The Alexandrine Plan
$12.95
In these translations from the sonnets of the major nineteenth-century French poets—Rimbaud, Baudelaire, and Mallarmé—the relation of the poet to his world is adapted to the wild, fruitful imagination of Ciaran Carson, while formally the poems hold to their “Alexandrine plan,” twelve-syllable lines in the rhyme schemes of the original. As Carson carries these poems across his own idiom and sensibility, he restores, with startling freshness, the essential joy and verve of the earlier poems.
In French and English
Reviews
“[A] reader with even a smattering of French might appreciate how thoroughly Carson both translates—that is, carries across—and then transplants in an altogether different soil and climate the richness of those originals. . . . Indeed, dazzlingly allusive from start to finish, the 77 poems (perhaps mock-modestly, half of Shakespeare’s famous output) in the sequence reveal how Carson himself ‘dangle[s] on / An anxious tangled cable, while my entourage / Of sins flit round me in their gaudy camouflage.’ They also reveal Carson as a poet not just of rapier wit but also of razor-sharp subtlety . . . ”
– Thomas O’Grady, Boston Review
Description
In these translations from the sonnets of the major nineteenth-century French poets—Rimbaud, Baudelaire, and Mallarmé—the relation of the poet to his world is adapted to the wild, fruitful imagination of Ciaran Carson, while formally the poems hold to their “Alexandrine plan,” twelve-syllable lines in the rhyme schemes of the original. As Carson carries these poems across his own idiom and sensibility, he restores, with startling freshness, the essential joy and verve of the earlier poems.
In French and English
Reviews
“[A] reader with even a smattering of French might appreciate how thoroughly Carson both translates—that is, carries across—and then transplants in an altogether different soil and climate the richness of those originals. . . . Indeed, dazzlingly allusive from start to finish, the 77 poems (perhaps mock-modestly, half of Shakespeare’s famous output) in the sequence reveal how Carson himself ‘dangle[s] on / An anxious tangled cable, while my entourage / Of sins flit round me in their gaudy camouflage.’ They also reveal Carson as a poet not just of rapier wit but also of razor-sharp subtlety . . . ”
– Thomas O’Grady, Boston Review
Additional information
| Publication date: | 1998 |
|---|---|
| Pages: | 96 |
| Binding: | paperback |
