Théophile Gautier, Un Vers de Wordsworth; translated by Olchar Lindsann (in progress)

This is a particularly rough one, not only because I'm working exclusively from Google Translate and a couple dictionaries, but because it involves a dense web of literary allusions that has necessitated a good deal of specific research. This research, like the filling out of the verses themselves, is in an incomplete state; the Wordsworth quote is indeed easily tracible (and included in Bartlet's Familiar Quotations, published a couple decades previous to the novels mentioned). The novel it is drawn from is Louisa, ou les doulours d'un fille de joie. I'm still tracking this book down, but expect little trouble in that direction. Google translates the title as 'Louisa- A Prostitute's Pain' but the last word is evidently the translation of a euphomism, I think 'daughter of joy/pleasure'...? And as Gautier informs us, this book's author draws his pseudonym (if I'm inferring correctly from Google's garbled transliteration) from a third book (Gautier does not quote the complete title), which turns out to be the 1829 book L'Ane Mort et la Femme guillotinée (The Dead Donkey and the Guillotined Woman) by one Jules Janin, a subversive novelist eventually forced into exile. I've obtained the text of this novel (in the French, of course) but haven't had an opportunity to peruse it yet.

(Of course, all of this is conveyed via inflexible units of vocabulary singularly ill-suited for easy versification, so that I get to ineptly grab at the shadow of Gautier's virtuosic rhythm and scansion.)

And I've not yet even begun to start addressing the reference to Shakespeare's Tempest...

I suspect this research is precisely the point of Gautier's writing this poem; especially when one considers that he implies that he is not only directing you toward these other texts, but has at the same time avoided other authors in response to similar textual embeddings, in this case the universal condemnation of Wordsworth's political and poetic apostasy by the second generation of Romantics--Byron, Shelley, Keats, Hazlitt, Hunt, etc.

This historiographic function is why this poem seems to me like a good candidate for the introductory volume of the project; not to mention of course that it partakes of the same tradition of excoriation continued not only by Gautier but by Fast Sedan Nellson and myself. To which is added the extent to which the poem is about translation and readership: Byron and Shakespeare were both being translated for the first time into French, the latter specifically by one of the Bouzingo group, translator/theorist/architect Jules Vabre (more on this fascinating character in a couple weeks--I'll be putting together a post focusing on the practice and role of translation within the group), and were defining influences on the Bouzingo both poetically and in self-presentation. And the ready availability of the line at hand in Bartlett's opens the possibility that the writer of the novel in which Gautier found the line had not read Wordsworth in his entirety either. AND, Gautier quotes the line in English as his own epigraph (doubly quoted), then repeats it in French in the poem's body, paraphrasing it again in the final line. This poses interesting questions to the translator rendering the poem back into English, especially as even the Google translation of Gautier's translation makes a smoother and more grammatically correct iambic pentameter line than Wordsworth's original (in which the plural subject and singular verb do not agree). I decided to add my bit to the ongoing intergenerational smearing of Wordsworth's face in the mud, and use the re-translated line (especially as the rhyme is easier as well, Wordsworth's requiring a double-rhyme; the original, of course, is in blank verse...)

la rime boite-- Google translates as 'the rhyme box' and my dictionaries bear this out. Eh? My current hypothesis is that this may be French technical terminology--or literary slang--for a poetic stanza... anyone know?

The translation so far is no doubt full of holes:

the French:

Un Vers de Wordsworth
Spires whose silent finger points to heaven.

Je n’ai jamais rien lu de Wordsworth, le poète
Dont parle lord Byron d’un ton si plein de fiel,
Qu’un seul vers ; le voici, car je l’ai dans la tête :
— Clochers silencieux montrant du doigt le ciel. —

Il servait d’épigraphe, et c’était bien étrange,
Au chapitre premier d’un roman : — Louisa, —
Les douleurs d’une fille, œuvre toute de fange
Qu’un pseudonyme auteur dans L’Ane mort puisa.

Ce vers frais et pieux, perdu dans ce volume
De lubriques amours, me fit du bien à voir :
C’était comme une fleur des champs, comme une plume
De colombe, tombée au cœur d’un bourbier noir.

Aussi depuis ce temps, lorsque la rime boite,
Que Prospéro n’est pas obéi d’Ariel,
Aux marges du papier je jette, à gauche, à droite,
Des dessins de clochers montrant du doigt le ciel.


...and the English so far:

A Line From Wordsworth

Spires whose silent finger points to heaven.¹

A I've never read the poet Wordsworth, he
B Against whom Byron let such venom fly,
A Except one line; its voice comes back to me:
B -The silent steeples pointing to the sky--

A It served as epigraph, a freakish ruse,
B For the initial chapter of -Louisa,-²
A A Hooker's Pain, a sludgy novel whose
B [ pseudonym drawn from] The Dead Ass XXX³

A This pious verse, abandoned in this book
B of lewd XXXXXX , was XXXXXX to my eyes:
A It was a XXXXXX bloom, XXXXXXXXX [took [shook [looked
B XXX fallen] XXXXXXXXXXXXXXX [lies

A And since that time, XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
B
A Across the paper's margins, left and right,
B I XXXXXX steeples pointing to the sky.

1from The Excursion, Book VI, line 19.

2Louisa, ou les doulours d'un fille de joie (Louisa: or, the Pain of a Daughter of Pleasure[?]), by Abbé Tiberge [Regnier Destourbet].

3L'Ane Mort et la Femme guillotinée (The Dead Donkey and the Guillotined Woman), by Jules Janin, 1829.