SHORTER NOTICES
Selections from 'Les Amours Jaunes' of Tristan Corbiere. Translated into English verse by C. F. Maclntyre. (C.U.P., 28s.)
CORBIERE is no gift to a translator. For what is defiantly harsh and staccato in the original comes over as merely awkward when the correct number of syllables have been packed into a bloated English line, and a suitably ungainly rhyme has been clamped on the end. His long poems of the Breton coast read well after eighty- odd years of half-oblivion. The language is tough, and the detail well observed. This is local poetry and something more; the poetry of a harsh landscape and a rough people, written by a young man who apes their roughness. It is when he introduces himself that a 'mattress- grave' self-pity reminds one of Heine at his worst. Corbiere was a sickly young man, probably consumptive, who struck hysterically heroic gestures, and—both literally and symbolically— deliberately sailed his small craft on the rocks. He must have read Baudelaire; if he had known any English one would have suspected him of picking up a colloquial trick or two from Brown- ing. His conversational tone influenced Laforgue, a poet rather subtler and less self-obsessed, and in this way contributed to our own poetic style of the Twenties. But he can be read in his own right, and does not present so many difficulties as to require a face-to-face translation.
3. M. COHEN
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