Lunar Solo

The 19th-century French symbolist poet Jules Laforgue may not be well-known in the Anglosphere, but some of the poems featured in Lunar Solo, translated by Mark Ford, will likely be familiar to readers of T.S. Eliot:

I smoke, spread out
Beneath the evening sky on the top-deck
Of a careering stagecoach, every bone
In my body rattling, jangling — but my soul
Is a dancing Ariel, my soul

Beyond such resemblances, a delightful strangeness trails these poems in Ford’s translation. Ford takes many liberties (which he admits to): he disregards line breaks, throws out words, interrupts the syntax. His fluid gestures give the reader a full sense of the interpretive possibilities and an understanding of how those play into the translation.

The poem “Romance” begins, in Laforgue’s original:

J’ai mille oiseaux de mer d’un gris pâle,
Qui nichent au haut de ma belle âme,
Ils en emplissent les tristes salles
De rythmes pris aux plus fines lames …

And here, in Ford’s translation:

I’ve a thousand seabirds nesting in the upper reaches
Of my soul. They’re pale and grey, and fill
The dismal rooms
With rhythms sharp as waves, as knives …

A literal translation would read: “I have a thousand grey-pale seabirds / that nest at the top of my beautiful soul / they fill the sad rooms / with rhythms taken from the finest blades.” Instead, Ford takes Laforgue’s birds straight to the “upper reaches,” rather than “at the top,” and forgoes “beautiful,” leaving the reader to imagine a soul in the shape of a grand and desolate cliff. By deferring adjectives like “pale and grey” to the second line, Ford allows the bleak beauty of the previous image to settle in.

Not all of Ford’s lines work (I remain unconvinced by “Fractious the ree-lay-shun-ship”), but overall, this book presents a version of Laforgue that is enriched through translation.