I love both Nerval and Rimbaud, but they’re hard to translate simply because they’re so hard to UNDERSTAND. There’s a lot of deeply personal symbolism going on and, especially with Nerval, a lot of esoteric references too. But I believe in the immersive search too and have my own private mythologies going on. I had a teacher once who compared poetry to instant soup — the poets have reduced a numinous experience to concentrated form and it’s up to you to add your own essence to it to create a new, living vital brew. They’ve walked their own field of experience, drawn a map, and now it’s up to you to make the journey too.
That said, here’s a couple of "After" poems in which I’ve taken poems by Nerval and Rimbaud and wrestled and whittled them until they’ve become something quite different, something that means something to me, and, hopefully, that will trigger something else altogether in you:
After Nerval
The thirtieth return
You’re here again
Once again the only one
In the only moment
You Virgin Mother
The first the last
My original
And final love
After Rimbaud
When the world’s reduced
to a single dark wood
for four astonished eyes
to a white beach
for two faithful children
to a musical home
for one pure harmony
I will find you
SPECIAL BONUS POEM! Hey, I got a million of ’em — This is my only other "After" poem to date. With Dante Gabriel Rossetti the problem is not a foreign language or symbolic obscurity but sheer prolixity — he’ll have passages of stunning merit followed by lines and lines of sheer puff — anyway I adapted and rewrote these until they were my own…
After Rossetti
This is her picture as she was
I look until she seems to move
In front of the ocean, among the trees
Where the light falls in hardly at all
A covert place, where you might think to
One day find the memory of these things
Yr pal,
UBU
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