Sentimental Stroll
The setting sun shot
its last rays, and the winds nursed
pallid nenuphars,
giant nenuphars in reeds
sadly gleaming on dead calms.
I was strolling, all
alone, perambulating
my woes round the lake,
among sallows where a vague
mist evoked a vast, creamy
phantom in despair
and weeping with the plaintive
voices of the teal
calling to one another
amid clatterings of wings
among the sallows
where I wandered all alone
perambulating
my woes: the dense winding-sheet
of dark swallowed up the last
rays of the setting
sun in its bloodless billows
and the nenuphars,
among the reeds, the giant
nenuphars on their dead calms.
Verlaine is a perennial challenge to translators, and James Kirkup chose not to seek to reproduce the sonnet form that Verlaine constantly returns to, since it is just a convention, as is all form’. He also chose to avoid rhymes, not because they are too difficult to manage in English versions, but because tanka do not rhyme, and he prefers tanka to Verlaine’s ‘sweetly-chiming rhymes’. Verlaine, who wrote ‘Oquidira les torts de la Rime!', may well have sympathised.
Translated by James Kirkup
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