Michael Peverett

Tuesday, March 10, 2020

Mazagrans

Les castors bâtirent. Les "mazagrans" fumèrent dans les estaminets.
Dans la grande maison de vitres encore ruisselante les enfants en deuil regardèrent les merveilleuses images.

(Arthur Rimbaud, from "Après le Déluge", in Illuminations)

Full text of Après le Déluge:
http://abardel.free.fr/petite_anthologie/deluge.htm

John Ashbery's translation:

The beavers built. Tumblers of coffee steamed in the public houses.

In the vast, still-streaming house of windows, children in mourning looked at marvelous pictures.

Unattributed translation on PoemHunter:

Beavers built.

'Mazagrans' smoked in the little bars.
In the big glass house, still dripping,
children in mourning looked
at the marvelous pictures.

Ashbery is right about a mazagran being a coffee drink, but his translation doesn't reveal that a mazagran is a cold, iced drink. (It originated in Algeria.) So if it steams or smokes, that's a paradox, but a natural one, like the vapour rising from a stream on a chilly evening.

[Image source: http://www.lavaisselleaukilo.be/catalogue/mazagran/ .]

Labels: Arthur Rimbaud, John Ashbery

Wednesday, January 06, 2016

Rimbaud (note from 2001)

Arthur Rimbaud (1854-1891)

I read Rimbaud’s Bateau ivre (drunken boat), in English of course, I think for the first time. Tremendous ---- verve? ----- momentum? Something, however, says: but what’s the point? Rimbaud’s poems are reviewable in the terms of a hot new album, or even the A-List in the Daily Mirror (the Friday review of movies). “his language resembling a high-voltage electrical circuit” .... a phrase from the Introduction, where it's improbably credited to Iris Murdoch. I suppose that Bateau ivre is really about driving a car.

(2001)