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BOOK NOTES The translation ofSupervielle's poetry has been a lifelong project for Cranston who feels a closeness to the poet, a tender and respectful commitment to his poetry. He has kept close watch over his translations, some begun over forty years ago, left aside for years, reworked episodically, thought through in their minute details, never final, as ifhis fondness for the poet imposed on his translating skills an unabating self-criticism. In his introduction, Cranston speaks to the excitement oftranslation and to its many challenges but also to the fact that the successful translator knows that he must always be in good spirit and accept losing his wager to the poem itself. He also addresses the thorny question ofform. Nothing is more arduous than transposing specific poetic forms from one prosodie system to another, from one that relies on syllable counts and specific phonetic accentuation to another which develops from a system ofstresses and accents. Unwilling to attempt the impossible , Cranston prefers to give his translated poems an inner breathing created by fitting pauses and silences, by harmonies and balances based on assonance and alliteration, sometimes going as far as re-creating a rhyme scheme. For example, "En petits poings fermés, en courtes cuisses, / En ventre rond sans aucune malice / Et nous restons tous deux à regarder / Notre secret si mal, si bien gardé" becomes "To small clenched fists, to leg upbent, / To chubby tummy (no harm meant), / And we look on—no need to tell— / Our ill-kept secret kept so well"(19). Here, Cranston finds the perfect combination ofpoetic rhythm and the simple prescription ofplain words to best serve the interest ofSupervielle's poetic voice. Naissances/Births is, however, more thanjust a collection ofpoems on beginnings and ends, on early childhood and death, on primordial impressions derived from nature and animals. This volume also includes a crucial essay on poetics entitled "Thoughts towards an Ars Poetica." Supervielle, who rarely wrote on poetry, is sharing here precious impressions about his trade, from his understanding ofrhetoric to his feeling for public reading. We are grateful to Philip Cranston for his faithful translation ofSupervielle's arspoetica in which we learn about the poet's strong attachment to dreams, his desire to write from within a dream structure in which, according to him, beings and things can be best recognized and clearly defined in a language unavailable once the dreamer has awakened. As for the book's format, it must be noted that the bilingual edition reads easily , since it presents the original French on the even page while the English translation appears directly across on the odd page. This volume will be of great use to French and English literary scholars and poetry historians whose fascination both for Supervielle's simple and tragic poetry and for the history ofcontemporary poetry was not yet met by an informed translation ofwhat may be called his most revealing work. Indeed, Naissances/Births is a compelling volume in which Supervielle 's honesty and integrity stand out, in English now, thanks to Philip Cranston. Eliane DalMolinUniversity ofConnecticut SUSAN BERNSTEIN. Virtuosity ofthe Nineteenth Century: Performing Music and Language in Heine, Liszt, and Baudelaire. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1998. ix + 239 pp. Susan Bernstein invites us to think about the encounter ofmusicians and poets by analyzing the artist's functions in the nineteenth century. Traditional male figures like the philologist, the rhapsode, the virtuoso, thejournalist, the poet, the gypsy, Vol. 24 (2000): 184 ??? COHPAnATIST and the composer are identified with an "ewige Geisterstadt, city ofspirits or spiritual cities [. . .] the common homeland of all arts, a land in which all kinds of artists communicate through a universal metaphoric language" (61). This "city" suggests the idea ofa community to which we could add the figures oftheflâneur and the bohemian. The author's research centers on concepts ofperformance, interpretation, language , and music. By analyzing several concepts ofmusic, verbal art, and composition , she discusses the complex relation between sounds and words, as well as the Saussurean interaction ofsignifiers and signifieds, langue and parole. The abundant corpus ofthinkers to which she refers belongs to the French and German schools (Benveniste, Foucault, Barthes, Benjamin) and includes some ofthe most prestigious scholars who developed...

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