french

X.J. Kennedy

X.J. Kennedy will have two new books out this year: a comic novel, A Hoarse Half-human Cheer (e-book from Curtis Brown Digital, paperback from CreateSpace) and Fits of Concision: Collected Poems of Six or Fewer Lines (Grolier Poetry Bookshop). His translations include The Bestiary of Guillaume Apollinaire (Johns Hopkins University Press) and the Lysistrata of Aristophanesin the Penn Complete Greek Drama series.

 

 

What Lasts

english translation

What Lasts

original French poem

Quatrain

Adapted from “Miscellaneous Poems”
with lines from “Le Testament”

“Quatrain”
Je suis Françoys dont il me poise,
Né de Paris emprès Pontoise
Et de la corde d'une toise
Sçaura mon col que mon cul poise.

Line 2 of “Le Lais” in “Le Testament”:
Je, Françoys Villon escollier,

See also:  “Le Testament,” ll. 48, 9-32, 721-8, and, in “The Legacy,” line 92 and
ll. 186-8.

 

And It Vanishes

english translation

And It Vanishes

original French poem

Épitaphe

Il a vécu tantôt gai comme un sansonnet,
Tour à tour amoureux insoucieux et tendre,
Tantôt sombre et rêveur comme un triste Clitandre,
Un jour il entendit qu’à sa porte on sonnait.

C’était la Mort!  Alors il la pria d’attendre
Qu’il eût posé le point à son dernier sonnet;
Et puis sans s’émouvoir, il s’en alla s’étendre
Au fond du coffre froid où son corps frissonnait.

Il était paresseux, à ce que dit l’histoire,
Il laissait trop sécher l’encre dans l’écritoire,
Il voulait tour savoir mais il n’a rien connu.

Et quand vint le moment où, las de cette vie,
Un soir d’hiver, enfin l'âme lui fut ravie,
Il s’en alla disant: “Pourquoi suis-je venu?”

 

The Rendezvous

english translation

The Rendezvous

original French poem

Le Rendez-vous

Il est tard. L’astronome aux vielles obstinées,
Sur sa tour, dans le ciel où meurt le dernier bruit,
Cherche des îles d’or, et le front dans la nuit,
Regard à l’infini blanchir des matinées.

Les mondes fuient pareils à des graines vannées;
L’épais fourmillement des nébuleuses luit;
Mais, attentif à l’astre échevelé qu’il suit,
Il le somme et lui dit: “Reviens dans mille années.”

Et l’astre reviendra. D’un pas ni d’un instant
Il ne saurait frauder la science éternelle;
Des hommes passeront, l’humanité l’attend;

D’un œil changeant, mais sûr, elle fait sentinelle;
Et fût-elle abolie au temps de son retour,
Seule, la Vérité veillerait sur la tour.

 

Vowels

english translation

Vowels

original French poem

Voyelles

A noir, E blanc, I rouge, U vert, O bleu: voyelles,
Je dirai quelque jour vos naissances latentes:
A, noir corset velue des mouches éclatantes
Qui bombinent autour des puanteurs cruelles,

Golfes d’ombre; E, candeurs des vapeurs et des tentes,
Lances des glaciers fiers, rois blancs, frissons d’ombelles;
I, pourpres, sang craché, rire des lèvres belles
Dans la colère ou les ivresses pénitentes;

U, cycles, vibrements divins des mers virides,
Paix des pâtis semés d’animaux, paix des rides
Que l’alchimie imprime aux grands fronts studieux;

O suprême Clairon plein des strideurs étranges,
Silences traversés des Mondes et des Anges:
—O l’Oméga, rayon violet de Ses Yeux!

 

François Villon

François Villon (1431 – c. 1463) was born François Montcorbier. A promising graduate of the University of Paris, adept in law and the classics, he fled to the countryside in 1455 after killing a priest in a brawl. For the rest of his life he was a violent vagabond, a thief, and arguably the finest lyric poet in French literature. Between imprisonments, in extreme poverty, he produced volumes of poems, including The Testament. When his death sentence in Paris was commuted to a ten-year banishment, he left the city and was never heard from again.

 

 

Gérard de Nerval

Gérard de Nerval (1808 – 1855) was one of several pseudonyms used by Gérard Labrunie, who translated Goethe’s Faust at age 19 and continued to import German Romanticism into French while also reverting to Renaissance poets for sonnet forms. A theater critic, travel writer and prose stylist, he is also ranked, on the basis of a dozen evocative sonnets, as one of the finest French poets. Subject to repeated schizophrenic breakdowns, he died at 47.

 

Armand Sully Prudhomme

Armand Sully Prudhomme (1839 – 1907) was a student of law and philosophy who worked for years in the office of a Parisian notary after vision problems prevented a career in engineering. His writing efforts, encouraged by Leconte de Lisle, extended the Parnassian style, which objected to both Symbolism and free verse and hoped to restore the classical standards of elegance, calm and impersonality. Despite the small quantity of his verse and essays, Prudhomme was awarded the first Nobel Prize for literature, in 1901.

 

 

Arthur Rimbaud

Arthur Rimbaud (1854 – 1891) was a French poet who wrote some of the most remarkable poetry and prose of the 19th century. He prefigured surrealism and free verse, and was a major figure in symbolism. Precocious and miserable in provincial France, he ran away to Paris at 16, where he read voraciously and lived in alcoholic squalor, sometimes with Paul Verlaine. Widely regarded as a prodigy, he wrote all of his poetry in the space of less than five years. Before age 21, he burned his last manuscripts and is not known to have written other work.

 

Diane Furtney

Diane Furtney, after her Tulsa upbringing and with a psychology degree from Vassar College, worked a year in Israel (1967), then took an assortment of jobs, sometimes in clinical psychology, in several US cities. Besides nonfiction ghostwriting, she has authored two prizewinning poetry chapbooks (Destination Rooms and It Was a Game) and two comic mystery novels (pseudonym D.J.H. Jones).

 

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