Review of Ashbery's Illuminations

Martin Sorrell, over at The Fortnightly Review, reviews John Ashbery's translation of the "doubtless foul smelling" Arthur Rimbaud’s Illuminations.

Sorrell gives a detailed description of an earlier translation, by Paul Schmidt:

Of the translations of Illuminations I’ve read, the one that most represents the freer, interpretative end is Paul Schmidt’s, of 1976. What Schmidt does, seeing shapes and rhythms beneath Rimbaud’s prose, is to set out each illumination in free verse. Thus the monolithic blocks of French become fluid stretches of English. It certainly catches you by surprise, and initially there’s a freshness about it which I find compelling – or did, because now I’m not sure about it. Rimbaud’s starkness, the glare of his prose, becomes corralled and less angular. The tone is softer. The medium really does seem to change the message. Sometimes, Schmidt writes splendid lines. In ‘Ornières’, Rimbaud’s final sentence has night-time hearses ‘filant au trot des grandes juments bleues et noires’. Schmidt doesn’t just see these horses, he hears their clip-clop. His line, loosely spondaic, is excellent on the ear: ‘And out trot great fat blue black mares’. I do like it, and many others in Schmidt. But I’m not sure that he isn’t too intrusive, in the end, a feeling not reduced by the way he decides to re-order the accepted sequence of Rimbaud works. What he’s done is to regroup everything into a series of ‘eight seasons’.

And he then shifts to the differences between the two translations:

I feel sure that what’s so telling is that Ashbery has had a lifetime to ponder the Illuminations, and only now, in his rich maturity, has he chosen to set about them.

An example of translation I consider just: the second paragraph of ‘Royauté’.

Rimbaud: ‘En effet ils furent rois toute une matinée où les tentures carminées se relevèrent sur les maisons, et toute l’après-midi, où ils s’avancèrent du côté des jardins de palmes.’

Ashbery: ‘In fact they were regents for a whole morning as crimson hangings were raised against the houses, and for the whole afternoon, as they moved toward groves of palm trees.’

There’s an admirable restraint about this. The sentence contains exactly thirty words, both in the original and in the English. Of those, in Rimbaud nineteen are monosyllables, and arguably fewer if words with mute ‘e’s are voiced. In Ashbery, there are twenty-two monosyllables. Other translators are “busier” here, but Ashbery is cleaner, as it were. Plus, the individual words are exactly right – ‘regents’, ‘against’, ‘groves’. It’s the contained power of true elegance.

But, of course:

I DO HAVE RESERVATIONS, however. First, towards the end of ‘Vies’, Rimbaud has the sentence: ‘Mon devoir m’est remis’. Ashbery takes this as ‘My homework has been handed back to me.’ Homework? Really? It’s got to be ‘duty’. We’re back with social versus private. Isn’t Rimbaud indicating that duty (i.e. something social) has been postponed or taken away altogether? The sentences that follow support this, situating Rimbaud in a new life beyond mortality (he says he’s from beyond the grave). In his review for the TLS, Edmund White praises Ashbery’s ‘homework’. White would be more persuasive if he’d read the French correctly; Rimbaud doesn’t write ‘devoirs’, plural. That’s important, as just possibly it would have made ‘homework’ more understandable.

You can watch Ashbery read from Illuminations here.