Don't mind quoting Arthur Rimbaud and Charles Baudelaire for French poets, and Poe and Burton for English/American poets.
Burton's 'Stain Boy', Rimbaud's 'Le Dormeur du Val' and 'Aube'... Don't really have any favorite poems. There is one tirade from 'Cyrano de Bergerac' (the play) which I love and know by heart, 'La Tirade du Nez'.
I must sound so uncultured: I am actually unfamiliar with Burton, unless you mean Tim Burton, heh.
However, I did find the poems of Rimbaud without issue. I read an English translation of 'Aube,' which I assume means 'Dawn,' or so the translator
Moineau says.
I cannot imagine how much more beautiful 'Aube' could be in its original language. I fell in love with the heavy imagery; even lines 2-5 would have been enough to leave me in a sense of reverie:
Nothing yet moved in the palace fa?ades. The water had died. The camps of shadow did not leave the wooden path. I have walked, awakening warm and lively breaths, and the gemstones watched, and wings rose up without a sound.
In fact, in going back between descriptions of nature and of the 'urban environment,' the author for some reason reminds me of the German novelist Theodore Fontane, especially his
Irretrievable about an upper class couple who slowly lose their love for each other, and cannot get it back even though they are painfully close and yet hopelessly far near the end to doing just that.
I will definitely have to set aside time to check out more of the poems of the authors you mention, and if 'Dawn' is anything to go by I will end up buying their collected poems in book format.
Relatedly, I do not know if I have ever been struck this much by a translated poem as I was by a passage from Lao Tzu's
Te Tao Ching (I consider the whole book a poem). In a topic at my forum titled '
Has an alternative translation for a book amazed you?,' I discussed how the 'definitive' translation by scholar Robert G. Henricks did not strike me in quite the same way as a much more 'amateurish' translation from a source I cannot recall. The latter translation helped me better understand the work, and encouraged me to read Henricks' more scholarly translation later. Here are the two translations, starting with the 'amateurish' one:
Under heaven nothing is more soft and yielding than water.
Yet for attacking the solid and strong, nothing is better;
It has no equal.
The weak can overcome the strong;
The supple can overcome the stiff.
Under heaven everyone knows this,
Yet no one puts it into practice.
Therefore the sage says:
He who takes upon himself the humiliation of the people
is fit to rule them.
He who takes upon himself the country's disasters deserves
to be king of the universe.
The truth often seems paradoxical.
In the whole world, nothing is softer and weaker than water.
And yet for attacking the hard and strong, nothing can beat it,
Because there is nothing you can use to replace it.
That water can defeat the unyielding—
That the weak can defeat the strong—
There is no one in the whole world who doesn't know it,
And yet there is no one who can put it into practice.
For this reason, the words of the Sage say:
To take on yourself the disgrace of the state—this is called being the lord of the altars of earth and grain;
To assume responsibility for all ill-omened events in the state—
this is called being the king of the world.
Correct words seem to say the reverse of what you expect them to say.
The second strikes me as more impressive how it was put together from a technical standpoint, but in terms of emotional impact the first stuck out more to me. It is amazing how alternate translations can bring something different to the table, and how one is not necessarily so inferior from the other that you should only read a 'definitive' version.
I also read Burton's poems in French, and it was just weird because the translator tried too much to make it all rhyme. It was ridiculous.
Yeah, there are many ways to maintain a sense of rhythm without relying on an AA,BB,AB,AB or whatever 'end rhyme' scheme. I believe the last time I saw writers take rhyming to that extreme was in the French game
Child of Light. I suppose it might have been easier to maintain the rhyme scheme without harming the content if it were in French, but English is less flexible when it comes to rhyme because there are fewer options, if memory serves.
One of my English instructors regularly translates French poems, and he is of the opinion that form is clearly more important than content in the translation. I cannot remember the reasoning, but the idea struck me, and it is why I asked the question about translation here.
Yeah I do like dolphins. When I was a kid, everyone kept giving me dolphins goodies... And one of my dreams is to one day swim with dolphins *o*
