u062a<\/a>,<\/p>\n

and also a Russian version<\/a> by Vladimir Nabokov, which, we are told<\/a> \u2014 those of us with scant Russian \u2014 respects both the rhyme scheme and the verse forms of the original. If so, he was truly <\/em>il miglior fabbro, to cite Dante about the Proven\u00e7al poet Arnaut Daniel, and T.S. Eliot about Ezra Pound. Note that both Dante and Eliot referred implicitly to making, to craft.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

So there was surely no academic need for another translation, and in this age of rampant free verse and colloquial speech acts as the basis for poetry, for sure no demand for a rhymed one. The contemporary reading public reacts to rhyme much the way I did when I was 16. How much I preferred then the prose poems of Rimbaud\u2019s <\/em>Illuminations and <\/em>Season in Hell, though in retrospect I probably didn\u2019t understand much if any of these astonishing, themselves hallucinatory works.<\/em><\/p>\n

The slowly dawning recognition that, since assonance and consonance are integral devices in poetic language, there is no reason not to embrace or at least to work in terms of the larger patterns of sound which rhyme forms contain.\u00a0<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n

So lately, latterly, I’ve been rhyming. See 2018: A Great Year for Translation<\/a>. Two other recent rhymed translations of Rimbaud as linked after this comment.<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n

In the present version I only on occasion resort to slant rhymes. I saw no reason to embrace alexandrines, which always feel wordy to me in English. \u00a0Rather, as if by default, I found myself using a five stress pentameter, a form which has an iambic feel even when not. This requires a certain compression, given that my translated lines are a foot shorter than Rimbaud\u2019s.\u00a0I don’t think I’ve left anything important out.<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

This translation with the French original is here<\/a><\/p>\n

Two other Rimbaud poems in translation:
\nAu Cabaret vert<\/a>
\nSonnet du trou du cul<\/a><\/p>\n

Other references to Rimbaud in my blogs:
\nNot All that Beat Either<\/a>
\nMy Black Orpheus<\/a>
\nFrame<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

<\/span><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Below the photo, my rhymed translation of Rimbaud\u2019s Le bateau ivre. Comments follow the poem, as does a link to the original French.\u00a0Without having discovered Rimbaud at 16, I probably would have taken to French and have sojourned in Africa anyway. But I was doubtless pushed along those paths by this 19th century and strictly … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “My Drunken Boat”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n

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