The Poem Itself

by Stanley Burnshaw

This classic work contains over 150 of the greatest modern French, Spanish, German, Italian, Portuguese, and Russian poems presented in the original languages, accompanied by a literal translation into English, a word by word commentary on the text, notes on the text and aids to pronunciation.

Contents

Acknowledgements
Introduction
The three revolutions of modern poetry

FRENCH
Gérard de Nerval
Charles Baudelaire
Arthur Rimbaud
Paul Verlaine
Stéphane Mallarmé
Jules Laforgue
Paul Claudel
Paul Valéry
Guillaume Apollinaire
Saint-John Perse
Louis Aragon
Paul Éluard
René Char

GERMAN
Friedrich Hölderlin
Stefan George
Hugo von Hofmannsthal
Rainer Maria Rilke
Bertolt Brecht

SPANISH AND PORTUGUESE
Rosalia Castro
Miguel de Unamuno
Antonio Machado
Juan Ramón Jiménez
Leon-Felipe
Manuel Bandeira
Fernando Pessoa
Pedro Salinas
Jorge Guillén
Jorge de Lima
César Vallejo
Cecilia Meireles
Federico García Lorca
Rafael Alberti
Eugenio Florit
Pablo Neruda

ITALIAN
Giacomo Leopardi
G. G. Belli
Giosué Carducci
Giovanni Pascoli
Gabriele d´Annunzio
Guido Gozzano
Dino Campana
Umberto Saba
Giuseppe Ungaretti
Eugenio Montale
Salvatore Quasimodo

APPENDIX
Poem by A. Blok
A note on the prosodies
A note on the pronunciations
Notes on contributors

Genres: Poetry, Nonfiction

337 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1960

Reviews

[Caroline · Rating 4 out of 5]

Aljandro Teruel has written an excellent review here on Goodreads. I recommend it as an overview of what Burshaw and his co-authors tried to accomplish, and why.

By and large, I think they were successful. They tried to pack a great deal into an average of two pages per poem: to situate it in the author's oeuvre and cultural context, to translate it in primarily a literal way (but also to include some possible variation in meaning), to explicate the prosody (both metrics and the way the poet uses sound), and to give a larger sense of the poet's accomplishment in the work.

The line by line translation enables the reader to refer back to the poem in its original language in detail. You can move from the English syntax and word order to the original syntax, morphology and and word order to see how the emphasis, assonance and alliteration, and nuances of vocabulary create a poem that cannot be captured in English. The 'what is lost in translation.'

For example, in Pablo Neruda's poem that starts 'Puedo Escribir los versos..'

The English is given as:

I can write the saddest verses tonight
To think that I do not have her. To feel that I have lost her.

The Spanish is

Puedo escribir los versos más tristes esta noche.
Pensar que no la tengo. Sentir que la he perdido.

The pensar-que / Sentir que and the tengo / perdido rhymes in the one line create so much more poetry than the English. Instead of the repetition of 'her' at the end of each sentence, you get the emphasized contrast of 'tengo' and 'perdido.' The deliberate pace of the commentary slow you down far enough to pay attention to such things.

I was able to do a close reading for the French, German, and Spanish to a sufficient degree, working from my minimal to moderate knowledge of the languages and cognates. I found a much deeper reading and satisfaction than in my normal reading of translated poetry. The Italian, however, I couldn't penetrate. Nevertheless, just the literal translations of Montale's poems were enough to provide a great deal of enjoyment. At some point I will be taking down the fat collected works of Montale that has been sitting on a shelf to read more.

Note: if you are going to read this seriously, in the spirit in which Burnshaw intended, it will be very slow. The explication is ponderous at times, and the puzzling out of languages you're not fluent in requires patience. I highly recommend that you read each poem out loud before or while you're working on the translation. This will allow you to understand how the sound puts the work into a completely different environment than you get if you just read the English, or even read the original language silently.

[Alejandro Teruel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Poetry is notoriously difficult to translate and Stanley Burnshaw believes that

...the only way one could experience the poetry of a language one did not command was by learning to hear and pronounce (if only approximately) the sounds of the originals and “simultaneously” reading literal renditions. Since the poetry inheres in the tonal language (the sounds of the poem in its original tongue), how could one possibly experience a Spanish poem in any language but Spanish, a French poem in any language but French?

Even this, Burnshaw adds a few lines later is not enough:

...My literal renditions were scrupulous, yet in certain key places a single French word could not be rendered by a single English word -pieces of two or three might be required. Other words with double denotations in French, had to be halved in English or equated by impossible compounds. And certain phrases that looked easy in the dictionary carried quite untranslatable connotations essential as meaning. As for syntax, the reader would have to untangle it for himself. And the allusions -although at times they might hold the key to the poem, they would not even be considered, since they stand outside the purview of all translation.

So what Burnshaw and his collaborators do is to provide each poem in its original language with a literal line-by-line translation with alternate readings set within square brackets, plus notes and commentaries on the poet, the allusions, the syntax, the poetic structure, prosody and sonorities. For some readers, the apparatus may be too cumbersome, but in general the translators make valiant and noteworthy efforts to keep it brief and to the point. The apparatus is either on the same page or the opposing page to the original verses, so it is always at hand.

Is this method successful? Each reader must judge this for himself. I found the method worked wonders for me in French, failed miserably in German, tantalizingly kept most of the Italian poems just out of my ken, and most Portuguese poems within my reach. This unevenness is not the fault of the translators or the associate editors, but rather a sharp and painfully accurate reflection of my language abilities. A smattering acquaintance with a few German words is clearly not enough for Burnshaw´s method to work, whereas my knowledge of French, while not deep was enough to allow me to successfully experience most of the French poems. Since I am bilingual in English and Spanish, I had no problem reading the poems in Spanish and appreciating the apparatus from the inside, as it were. Some familiarity with Italian and Portuguese, born of their common romance origins with Spanish and brazilian and italian films were very helpful, but alas, not quite enough to actually grasp most of the poems in Italian.

The collection qua anthology is a peculiar one. In his introduction, Burnshaw states that he has included modern poetry and by modern, he means poetry written within the modern historical period, a period which he defines as beginning with the outbreak of the Industrial Revolution and ended with the close of World War II, some one hundred and fifty years. The oldest poem in the anthology dates from 1798 (Friedrich´s Hölderin´s Hyperions Schiksalslied) and the most recent ones from 1956 (Eugenio Montale´s L´Anguilla and Eugene Florit´s La noche). Some of the inclusions, and many omissions are very puzzling and the various languages are certainly not represented equitably. Thus, there are 110 pages covering one hundred years of French poetry, from Gérard de Nerval´s 1854 El Desdichado to Saint-John Perse´s 1953 Plueis VIII compared to 45 pages spanning one hundred and twenty nine years of German poetry from Hölderlin´s 1798 Hyperions Schiksalslied to Bertolt Brecht´s 1927 Grosser Dankchoral. It is a welcome surprise to find 105 pages devoted to poetry in Spanish, Galician and Portuguese, the vast majority of which is in Spanish and selected from a period of a mere 53 years and ranges from Antonio Machado´s 1903 Yo voy soñando caminos to Eugene Florit´s 1956 La noche. The 57 pages are selected from 123 years of Italian poetry range from Giacomo Leopardi´s 1835 La sera del di di festa to Eugenio Montale´s 1956 L´Anguilla. Burnshaw himself clearly states in his introduction that:

The book makes no claim to being representative of the last hundred years

and apologizes for only including one Russian poem, an untitled 1910 poem by Alexander Blok.

If the anthology is occasionally puzzling in its selection(and omission) of poets and its coverage of poetry in different languages and time periods, there is an inexcusable gaffe in subtitling the book “150 European poems translated and analysed” and including such latin-american masters as Manuel Bandeira, Jorge de Lima and Cecilia Meireles (Brazil), César Vallejo (Peru), Eugenio Floret(Cuba) and Pablo Neruda (Chile). This as bad as considering as English or British poets, say, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Wallace Stevens and e.e. cummings!

If you are at all interested in translations of modern poetry into English and have a at least some knowledge of French, Spanish, German or Italian, you would be well advised to at least dip into this book and try it out for size and take a look, for contrast, at the Penguin Modern European Poets series.

[Anthony Weir · Rating 5 out of 5]

I discovered this book shortly after it came out as a Penguin in (I think) the 1960s, and was hugely impressed. I wish there were more books like it.