Symbolism is “in” and Paul Verlaine is experiencing something of an English-speaking resurgence, thanks to the efforts of poet, translator, Director of the Bryn Mawr College Creative Writing Program, and Andrew Heiskell Arts Director at the American Academy in Rome,  Karl Kirchwey.

Next month, Princeton University Press is proud to release the first-ever complete English translation of Verlaine’s freshman collection of poems, Poèmes saturniens, translated and introduced by Kirchwey (whose own sixth book of poems, Mount Lebanon, will be released by Putnam in April. )

Q: When did you first discover Verlaine?
KK: I lived with my family in Lausanne, in French Switzerland, between 1970 and 1974. For part of that time, I attended an English boarding school in the mountains. The French teacher there, nicknamed “the Groundhog” by the students, was a man of deep culture and learning (I once found him practicing the violin in an empty classroom), and even today it pains me to remember the travesty some of the students made of his attempts to introduce them to Racine’s Andromaque. But I suspect that I first encountered poems by Verlaine at that time, when I was in my teens. Also, my mother had written poetry, and she studied literature for the two years she attended Vassar before dropping out to get married in the depths of World War II. I believe I still have her copy of an anthology of French poetry.

Q: What about his work spoke to your poetic sensibilities?
KK: As I have occasion to say in my Preface to the volume, what appealed to me very powerfully was, first of all, the intense musicality of Verlaine’s lines– impossible to render in English, really, because English is a language of speech stresses, as French is not– and then also the combination of carnality and learning, in the poems. Verlaine was a hot-blooded young man in a repressive society, but he was also, at least intermittently, a spiritual and religious seeker and a scholar on the upward road to Parnassus. Many of the poems in this book are full of sex, real or imaginary, but also braided up with the whole history of Western (and even non-Western) civilization.

Q: How did you know that the timing was right for this translation?
I had no idea of whether or not the timing was right for this translation. Poets don’t often work that way! The timing was right for me, in terms of my own work and my own interests, to undertake this translation. I fell in love with this first book of Verlaine’s, and then the hard work began, of trying to get the translations right. The fact that I then discovered that mine is the first complete translation of Verlaine’s first book in English was a happy accident.

Q: Do you believe that lack-luster translations are a chief motivator for poets to undertake their own translation projects?
KK: Again, I discuss this at some length in my Preface, but the short answer is: Yes. However, it is a commonplace to say that translations usually have a life-span of one generation or less. Certain translations– Pope’s Homer, for instance– achieve well-deserved immortality, but the evolution of language itself guarantees that most will be superseded. Therefore, what seems to the contemporary eye lackluster may have been more than adequate to the purposes and conventions of its own time.

Q:  You speak of Verlaine’s verse as caught between the sacred and the profane; does youth play a role in the presence of these extremes (he was twenty-two at the time of publication) or is this a quality that is endemic to the poetic sensibility?  How does your own poetry fit into this mingling of the fleshy and the spiritual?
KK: No single polarity or dichotomy is endemic to the poetic sensibility, surely. But, now that you mention it, my own poetry has always attempted to respond to the flesh, the spirit, and the intellect. It has been my effort for some years now to move away from the well-crafted and linguistically-alive but emotionally cool poems I wrote at the beginning of my career– poems that hid, behind their learning, from emotional engagement with the self– and toward poems of greater linguistic simplicity and more direct emotional engagement. But in a sense I think the critical damage was done with the first book or two– I became known as an “academic” poet, with the automatic assumption of emotional sterility that can accompany that label, in the balkanized world of contemporary American poetry. James Merrill rejected my first book for the Yale Younger Poets Prize with the remark that some of the poems reminded him too much of his own: layered like a cake but (he implied) finally without feeling. I took that comment, by now more than twenty years ago, to heart.

Q:  You’re an upstanding citizen, father of two, loving husband and college professor.  It seems there is very little common ground between your personal life and that of Verlaine.  Was there an element of living vicariously, a languorous and decadent fin-de-siècle lifestyle, as you immersed yourself in his words?
KK: I’ve never tasted absinthe, but I don’t think I would like it. It is, of course, unimaginative in the extreme to insist, or expect, that a translator should have anything in common with the writer he is translating (though biographers, for example, have certainly been known to take on the coloration of their subjects, after long study and immersion in the details of their subjects’ lives). In any case, a connection between the outlines of my personal life and those of Verlaine’s would be irrelevant to a translation: what is relevant is that my work and his might have something in common (see under “Flesh and Spirit,” discussed above). As for living vicariously… I suppose you are correct that poetry always requires an act of the sympathetic imagination.

Q: Were there any startling discoveries made, either about yourself and your own work or about Verlaine, as you worked closely with the text?
KK: Yes. As I think about this translation in the context of my own work, I realize that discovering I was capable of using a system of imperfect rhyme, in translating all of the diverse rhyme schemes in Verlaine’s first book, actually prepared me to work on a long poem called Mutabor I have had in hand for several years now, some parts of which recently appeared in the new literary journal Little Star. That is, working in rhyme at book-length in the Verlaine translation gave me the confidence to undertake a book-length poem which is all in four-line stanzas rhymed variously. I have been working in imperfect rhyme for most of my career as a poet; the perfection of Richard Wilbur’s rhyme schemes (and coincidentally he is also our greatest living translator of Racine, Moliere and Corneille) have always been beyond me. But it has been a satisfaction to work within a larger and more open-ended architecture, in Mutabor, and this derived from my work on Verlaine.

To this I would add that translating brilliant and precocious poetry (which much of the work in  Verlaine’s first book is) is a very humbling experience, testing not only one’s knowledge of the foreign language, but indeed one’s own sensibility as a poet.

And one final startling discovery? The single strangest word in Verlaine’s first book is oaristys, which isn’t even French (it’s Greek), and which refers originally to the magic girdle of Aphrodite used by Hera to beguile Zeus in the Iliad, but which has come to mean “link of intimacy” or “pillow-talk.” Here in Rome, the architectural and artistic wonders contained in the Palazzo Farnese (which is the French Embassy) are momentarily available to the public. Yesterday I was studying Annibale Carracci’s stupendous ceiling frescoes on mythological subjects. There was Zeus, inching Hera toward bed: and bound firmly below Hera’s breasts was the oaristys!

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Many thanks to Professor Kirchwey for gamely answering all manner of inquiries.  POEMS UNDER SATURN will be released on April 6.