Baudelaire's "Swan" in Literary Matters
 

Here's my translation of Baudelaire's "The Swan" (one of the greatest poems ever written): http://literarymatters.org/13-3-the-swan/

It's beautiful.

I love the 'bric-a-brac and frills' and other things, like how the sight of the swan 'hits home' & more than all of that - the way you're catapulted, as a reader, into the 'feel' of the place, the hurt of it, the something-of-buried-hope of it.


Sarah-Jane

Hi Aaron,

Many congratulations on your translation and publication. Baudelaire must be fun to have a go at!

AP: "Baudelaire's "The Swan" (one of the greatest poems ever written)."
It is splendid, isn't it? Critics like to point out that "Le Cygne" is a pun. I just like to say this: "Le vieux Paris n'est plus. La forme d'une ville /
Change plus vite, helas! que le coeur d'un mortel."

Cheers,
John

Magnifique 🦢

Baudelaire, translated, somehow sounds wrong to me in pentameter. That's only a personal preference, I know. Still, I report it here, as a matter of interest (or not).

David

It's ok. Many other people have told that this translation is great.

Well that's good then. Congrats.

Just a question. You write Pyrrhus' and Helenus' but I can't make those lines scan without adding the lost "s". Is that what you intended?

Loved it, Aaron. It reads like a poem that happens to be a translation, i.e. very nicely. I'll get the book for sure when it's out.

Excellent, Aaron. Thanks for posting. You make Baudelaire speak modern American.

Ann, we learned to drop the s in the possessive of polysyllabic names ending in s. That protects us from constructions like Ulysses's and Aristophanes's.

I don't know Aaron's inclinations in this, but Derek Attridge advocated scanning an "implied offbeat" between the syllables of a spondee to reflect the actual slight pause when the speaker transitions between two stressed syllables. "Rough pride" in Aaron's line could call for such an addition. For the writer to scan it that way invites the reader to add stress.

In the Helenus' line, possibly we are invited to count the caesura as a syllable.