2014 TBO 1D--Rimbaud's lice
 

"Les Chercheuses de poux" by Arthur Rimbaud (France, 1854-1891)


VERSE TRANSLATION:

Head-hunters

After Rimbaud

When the child, with his reddened, throbbing brow,
Longs for the vague dreams in whose peace it pales,
Two stately sisters tiptoe to his bed
With fragile hands and silver fingernails.

They sit him down beside an open window.
A mass of flowers perfumes the fresh air.
Dew falls on him. Gentle and purposeful,
Thin fingers wander through his heavy hair.

He listens to their breathing; tentative,
All honey, herbs and roses. Hears the hiss
That interrupts it; spittle captured by
A pouting lip — an interrupted kiss.

He hears their lashes swish through scented silence.
Their busy fingers gently creep and pause
To infiltrate his indolence with clicking
As tiny lice expire between their claws.

Liquor of laziness goes to his head,
Sweet, sighing sound threatens to get him high;
And oh, those slow caresses make him feel
The rise and fall of a desire to cry.


FRENCH ORIGINAL:

Les Chercheuses de poux

Quand le front de l'enfant, plein de rouges tourmentes,
Implore l'essaim blanc des rêves indistincts,
Il vient près de son lit deux grandes sœurs charmantes
Avec de frêles doigts aux ongles argentins.

Elles assoient l'enfant devant une croisée
Grande ouverte où l'air bleu baigne un fouillis de fleurs,
Et dans ses lourds cheveux où tombe la rosée
Promènent leurs doigts fins, terribles et charmeurs.

Il écoute chanter leurs haleines craintives
Qui fleurent de longs miels végétaux et rosés,
Et qu'interrompt parfois un sifflement, salives
Reprises sur la lèvre ou désirs de baisers.

Il entend leurs cils noirs battant sous les silences
Parfumés ; et leurs doigts électriques et doux
Font crépiter parmi ses grises indolences
Sous leurs ongles royaux la mort des petits poux.

Voilà que monte en lui le vin de la Paresse,
Soupir d'harmonica qui pourrait délirer ;
L'enfant se sent, selon la lenteur des caresses,
Sourdre et mourir sans cesse un désir de pleurer.


ENGLISH PROSE CRIB:

The seekers of Lice

When the front of the child, full of red woes;
Implores the white swarm dreams indistinct
He comes by his bed two large charming sisters
With frail fingers nails argentine.

They sit a child in front of a cross
Wide open where the blue air bathes a jumble of flowers,
And her heavy hair where the dew falls
Walking their slim fingers, terrible and charming.

He listens to sing their fearful breath
That feel long plants and roses honeys
Qu'interrompt and sometimes wheezing, saliva
Reversal of the lip or desires kisses.

He hears their black eyelashes beating in silence
fragrant; and electrical and gentle fingers
Crackles from his indolence gray
Under their fingernails royal death in young lice.

Behold rises in him the wine of Laziness
Sigh harmonica could rave;
The child feels, in slow caresses,
Well up and die constantly desire to cry.

Commentary
 

NOTES ON THE POEM:

We sometimes forget how common human parasites have been throughout history. For example, until the last few centuries, the trope of lice and fleas on beautiful ladies' bodies has thoroughly infested Western European literature and art. (Cf. Donne's famous flea poem, and these paintings from the 1600s, by Gerrit van Honthorst, Henrick ter Brugghen , and Georges de la Tour.) The idea that even classy ladies had fleas was not seen as insulting--everybody, from all walks of life, had such vermin. We are not so far removed from monkeys' and baboons' parasite removal rituals as we might like to think.

I mention the flea because it holds a particularly special place in French literature, due to the similarity of the words "puce," flea, and "pucelle," virgin. I suspect that there's a hint of that virginal connotation in this poem about two older girls seeking and destroying the "poux," lice, in a young boy's hair.

The "two big sisters" of this poem (and no, Rimbaud did not have older sisters--I checked) do not regard what they are doing as at all titillating: it's the type of quotidian domestic chore that can be performed in broad daylight, in an open window, for all the neighbors to see, while chatting with your sister. (The paintings above depict flea-hunts as a candlelit activity, probably because of the immodesty of such a state of undress, and the artistic opportunity for chiaroscuro; but anyone who's ever picked lice and nits out of a child's hair will agree that daylight would be far better than candlelight for that operation.) I get the impression that the sisters tiptoe to the child's bed, and later whisper, not because they don't want to get caught doing something naughty, but because they are hoping not to wake another child from a midday nap. No, such a sleeping bystander is not mentioned, but the implicit ubiquity of babies in the domestic scenes of yesteryear is something I always assume. I come from a fairly large family myself, and, as a girl, was habitually stuck with chores having to do with my far younger sibling and cousins, while, grumble grumble, the older boys got to go out and play.

Clearly, the drowsy (and perhaps feverish) child is not being sexually molested in this poem. However, it's also clear that he responds to the multi-sensory sensuality of this innocent scenario in a sexual--or proto-sexual--way. His powerful reaction to these pleasurable sensations of touch, smell, and sound confuses and fascinates him. He seems torn between delight and disgust. Part of the thrill seems to be his own passivity in the scene--the feeling that what is happening to him is slightly dangerous and beyond his control.


NOTES ON THE TRANSLATION:

The prose crib's shortcomings will make it difficult for non-Francophones to make useful comments and suggestions. I suspect that the prose crib was a hasty affair, perhaps done by plugging the French original into Google Translate. E.g., in this context, "le front de l'enfant" means "the forehead of the child" rather than "the front of the child," and "croisée" refers to a type of window common in France, rather than to a cross. The syntactical relationships between words is also confused in the prose.

S1: I would prefer for "brow," rather than "child," to remain the subject of "longs for." That extra bit of distancing strikes me as quite intentional on Rimbaud's part, since it makes the child seem more passive and innocent. He's not longing for anything--his brow is. I would also prefer "silvery" to "silver," because the former is more obviously metaphorical. To me, "silver" is more suggestive of metal claws; "silvery," while still otherworldly, is a more appropriate term for the play of light on ordinary fingernails half-glimpsed through eyes heavy with sleep. I don't think the extra syllable of "silvery" would be a problem metrically.

S2: In the original, I just love the way Rimbaud oh-so-casually tosses in "terribles" between "fins" and "charmeurs". "Purposeful" doesn't quite convey the same creepy ominousness. Even though the French is quite clear that the dew is falling into the child's hair, I somehow get the impression that the child is actually breaking out in a sweat--perhaps feeling clammy with both fear and anticipation. "Dew falls on him" doesn't quite connote that; but maybe I'm reading too much into it in the first place. "Wander" is wonderful.

S3: Of course there's always some loss of content when converting hexameter to pentameter, but this is very nicely done.

S4: Ooo, all those lovely, swishing "s" sounds in L1! I'm very sorry to see the gentle electric fingers ("doigts électriques et doux") become merely "busy," though. And I'm sorry to see the "ongles royaux," queenly nails, downgraded to mere "claws". The animalistic term is a bit too unambivalent for my taste. Although there is plenty of frightening language in the poem, Rimbaud seems careful throughout to keep the child confused about whether or not he likes what he's experiencing, and "royaux" definitely casts the nails' power in a positive light.

S5: The first two lines of this stanza seem to be experiencing technical difficulties. I can't help scanning L1 as a series of dactyls: "LI-quor of LA-zi-ness GOES to his HEAD," which has only four beats; I also scan L2 as the six-beat "SWEET, SIGH-ing SOUND THREAT-ens to GET him HIGH." (And is "get him high" appropriate in register for this piece? I'm not sure.) I'd also like to see more of the musical element of "harmonica" conveyed. The rendering of the final two lines is lovely, though.

As a confirmed rhyme snob, I must dourly mention that the translator has only attempted half of the abab scheme; still, on the whole I find this very well done, and if sacrificing some of the rhyme was the cost of achieving that, I think it was worth it.

Rimbaud can be impossible, in more than one way, but this is a pretty good rendering. Yes, life is easier when you halve the rhymes, but even so, to get the tone as right as this takes some doing. R out-Baudelaires Baudelaire in making innocent activities seem dubiously over-ripe, and this could easily have gone horribly wrong.

'Stately' doesn't match the original at all, but "get him high" is a great stroke.

Enlightening comments, Julie, thank you! What a lot of work you've put into this. And what a lovely poem about something so yecchy. Sex aside (the thought that this had anything to do with molestation never occurred to me, so I was surprised to see you preemptively arguing against that interpretation), there's just something relaxing about having someone work on your hair. Something to do with scalp massage and blood flow to the brain. Or maybe it goes back to those monkey grooming rituals you mentioned. My mother used to have to pick burrs out of my hair when I was little, and you'd think it would have hurt, but it didn't, it was soothing, it's a fond memory.

Rimbaud is often cited as an influence by rock poets whose own work is very different from his, plus he has a reputation for being a badass who died young, and I suspect a lot of people are drawn to him for that reason alone, with the result that he's the nominal favorite poet of a lot of jerks, plus a lot of people have probably read only unrhymed translations of his poems, so it's easy to get a distorted impression of his poetry through a kind of osmosis. A poem like this reminds me how important it is to ignore the hype and go straight to the source.

I like the title "Head-hunters," it's clever, but I don't know if I'd have understood what the poem was about if I hadn't seen "Rimbaud's lice" in the subject line of the thread. Maybe if the word "lice" was used explicitly in the original title, it should be preserved in the translation. "Head-hunters" also has a literal meaning which wasn't present in the original, and that image doesn't correspond perfectly with what's happening in the poem. Head-hunters are killers, and the girls are hunting and killing the lice, but there's no decapitation going on. But the image of the girls hunting for prey in the forest of the boy's hair is such a good one, I'm torn.

"fragile hands and silver fingernails" and "thin fingers" made me think of the lice themselves with their fragile, silvery little legs, and of course lice "tiptoe" silently into one's hair. So at first I thought the two sisters were a metaphor, that this was about a boy delirious with fever who can feel the lice crawling around on his scalp, and hallucinates the sisters grooming his hair. That reading falls apart in S2 - what does the scent of flowers have to do with lice - and in S3 it's obviously a couple of actual girls who are hissing when they spot the hated lice... but then the boy is feverish, so it does make a kind of sense for the line between dream and reality, image and meaning, to be blurred, or at least for Rimbaud, in describing the sisters, to make appropriately "lousy" word choices. (I'm getting so itchy as I type this!)

"Dourly" is right, Julie! Translators have to juggle many competing priorities, and the fact that this translator was able to keep half the rhymes is (to me) an amazing feat, not a failing.

I had some problems with the meter, not only with S5 as Julie points out, but also with L1. Even after figuring out it's IP I'm not sure where the stresses should fall. I do like the tone the translator achieves -- unwholesome without being too creepy. A difficult balance.

'get him high' is such a different register that I'd love to see that kind of tone in additional places. But other than that, and having heard on this forum in times gone by how impossible Rimbaud can be, getting half the rhymes works for me too. Actually, I'm just about certain I've seen this one before.... :)

I wish Wordsworth had chosen to write about lice. This is a fine translation; howvere the meter is a bit wanky. The last stanza captures the original well.

The title is all wrong. A head hunter is not only a killer, but in the modern context is also someone who tries to steal away potential job candidates from other companies. And although the translator did come up with half of the rhymes, I'm afraid I can't laud the effort as much as others have, myself having been tempted way too often with the "vin de la Paresse" ;).

Julie just about covered everything here and I'm in agreement with her analysis. Good effort.