Meter and Rhyme

Anna de Noailles may not be well known to the American public, but her contemporaries Marcel Proust and Rainer Maria Rilke valued her work, and the L'Académie française (The French Academy), France's pre-eminent authority on the French language, found her writings important enough to award her the Grand Prix de Littérature in 1921, even as certain people in French society had difficulty accepting her as a French writer because her father was Romanian and her mother Greek. How Anna de Noailles, born in 1876 in Paris, worked the French language was of interest in France up until after World War I, when poets such as Guillaume Apollinaire and Paul Valéry were developing their ideas of modernism. Anna de Noailles kept to meter and rhyme, and this is well reflected in Norman R. Shapiro's selected translations in A Life of Poems, Poems of a Life (edited by Catherine Perry).

Those readers who don't know French will of course stay with Shapiro's translations. It certainly isn't a bad idea to appreciate the translations separate from the French originals. Trying to reconcile the 2 would bring the reader into a whole different arena in which taking in Shapiro's acrobatics would make for a very interesting activity—here are some easy starters: "[p]aradise-plagued" for "hanté de paradis," a "split-flanked moon, amphora sadness-cast" to mean "lune aux flancs brisés, mélancolique amphore," hands that are "dream-hands" or "mains aux rêveuses phalanges," the "[p]asserby, sudden friend, strange brother mine, / Azure-turned-man" who is also the "[p]assant, subit ami révélé, frère étrange, / ... / Azur humain." Those who know that Anna de Noailles had learned German in addition to English will be intrigued by Shapiro's word combinations, such as "tempest-transfixed" and "angel-sad." One may find oneself reading just to see when the next combination might appear.

In certain poems, more English is used to convey de Noailles's French, and this is appreciated, for it develops for us Shapiro's vision of de Noailles's work. Three such poems are "Meditation" ("Méditation"), "The Dazzling" ("Éblouissement"), and "Poem on the Azure" ("Poème de l'azur"). Regarding this last poem, de Noailles's line "Le ciel est blanc ainsi qu'une rue à Tunis" is expanded a bit into "the sky, one sees it through the heat's / Dry air, white as bare, dusty Tunis streets." The "enfant qui court dans un jardin d'Espagne" becomes a "young lad, fleet-footed, making for / A Spanish garden"—de Noailles seems to have placed the child already in the garden, but Shapiro's child running towards the garden may emphasize the want for water. Shapiro chooses to make the child a boy—what would be wrong with using the word "child," the reader may wonder? The word "child" might work well, allowing the reader freedom to wander around in it without being guided towards a certain direction. We see also that Shapiro seems to have dropped translating "gosier de fleur," but the urgent sense of thirst is still there. A beautiful temple ("beau temple") becomes a piece of art, or Shapiro's "temple-art"—interesting use of the word "art" to stand in for the idea of beauty. Regarding de Noailles's "cigognes de Chine," if these were sheerly to be cranes in China instead of "China swans," the word "cranes" would direct the reader much faster to thinking about the significance of the crane in Chinese culture and art—the swan does not play nearly as large a role, and in de Noailles's poem, the case does not seem to be that the poet is going for any obscure notion of the swan. De Noailles is leaning more towards giving us the recognizable exotic—Buddhas appear next, then Luxor (an ancient city of Thebes), then Turkish bazaars. De Noailles goes on to...