By Stéphane Mallarmé, trans. Peter Manson.
Of Mademoiselle Mallarmé
Dreamer, that I might plunge
into pure unguided delight,
learn, by a subtfle lie,
how to guard my wing in your hand.
A twilight coolness
comes your way with each beat
whose captive stroke delicately
pushes back the horizon.
Vertigo! see space
shivering like a great kiss
that, mad to have been born for no-one,
can neither break free nor calm down.
Do you feel the untamed paradise
slip like a buried laugh
from the corner of your mouth
to the base of the unanimous fold?
The sceptre of rose-coloured shores
stagnant on golden evenings, this is it,
this white closed flight you pose against
the fire of a bracelet.
Elsewhere: The Poems in Verse (2012), Peter Manson’s translation of the Poésies of Stéphane Mallarmé.
Still farther: Lady Windermere’s Fan, ed. N. Scargill (Pride Press, 2012)
Noice. Good, even.
…and in its mix of potent striking image and melodrama it’s making me think of this Pasternak poem I came across the other day somewhere online. It was a translation by someone or other but I remember tweaking a couple of bits using a literal translation as a guide. A foray into translation! ‘s Easy!
It’s February. Weeping, take ink.
Find words in a sobbing rush
For February, while black spring
Burns through the rumbling slush.
And take a cab. Ride for a rouble
Through wheel racket and bells’ throbbing
To where the downpour makes more din
Than the sound of ink and sobbing;
Where rooks in thousands, like charred pears
Windfallen from their branch-thick skies,
Drop into puddles and bring down
Desolation deep into dry eyes.
Thawed patches underneath show black,
The wind is furrowed with cries, and then,
The more suddenly the more surely,
Verses sob from the pen.