Ballade: In favour of those called Decadents and Symbolists, Translation of Paul Verlaine's Ballade: En faveur des dénommés Déca

Ballade : In favour of those called Decadents and Symbolists, Translation of Paul Verlaine’s Ballade en faveur des dénommés Décadents et Symbolistes

for Léon Vanier*

(The texts I use for my translations are from : Yves-Alain Favre, Ed. Paul Verlaine : Œuvres Poétiques Complètes. Paris : Robert Laffont, 1992, XCIX-939p.)

Some few in all this Paris :
We live off pride, yet flat broke we’re
Even if with the bottle a bit too free
We drink above all fresh water
Being very sparing when taken with hunger.
With other fine fare and wines of high-estate
Likewise with beauty : sour-tempered never.
We are the writers of good taste.

Phoebé when all the cats gray be
Highly sharpened to a point much harsher
Our bodies nourrished by glory
Hell licks its lips and in ambush does cower
And with his dart Phoebus pierces us ever
The night cradling us through dreamy waste
Strewn with seeds of peach beds over.
We are the writers of good taste.

A good many of the best minds rally
Holding high Man’s standard : toffee-nosed scoffer
And Lemerre* retains with success poetry’s destiny.
More than one poet then helter-skelter
Sought to join the rest through the narrow fissure ;
But Vanier at the very end made haste
The only lucky one to assume the rôle of Fisher*.
We are the writers of good taste.

ENVOI

Even if our stock exchange tends to dither
Princes hold sway : gentle folk and the divining caste.
Whatever one might say or pours forth the preacher,
We are the writers of good taste.

*One of Verlaine’s publishers who first published his near-collected works at 19, quai Saint-Michel, Paris-V.

* Alphonse Lemerre (1838-1912), one of Verlaine’s publishers at 47, Passage Choiseul, Paris, where from 1866 onwards the Parnassians met regularly.

*Vanier first specialised in articles for fishing as a sport.

© T. Wignesan – Paris, 2013

From: 
T. Wignesan




ABOUT THE POET ~
If I might be allowed to say so, I think my "first" love was poetry. Unfortunately for me, the British curricula at school did not put me in touch with the Metaphysical Poets, nor with the post-Georgian school. Almost all the school texts after World War II contained invariably Victorian narrative poems and some popular examples of Romantic poetry. I chanced upon a selection of T. S. Eliot's and Fitzgerald's Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, and a little later on Pope's An Essay on Man and Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. That did the trick. Yet, I regret not having taken to prose in earnest earlier than the publication of my first collection: Tracks of a Tramp (1961). There's nothing like trying your hand at all kinds of prose exercises to come to grips with poetry. Or rather to see how poetry makes for the essence of speech/Speech and makes you realise how it can communicate what prose cannot easily convey. I have managed to put together several collections of poems, but never actually sought to find homes for them in magazines, periodicals or anthologies. Apart from the one published book, some of my sporadic efforts may be sampled at http://www.stateless.freehosting.net/Collection of Poems.htm


Last updated October 04, 2013