[Caleb Murdock]

Kate, for me, the stars work, but that's because stars have a special symbolism to me (that which can be seen but which is unattainable) -- I have alluded to them in about 10% of my poems, and finally had to resolve not to do that any more.

Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.

Yeats may be saying more here than that love fled to an untouchable distance. He is introducing two concepts -- one, that love was lost due to fear and worry ("paced upon the mountains"), and two, that love was lost because it was over-idealized (it became one of the stars). That's what I'm hearing, anyway.

You say that this poem has a double meaning, so I'm wondering what you think of the double meaning I put in my poem "Goodbye" on the other board (you haven't commented on that, have you?).

[Alan Sullivan]

Back from my holiday sabbatical, I see that Alex has tweaked the site very pleasingly, and that an interesting discussion has begun in my absence. I too am fond of this Yeats poem, however treacly it seems. I agree with C.G. MacDonald at every point in his excellent commentary.

I'm glad that Jim Pitt has posted the Ronsard, because it gives me a chance to pontificate briefly on the subject of translation vs. imitation, which has become a hobby-horse for me since I worked on Beowulf. The Yeats is most definitely not a translation, but an imitation, and a very fine one indeed.

A translation attempts to reproduce, with maximum fidelity, the sense, and preferably also the form, of a poem from another language. An imitation may take any form, and only echoes or reinvents the sense.

Many, perhaps most, contemporary translations in English are really imitations, since they are generally written in free verse, heedless of the verse-forms used in other languages.

My limited French is an obstacle, but I get the impression that Wolfe has taken so many liberties to secure the form that he may not have honored the sense very well. Still, the contrast between Wolfe and Yeats nicely demonstrates the difference between translation and imitation.

Alan Sullivan