Baudelaire edits

Small correction to « Petits poëmes en prose » of Baudelaire at http://www.aule-browser.com/books/baudelaire-ppp.curl ( Curl "Surge" RTE browser plugin 7 or 8 required ; see www.curl.com )

A poet's hubris?

One volume of the Ben Belitt translations of Pablo Neruda includes not a single translation by another poet or by another poetry translator.

One of the translations is obviously flawed: a Chilean poem becomes a poem for all mechanized and schooled mankind. What is worse, the poet may have encouraged his translator in this cosmopolitan reading — but it is lacking in the original as given on the facing page, verso.

A better title: The Collected Translations of Neruda by poet Ben Belitt, 1970.

A book for me: a single volume with the best translations of Neruda from any European language (look how well Italian appears to translate to Danish - the concision - and Spanish?) with originals in Spanish RECTO and the selected translations VERSO (an e-book?) - not the usual arrangement (but consider how French bilingual dictionaries begin with the French lexicon, but those by the English or Germans begin with the target language - so the privilege would go to the poems, not the polyglot translations.)

A UN poetry week project: Tagore?

René Char

The work of René Char is missing from the NB public library system.

Why should this matter?  Well, there are bilingual editions available (quality varies) and perhaps he is important for Acadiens given their Quebec neighbours: consider what he says in Feuillets d'Hypnos about the French staff officer who laments the language spoken by Char's courageous maquisards.

He is not a Parisian poet so much as a poet of Provence.  Yes, I know, Aix is a favourite destination of the Quebec intellectual.  But all the same ...

Two nights ago I went to meet an Anglo-Irish poet at Alden Nowlan House at unb.ca.  One table in the Windsor Castle bar was speaking French during the hockey game. A woman stepped out onto the deck and said "Look, I can speak French, too" and began making noises.  It could have been a Russian imitating a Pole or a Ukrainian.

I keep hearing this kind of offensive drivel and noise-making here and there around this officially bilingual town - and in this, Canada's only bilingual province.  And when will I hear an Acadienne imitate an NB anglo here in "Arcadia"? Will it be among Australian graduate students at UNB?  I think not.

Is the answer to require Canadian schools to teach that Norman French forms a large part of our English vocabulary - and that the largest part of that came from Latin Rome?  That the French were Franks? ( Is Germanic ancestry still the dominant ethnic origin of "English" Canadians? Does it remain so for "whites" in the USA?)  Or are we to concede to ethnic loathing?

Should foreign students be required to take at least one course on Canadian history to obtain a graduate degree from one of our universities?  Is UNB finding and funding graduate candidates from "la Francophonie" as much as from the Commonwealth?

As to the absence of Char: I have noted elsewhere how deficient the New Directions bilingual edition of Char is -  but better that than nothing.

And here in Fredericton, where is the monument or plaque to commemorate the burning of those Acadian homes on these fashionable streets? (Shades of another quiet university town filled with tourists in summer: Marburg in Lahntal.)  The Marburg of the students Eliot and Pasternak.

Canadian poetry

I have added new site index page which puts in one place both some Google book previews and some of the home pages of Canadian poetry organizations and other useful sites.