Leftovers...

This is something I started to write for the blog last year, and abandoned. Perhaps rightly.

...

I’ve been trying to snatch moments between coaxing the thesis along and working on the journal to read up more on Cezanne. Our deadline for submissions for the next issue having just passed, bringing with it a rush of tasks, this hasn’t been easy, especially when combined with making urgent decisions about moving or not moving house. I have at least worked out what I want to read when I can, though. More so than Courtauld’s (see blog entries below) the true modernist encounter with Cezanne (leaving aside actual painters, of course) was perhaps that of Rilke. As for Courtauld (and for me, nel mio piccolo), Cezanne’s art seems to have revealed itself to Rilke in a kind of epiphany, only after he had already been grappling with it for some time. When that moment came, Rilke believed himself able at last to see Cezanne's paintings because, as he put it, “I had just reached it [the turning point] in my own work or had at least come close to it somehow, after having been ready for a long time, for the one thing which so much depends upon”. For Rilke, Cezanne was starting afresh from the bottom up, clearing away the sentimental stylisations of the visible that clogged so much contemporary art. There is an interesting, more detailed discussion of Rilke’s engagement with Cezanne by Michael Heller, here.

Cezanne's favourite poem was Baudelaire's ‘La charogne’ (‘Carrion’), where dead flesh is made beautiful. Rilke dwells on this in one of his letters.

Here are the first three stanzas of Baudelaire’s poem:

Rappelez-vous l'objet que nous vîmes, mon âme,
Ce beau matin d'été si doux:
Au détour d'un sentier une charogne infâme
Sur un lit semé de cailloux,

Les jambes en l'air, comme une femme lubrique,
Brûlante et suant les poisons,
Ouvrait d'une façon nonchalante et cynique
Son ventre plein d'exhalaisons.

Le soleil rayonnait sur cette pourriture,
Comme afin de la cuire à point,
Et de rendre au centuple à la grande Nature
Tout ce qu'ensemble elle avait joint

And here’s Roy Campbell’s translation of those stanzas:

The object that we saw, let us recall,
This summer morn when warmth and beauty mingle —
At the path's turn, a carcase lay asprawl
Upon a bed of shingle.

Legs raised, like some old whore far-gone in passion,
The burning, deadly, poison-sweating mass
Opened its paunch in careless, cynic fashion,
Ballooned with evil gas.

On this putrescence the sun blazed in gold,
Cooking it to a turn with eager care —
So to repay to Nature, hundredfold,
What she had mingled there.

There have been at least four translations into English of this poem (you can see them here) and

probably many more. Of the four I looked at, Roy Campbell’s was the only one I could go for once I got to line five. The other translations of “Les jambes en l'air, comme une femme lubrique” are “Its legs raised in the air, like a lustful woman” (William Aggeler); “Its legs raised like a whore's in lubric play” (Jacques LeClercq); and “Legs in the air, like a lascivious woman” (Geoffrey Wagner). The first is hopelessly colourless, and the third is similarly anaemic and lacking in any emulation of the rhythmic thrust of the original. The second is better. Does ‘lubric’ sound overly medical-scientific? Would ‘lubricious’ be better, and has he gone for lubric to keep meter? Reading it again, perhaps I’m being unfair – maybe ‘lubric’ works well precisely because of the coupling of its vicinity to ‘ludic’ with its coldblooded gynaecological feel. But what I really like about Campbell’s, and what the others throw into relief, is how the very fall of the line contains and communicates an excess of wearied comprehension that cannot overwrite physical shock. This is prosody as cognition: the shorter, obscenely jutting phrase before the comma, then the drawn-out, far-gone after, stretching the line out to a hendecasyllable. After such knowledge, what forgiveness?

I know how hard this is to get right – I had to go back and look at my own translation of Elsa Morante’s poetry the other day, and it is painfully poor, full of moments as bad as any of these, and others far worse: I really repent of having let myself be persuaded into going ahead with publishing it before I was happy with it, or even properly knew why we were doing so. That said, the decision was entirely my own – I don’t want to give the impression I was bounced into anything. But even back then, though I knew it wasn’t ready, I wasn’t aware of how clunking it was: and on the other hand it’s probably true that I might never have let it be published at all if not then. And different kinds of translation serve different purposes: I suppose the LeClercq translation of ‘La charogne’ might perhaps be best for someone such as myself, with extremely dubious French, trying to grapple with the original. But as a poem in English that also gives you something of an idea of how the French might be, the Campbell stands out. It’s the only one that sounds remotely English. The Morante translation I think now, is not really a translation at all; at best it’s a useful crib for the reader with shaky Italian.