après ÉMILE GOUDEAU . . .

Alors . . . a few weeks before we left for Paris, I began to dust off my French—or, more aptly, began to scrape the rust off my French—of 35 years ago by trying my hand at some translating.  Specifically, I took at look at some French poetry—perhaps not the best idea, as poetry (as Robert Frost once observed) involves “ulteriority”: a slippery use of language and imagery that may have led Frost to observe also (so legend has it) that “poetry is what gets lost in translation.”  Peut-être.

Alors . . . one of the poems I ended up translating was by an obscure poet, Émile Goudeau, associated with the famous 19th-century Montmartre café Le Chat Noir.  It’s a sonnet, but when I began to engage with it I decided, for better or for worse, not to be held hostage by its form: what interested me more than its formal structure was its rhetorical structure—the movement by which the gypsy woman moves from being an object of male desire to being an agent of male despair.  Here’s the original:

LA CHUTE

La gitane aimée et perverse

A déserté les Orients

Aux grands cadres luxuriants,

Pour descendre dans le commerce.

Dans un cabaret elle verse

Des liqueurs aux étudiants ;

Moi, sur mes genoux suppliants

Le désespoir brutal me berce.

Or, nous sommes là quatre ou cinq

Autour de la fille de zinc,

Dont l’astuce froide nous joue.

Mais Samson court à Dalila!

Mon rêve est tombé dans la boue,

Et je l’ai suivi jusque-là.

Here’s my attempt to render it (without rending it) in English:

THE FALL

après Émile Goudeau

Admired and despised, reviled,

desired, she turned

on her gypsy heel

and turned both cheeks

on sumptuous surroundings:

Les Orients.  She went

for company far beneath

herself and now

pours booze for students

in a cabaret where

I delude myself in brute despair,

brought to my knees

(with four or five confrères)

by a barmaid bent

on playing her cold tricks.

Did Samson court Delilah?

My dream falls on the muddy floor.

I follow it there and wallow.

Do I have a poetic leg to stand on?  Here’s a photo of me standing in Place Émile Goudeau in Montmartre a few days ago: