Oysters, Nightingales and Cooking Pots: Selected Poetry and Prose in Translation by Tristan Corbière (review)

The poetry of Tristan Corbière is a language in its own right, an idiolect that amalgamates linguistic registers ranging from the contemporary slang of Breton sailors to the parodied verses of Hugo and Dante. In her Introduction to this delightful bilingual collection of poems in parallel, Katherine Lunn-Rockliffe reminds the reader of Des Esseintes’s description of Corbière’s writing in J.-K. Huysmans’s À rebours: it is ‘barely French’ (cited p. ix). It may therefore seem an insurmountable task to translate the enigmatic, anti-lyrical, and often cacophonic verse of the most damned of Paul Verlaine’s ‘poètes maudits’ into English. Nevertheless, Christopher Pilling takes up the challenge with brio and ingenuity for a second time, as this is the continuation of These Jaundiced Loves (Calstock: Peterloo Poets, 1995), the first translation of Les Amours jaunes (1873) into English by the same translator. The translations in this work, whose title stems from the poem ‘À Madame Millet’ (p. 103), introduce the reader to those texts not included in These Jaundiced Loves or in his correspondence. Pilling has reproduced a poetic treasure trove for the anglophone reader wishing to discover not only Corbière’s verse but also his prose, a body of work which has received relatively little scholarly attention. Two exceptional prose renditions include ‘I. Dead Men’s Casino’ and ‘II. The American Girl’. Furthermore, the reader will marvel in the many versions of poems that did not make the cut for publication into Les Amours jaunes, including ‘Sonnet’, ‘À mon chien Pope’, ‘La Pastorale de Conlie’, and ‘Veder Napoli e morire’: a panoramic exhibit of the paronomastic and acerbic Corbière, the Breton Corbière, and the Italian Corbière. These examples, which offer scholars tremendous potential for future work in the area of genetic criticism, are all taken from Corbière’s Œuvres complètes (ed. by Pierre-Olivier Walzer (Paris: Gallimard, 1970)). What is most original and timely in this book, however, is the inclusion of three poems from the Album Louis Noir (or the Roscoff album), a work rediscovered in the last decade which demands we revisit Corbière’s poetics alongside his iconographic creations. These include ‘Le Bain en mer de Madame Xxxx’, ‘Petite Pouesie en vers passionnés’, and ‘À mon Roscoff’, where ‘sea-storms [.. .] snore’ and the Presqu’île de Perharidy is ‘flat on his belly in the sun like a plump disabled lizard’ (p. 49). The proximity of texts in this collection breaks down the above-mentioned categories in which scholars have placed Corbière (especially the Paris versus Brittany dichotomy in his poetry), thus allowing for fruitful new connections to be made. For example, the lazzaroni, ‘[r]ich with flab bellies in the sun!’, intratextually recall ‘À mon Roscoff’, but ‘[t]hey’re not the basking lizard, they’re the leech that sucks’ (p. 145). Pilling’s respect for Corbière’s neologisms, his versification, and his stunning images and sounds, has culminated in a collection of Corbière’s performatively fluky poetry (Pilling translates ‘raccroc’ as ‘fluke’) that is, in the very best way, barely English, a collection that will undoubtedly bring forth a renewed interest in Corbière from the anglosphere.