[Janet Kenny]

I don't think so Philip. He died before I wrote it

Wow! "Autumn" is stunning.
"Horses on the Camargue" is a force of nature itself. Superb. It makes me think of Debussy's "La Mer".




[This message has been edited by Janet Kenny (edited June 04, 2008).]

[Tim Murphy]

He really is a broad shouldered, deep chested poet, Janet, and the Zebra poem is my favorite of a very fine lot.

[John Whitworth]

If you google Roy Campbell poet and then Love in a Hut you will get an essay on Campbell by Gwyn Neale which I think is very good, though it may well alienate you utterly from a 'bombastic liar' who said that he hung his wife upside down out of a window (what, as well as Stephen Spender!) and broke the glasses of a Jewish Doctor. I think (though you may not) that it makes it better that be obviously did neither of these things, neither did he actually fight for the Falange, as he said he did. But then Auden didn't actually fight for the Republic either. As Neale says, his boasting and lying did not seem to extend to his poetry which he took very seriously indeed. It is also interesting, I think, that Campbell was the first person to suggest Dylan Thomas was a kind of Welsh Rimbaud. Thomas, of course, was another liar, but lying and poetry are surely inextricably linked, indeed bragging was considered by the Vikings to be what poetry was really all about.

Campbell was a fine translator,at least I think so, from French, Spanish and Portuguese, though I don't know what Erastosphereans think of the phrase 'bitter vastitudes' from a sonnet by Baudelaire.

[Andrew Frisardi]

Thanks, John. I'm going to look that essay up. I knew an English poet here in Italy named Peter Russell, who was a friend of Campbell's in the 1950s in London. He said that Campbell once reviewed a translation of Jiménez by the regius professor of Spanish at Cambridge, writing, "We don't expect intelligence of a professor, but at least we expect accuracy." And then he translated the same poems by Jiménez and put them in the review. I interviewed Russell once, and here is a bit he said about Campbell:

"I remember, Roy and I used to have lunch together in a particular pub, virtually every day, because we shared an office in Kensington, and about half past ten when it opened we’d repair to the pub, drink seven or eight or ten pints of beer, then go back to his house. We’d collect a couple of bottles of rough Spanish wine, take them back to the house, have a nibble and some wine, then Roy would lie diagonally on the floor--it was a room a bit bigger than this, no furniture, practically nothing. He would lie down on the floor with Baudelaire open on the left and a notebook in the middle, and, the first time I saw him doing this, I thought he was copying it. He wasn’t: he was translating it, at the speed that you or I would copy something carefully. Amazing. He was a marvelous man, terribly amusing, and of course he, again, was very rambunctious. He was attacking everybody all the time, including his close friends."

Here are examples of Campbell's translations of St. John of the Cross and Baudelaire. I found them online, but Campbell's books of them are available at Alibris for less than ten bucks.


St. John of the Cross: Entréme donde no supe

I entered in, I know not where,
And I remained, though knowing naught,
Transcending knowledge with my thought.

Of when I entered I know naught,
But when I saw that I was there
(Though where it was I did not care)
Strange things I learned, with greatness fraught,
Yet what I heard I'll not declare,
But there I stayed, though knowing naught,
Transcending knowledge with my thought.

Of peace and piety interwound
This perfect science had been wrought,
Within the solitude profound
A straight and narrow path it taught,
Such secret wisdom there I found
That there I stammered, saying naught,
But topped all knowledge with my thought.

So borne aloft, so drunken-reeling,
So rapt was I, so swept away,
Within the scope of sense or feeling
My sense or feeling could not stay.
And in my soul I felt, revealing,
A sense that, though its sense was naught,
Transcended knowledge with my thought.

The man who truly there has come
Of his own self must shed the guise;
Of all he knew before the sum
Seems far beneath that wondrous prize;
And in this lore he grows so wise
That he remains, though knowing naught,
Transcending knowledge with his thought.

The farther that I climbed the height
The less I seemed to understand
The cloud so tenebrous and grand
That there illuminates the night.
For he who understands that sight
Remains for aye, though knowing naught,
Transcending knowledge with his thought.

This wisdom without understanding
Is of so absolute a force
No wise man of whatever standing
Can ever stand against its course,
Unless they tap its wondrous source,
To know so much, though knowing naught,
They pass all knowledge with their thought.

This summit all so steeply towers
And is of excellence so high
No human faculties or powers
Can ever to the top come nigh.
Whoever with its steep could vie,
Though knowing nothing, would transcend
All thought, forever, without end.

If you would ask, what is its essence,
This summit of all sense and knowing:
It comes from the Divinest Presence,
The sudden sense of Him outflowing,
In His great clemency bestowing
The gift that leaves men knowing naught,
Yet passing knowledge with their thought.

--tr: Roy Campbell (1951)


Baudelaire: Le Balcon (The Balcony)

Mother of memories, queen of paramours,
Yourself are all my pleasure, all my duty;
You will recall caresses that were yours
And fireside evenings in their warmth and beauty.
Mother of memories, queen of paramours.

On eves illumined by the light of coal,
The balcony beneath a rose-veiled sky,
Your breast how soft! Your heart how good and whole!
We spoke eternal things that cannot die —
On eves illumined by the light of coal!

How splendid sets the sun of a warm evening!
How deep is space! the heart how full of power!
When, queen of the adored, towards you leaning,
I breathed the perfume of your blood in flower.
How splendid sets the sun of a warm evening!

The evening like an alcove seemed to thicken,
And as my eyes astrologised your own,
Drinking your breath, I felt sweet poisons quicken,
And in my hands your feet slept still as stone.
The evening like an alcove seemed to thicken.

I know how to resuscitate dead minutes.
I see my past, its face hid in your knees.
How can I seek your languorous charm save in its
Own source, your heart and body formed to please.
I know how to resuscitate dead minutes.

These vows, these perfumes, and these countless kisses,
Reborn from gulfs that we could never sound,
Will they, like suns, once bathed in those abysses,
Rejuvenated from the deep, rebound —
These vows, these perfumes, and these countless kisses?

--tr. Roy Campbell (1952)

[Andrew Frisardi]

Oh yes, and today's Campbell poem:


Sonnet

The teeth of pleasure, when they hiss
So fiercely through the rasping rind,
Reach but the verges of that bliss
The fruit has lost its form to find.
The fruit's a fiction of the mind
Whose scent and taste our senses miss,
Save when, to fiery thought refined,
They draw a fragrance from your kiss
As thrilling as the deep-drawn breath
With which the blood begins to flare
When life is triggered by a hair
And stands upon the peak of death,
Elate, with scarlet cloak outspread,
Before a bull with lowered head.

[ChrisGeorge]

Always glad to be introduced to an accomplished writer that I don't know about. Many thanks, Andrew!

Chris

[R. S. Gwynn]

I'm currently teaching his translation of La vida es sueno, which I've used for years. It's a superb translation, and it's a shame there's not an English-language film of it.