GUILLAUME APOLLINAIRE
Nàng thầy bói Di Gan
Nàng thầy bói du mục biết trước
Tình của lứa đôi Gấu bị đêm phá đám
Hai đứa bèn bye bye nàng
Và bất thình lình
Hy vọng từ cái giếng phọt ra
Tình nặng như Gấu nhà Xiệc
Đi 1 đường khiêu vũ khi hai đứa ra lệnh
Và con chim xanh mất bộ lông xanh
Và những người hành khất, bài ca thánh Ave
Hai đứa biết trời đầy tình lứa đôi
Nhưng hy vọng tình đeo đuổi trên đường dài
Làm hai đứa nắm tay nhau
Làm lời trù ẻo của nàng thầy bói trở thành hỏng cẳng!
****
Signe
Je suis soumis au Chef du Signe de l'Automne
Partant j'aime les fruits je déteste les fleurs
Je regrette chacun des baisers que je donne
Tel un noyer gaulé dit au vent ses douleurs
Mon Automne éternelle ô ma saison mentale
Les mains des amantes d'antan jonchent ton sol
Une épouse me suit c'est mon ombre fatale
Les colombes ce soir prennent leur dernier vol
Apollinaire: Alcools
Sign
I am vassal to the Lord of Autumn's Sign
I love all fruit despise all flowers
I regret each kiss I ever kissed
I am a beaten walnut tree complaining to the wind
O mental season my eternal autumn
Hands of outworn lovers strew your soil
An irrevocable shadow bride pursues me
Tonight the doves fly one last time
Trans. Donald Revell
Ký
Tớ sinh ra dưới ký hiệu Mùa Thu
Tớ mê mọi trái cây, ghét mọi thứ hoa
Rất ư là ân hận, về từng nụ hôn, lỡ ban phát cho 1 cô gái nào đó
Như hột óc chó, xì ra nỗi đau đớn của mình, trước nàng tiên gió
Ôi mùa thu tâm thần, mộng mị, thiên đường, miên viễn của Tên Gấu Già đáng thương, tội nghiệp
Những bàn tay ngọc ngà, của hàng triệu triệu mối tình một chiều, ngày xửa ngày xưa
Trải ra trên mặt đất “nàng”
Người phối ngẫu đuổi theo thằng chồng tàn nhẫn như cái bóng oan nghiệt của chính nó!
Những con bồ câu chiều nay cất cánh lần cuối cùng
Rosemonde
À André Derain
La maison où entra la dame
Bonnes heures à Amsterdam
Mes doigts jetèrent des baisers
Mais le canal était désert
Le quai aussi et nul ne vit
Comment mes baisers retrouvèrent
Celle à qui j'ai donné ma vie
Un jour pendant plus de deux heures
Je la sumommai Rosemonde
Voulant pouvoir me rappeler
Sa bouche fleurie en Hollande
Puis lentement je m'en allai
Pour quêter la Rose du Monde
Apollinaire: Alcools
Rosemonde
A long while on the steps
My fingers blew kisses
To the front door of the lady
I'd followed over two
Good hours in Amsterdam
The canal was deserted
The embankment also and none
Saw the way my kisses found
The lady I gave my life
One day over two good hours
I christened her Rosemonde
Wishing to remember
Her mouth a Holland flower
Then slowly went away
Seeking the worldrose
THE ALCOOLS OF GUILLAUME APOLLINAIRE:
WHY AND WHY NOW
Many translations, including my “Alcools”, begin in the unshakeable conviction that a writer, long-deceased, is nevertheless a contemporary, still speaking, still responding to the circumstances and occasions of the present. Translation does its best to draw attention to this miracle of immitigable presence and to become a medium of its wider acceptance. As Allen Ginsberg wrote in "At Apollinaire's Grave":
Guillaume Guillaume how I envy your fame your accomplishment for American letters your “Zone” with its long crazy line of bullshit about death come out of the grave and talk thru the door of my mind.
The plain facts of Apollinaire's biography guarantee the continual, vocable resurrection upon which Ginsberg insists. Born in Rome to a Polish mother in August 1880, Apollinaire never knew his father or his father's name. Therefore he improvised a host of fathers throughout a lifetime of autobiographical improvisations, brilliantly re-inventing himself as the bastard of princes or prelates or, on one occasion, a pope. Schooled and raised within earshot of the Casino in Monte Carlo, he early learned the eminent operations of pure chance, operations which, on the grandest scale, have nearly completed the erasure of all ideologies in our new world order.
In early manhood, in Paris, Apollinaire found a milieu that re-invented itself daily with every gesture and pronouncement of its now-lionized company. And in this company of emigres and outsiders, the improvised nature of Apollinaire found its natural habitat and necessary welcome. Inspired by company, the young poet responded with a welcome of his own. In prolific conversation with Picasso, Jarry, Max Jacob, Marie Laurencin, and many others, he introduced a city and a century to the revolutions already active in their midst. Along the way, he sometimes gave these revolutions their proper names (as in his coining of the word "Surrealism") and their proper dimensions (as in his many critical writings on the emergence of Cubism). Also along the way, as early as 1903 or 1904, he began the most durable improvisations of his imaginative life: the poems that would culminate in the composition of "Zone" in 1912 and in the publication of “Alcools” in 1913. As early as 1903 and 1904, in "The Song of the Poorly Loved" and 'The Emigrant of Landor Road," Apollinaire introduced the poetry of his young century to collage, polyphony, and the animation of inanimate objects in human view. One could honestly say he introduced the century to its true self, right from the start.
Apollinaire shared the absurdity and horror of the century in full measure with its glamor. In 1911 he was falsely arrested for the theft of the Mona Lisa and briefly imprisoned, an experience which produced the poem "At the Santé." Reporting the incident, the New York Times described him as "a well-known Russian literary man living in Paris." For such a figure, how could identity be, as it is for we who twist in the accusations and self- reproach of late-century political correctness, anything but improvisation? And in March 1916, in the uniform of his adopted country, Apollinaire was wounded in the head by a shell fragment, aptly enough while reading a literary magazine in his trench. He underwent two skull operations, afterwards sporting his bandages like an avant-garde chapeau. As Wittgenstein wrote, "Courage is always original," i.e., always contemporary. In the terrible year 1918 Apollinaire married, quite spontaneously, Jacqueline Kolb, thus emancipating Breton's dictum that life ought to be lived as though always at the brink of falling in love. On the weekend of the Armistice, the poet died of Spanish influenza, departing into the internationalism that is his most urgent bequest and relevance to us now. He was reported to have struggled vehemently against death, exhorting his physician, "I want to live! I still have so many things to say!"
At present, under the burden of canons and the burden of language's deep complicity with countless atrocities, the very making of poems requires audacity. And if the audacity is well-intended, it requires a certain awkwardness as proof of its unrehearsed refusal to comply with silence. I have attempted a new translation of “Alcools” because, as a poet and as a reader of poetry, I feel lonely for joy and for the spur of joy. In my task, I have been constantly reminded by the poems themselves that transformation always begins in awkwardness and disproportion. Therefore, I chose to distort certain moments of syntax deliberately to reproduce Apollinaire's verbal and thematic strayings. The French verb “errer” describes his method well; “Alcools” is intentionally aimless, preferring to find rather than to fashion its forms. And aimlessness, the total surrender of language to the immediate moment, is what made Apollinaire an inspiration to American Modernism. As critic Marjorie Perloff has shown (in “The Poetics of Indeterminacy”), there is another "French connection" in American writing, one emanating not from the symbolic mysterium of Baudelaire but from the disorderly conduct of Rimbaud and Apollinaire among images made vivid by literal disorientation. What Perloff justly calls the "anti-illusionist" art of Williams and Pound, art energized by "the abolition of all transition," owes a fortunate debt to the eloquent drift of Rimbaud's "Drunken Boat" and, more nearly, to Apollinaire's strolling "Zone" and "The Harvest Month."
Also in the spirit of this other "French connection," I chose to translate many passages in “Alcools” as "incorrect" mixes of high and low diction, of latinate and slang, of abstracted concretes and concretized abstractions, because it is just such mixes that have made Apollinaire so enabling to our contemporary poets. The beautiful solecisms of Ashbery's groundbreaking “The Double Dream of Spring”, a collection of poems startled into existence by 'The way the breath of spring creeps up on you and floors you," would have been unthinkable without the example of Apollinaire's verbal indiscretion. The exuberant, perverse loquacity of O'Hara's masterpiece "Second Avenue" would have been impossible without Apollinaire's own unpolished polyglot urbanity. And the passion-plays of Kenneth Koch, whether compulsive, as in "Sleeping with Women," or tragically serene, as in "Days and Nights," could never have accomplished quite so unabashed a sense of integrity without the first permission of Apollinaire's deeply serious, deeply convincing utter awkwardness. Thus, as the audacities of 1913 may not seem audacious now, I have tried, in translating Apollinaire to the end of his century, to present him a new suit of grammars, a suit cut after his own audacious style.
As the century ends, it begins to forget itself and, under the guise of revisionism, obscures the origins of the Modern and of all its prolific aftermaths. An exaggerated sense of "now" suppresses the more genuine, more useful sense of "for now" inscribed within the etymology of "modern." All great poems are causes, but not therefore exempt from causality. Each is itself an aftershock of some earlier disruption, some prior innovation. As William Carlos Williams cautioned, "Look at/what passes for the new." Those who, in remembering “Alcools’, remember a whimsical, sorrowful, tragic “naif” will not find him herer. Apollinaire was a canny, complexly great poet with fierce but sophisticated appetites for modernity. In “Alcools”, experience reigns as a polymorphous sole authority, and everything is its nature, for now. There are many landscapes in “Alcools”, many cities. None is unreal. Modernism is always realism, for now. And as reality was the companion Apollinaire never failed to choose, I have chosen Apollinaire for a longtime companion, the best I've known.
Donald Revell
QUAND VOUS SEREZ BIEN VIEILLE
Fifty years from now you'll be my age
And old like me instead
Of young, and I'll be dead
And therefore won't be any good in bed,
But you won't either at that stage,
When your lunatic beauty will exist only on this page
From fifty years before, when it still could ravage
Me and turn a dainty Harvard man into a grunting savage
Who climbs a ladder through the stars to reach the moon,
And plucks at his laptop and it becomes a lute,
And writes an old man's poem of pursuit—
Earth rising to the moon to sing a saccharine tune
And leave below the geriatric horror of his appetite
And hide inside the moonlight high above the awful sight.
PARIS, 1960
FOR NELSON ALDRICH
I was the Paris editor of The Paris Review
In a little office off the Champs-Elysées.
On the floor above our little room
Was Auto Europe, an outfit whose Anglo-American oddball salesmen,
Such as Digby Neave and Eddy Morgan,
Were wellborn fugitives hiding from a privileged life back home.
Unbeknownst to me, we were partly funded by the CIA
Through a CIA subsidiary with good Cold War intentions
Called the Congress for Cultural Freedom,
Itself funded secretly by the Kaplan Foundation.
If only I had known what was going on,
I would have asked the CIA man in Paris if I could join.
One fine day I was in the office doing nothing,
Or admiring the fabulous Larry Rivers cover for our next issue,
When God walked in and smiled
And said she'd like a job.
George Plimpton in New York had told her to introduce herself.
She explained she was the March Playmate for Playboy.
Như bài thơ cho thấy, Seidel đã từng chủ biên tờ The Paris Review, và dịch bài Cầu Mirabeau và nhiều bài thơ khác của Apollinaire. Hai câu thơ thần sầu của Apollinaire: Ôi đời sao quá chậm, hy vọng sao hung bạo, (1) được ông dịch khác hẳn đi, nhờ vậy Gấu hiểu ra, dịch là hủy diệt chứ không phải là phản, để có 1 cái gì đó, chưa hẳn là thơ, nhưng đâu cần! K vẫn thường phán, mi dịch thơ là phải có cái của mi ở trong đó!
Đúng như thế!
Dante của Anna Akhmatova của Florence, biến thành TTT của Hà Nội, thí dụ.
Petersburg của Brodsky, của Anna, biến thành Huế, Anna thành O Huệ nhỏ, là vậy!
In issue 202, the Paris Review staff contributed unsigned translations of ten Apollinaire poems. The following translation of “Le Pont Mirabeau” is by Frederick Seidel.
Le Pont Mirabeau
Under Eads Bridge over the Mississippi at Saint Louis
Flows the Seine
And our past loves.
Do I really have to remember all that again
And remember
Joy came only after so much pain?
Hand in hand, face to face,
Let the belfry softly bong the late hour.
Nights go by. Days go by.
I’m alive. I’m here. I’m in flower.
The days go by. But I’m still here. In full flower.
Let night come. Let the hour chime on the mantel.
Love goes away the way this river flows away.
How violently flowers fade. How awfully slow life is.
How violently a flower fades. How violent our hopes are.
The days pass and the weeks pass.
The past does not return, nor do past loves.
Under the Pont Mirabeau flows the Seine.
Hand in hand, standing face to face,
Under the arch of the bridge our outstretched arms make
Flows our appetite for life away from us downstream,
And our dream
Of getting back our love of life again.
Under the Pont Mirabeau flows the Seine.
Federick Seidel
(1)
Le pont Mirabeau
Sous le pont Mirabeau coule la Seine
Et nos amours
Faut-il qu'il m'en souvienne
La joie venait toujours après la peine
Vienne la nuit sonne l'heure
Les jours s'en vont je demeure
Les mains dans les mains restons face à face
Tandis que sous
Le pont de nos bras passe
Des éternels regards l'onde si lasse
Vienne la nuit sonne l'heure
Les jours s'en vont je demeure
L'amour s'en va comme cette eau courante
L'amour s'en va
Comme la vie est lente
Et comme l'Espérance est violente
Vienne la nuit sonne l'heure
Les jours s'en vont je demeure
Passent les jours et passent les semaines
Ni temps passé
Ni les amours reviennent
Sous le pont Mirabeau coule la Seine
Vienne la nuit sonne l'heure
Les jours s'en vont je demeure
THE MIRABEAU BRIDGE
Under the Mirabeau Bridge the Seine
Flows and our love
Must I be reminded again
How joy came always after pain
Night comes the hour is rung
The days go I remain
Hands within hands we stand face to face
While underneath
The bridge of our arms passes
The loose wave of our gazing which is endless
Night comes the hour is rung
The days go I remain
Love slips away like this water flowing
Love slips away
How slow life is in its going
And hope is so violent a thing
Night comes the hour is rung
The days go I remain
The days pass the weeks pass and are gone
Neither time that is gone
Nor love ever returns again
Under the Mirabeau Bridge Flows the Seine
Night comes the hour is rung
The days go I remain
1956
W.S Merwin
Cầu Mirabeau
Dưới cầu Mirabeau, sông Seine chảy
Và tình đôi ta
Liệu anh phải nhớ
Niềm vui luôn tới, sau nỗi đau
Đêm tới, giờ đổ
Ngày đi, ta ở
Tay trong tay mặt nhìn mặt
Dưới cầu đôi tay
Sóng uể oải lập đi lập lại
Nhân lên mãi mãi
Ánh mắt thiên thu hoài hoài của đôi ta
Đêm tới, giờ đổ
Ngày đi, ta ở
Tình đi, như nước chảy
Tình đi
Ôi, đời sao chậm lụt
Hy vọng sao hung bạo đến như vầy
Đêm tới giờ đổ
Ngày đi, ta ở
Ngày đi, tháng đi
Thời gian không đi
Tình không bao giờ trở lại
Dưới cầu Mirabeau sông Seine chảy
Đêm tới, giờ đổ
Ngày đi, ta ở
By Sadie Stein February 19, 2016
Poetry
In 1912, the poet Guillaume Apollinaire published “Le Pont Mirabeau” in the journal Les Soirées de Paris; a year later the poem appeared in his collection Alcools. Even in Apollinaire’s lifetime, the melancholy piece—which uses the image of the ornate bridge spanning the flowing Seine to explore love and the passage of time—was one of his best known. In the years since, its fame has only grown: it was set to music in a much-covered 1953 song by Léo Ferré, made into a choral arrangement by Lionel Daunais, and later interpreted by the Pogues. A plaque bearing the last lines can be found on the bridge’s foot.
In a rare recording, you can hear Apollinaire himself read “Le Pont Mirabeau”:
In issue 202, the Paris Review staff contributed unsigned translations of ten Apollinaire poems. The following translation of “Le Pont Mirabeau” is by Frederick Seidel.
Le Pont Mirabeau
Under Eads Bridge over the Mississippi at Saint Louis
Flows the Seine
And our past loves.
Do I really have to remember all that again
And remember
Joy came only after so much pain?
Hand in hand, face to face,
Let the belfry softly bong the late hour.
Nights go by. Days go by.
I’m alive. I’m here. I’m in flower.
The days go by. But I’m still here. In full flower.
Let night come. Let the hour chime on the mantel.
Love goes away the way this river flows away.
How violently flowers fade. How awfully slow life is.
How violently a flower fades. How violent our hopes are.
The days pass and the weeks pass.
The past does not return, nor do past loves.
Under the Pont Mirabeau flows the Seine.
Hand in hand, standing face to face,
Under the arch of the bridge our outstretched arms make
Flows our appetite for life away from us downstream,
And our dream
Of getting back our love of life again.
Under the Pont Mirabeau flows the Seine.
Federick Seidel
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