Category Archives: Translations

© 2022 . All rights reserved.

The Swan by Charles Baudelaire and The Goose by Daisy Fried

During the pandemic, the poet Daisy Fried was living in Philadelphia with her husband who was dying of a debilitating disease. Without much help from the outside, during breaks from the caring, Daisy began to read and translate Charles Baudelaire, … Continue reading

© 2022 . All rights reserved.

Daisy Fried reads from The Year the City Emptied, translations and adaptions from Les Fleurs du Mal

During the pandemic, while taking care of her dying husband, quarantined from friends, and without much help from Medicaid, one day in the spring of 2020, Daisy Fried read a translation of Baudelaire’s “Paysage” by John Ashbery, thought to herself, … Continue reading

© 2022 . All rights reserved.

Alfred Corn reads his translation of Rilke’s First Elegy from the Duino Elegies

  A few years ago, the news that Alfred Corn was working on a translation of Rainer Maria Rilke’s Duino Elegies made me very happy. When I was in my early twenties, Rilke was one of the poets who showed … Continue reading

© 2021 . All rights reserved.

Le Pont Mirabeau read by Guillaume Apollinaire and translated by Ron Padgett

  The best translation by far that I have come across of Guillaume Apollinaire’s poetry is by Ron Padgett in a book published by the New York Review of Books in 2015 simply titled, Zone, Selected Poems. When Ron Padgett … Continue reading

© 2019 . All rights reserved.

Peter Valente translates Vers Dorés by Gérard de Nerval

… In my early twenties when I started to study French, I listened to Edith Piaf, translated Le Petit Prince, and bought a bilingual book of Symbolist Poets that included Charles Baudelaire, Arthur Rimbaud, Paul Verlaine and Gérard de Nerval, … Continue reading

© 2019 . All rights reserved.

Lines 644-691 from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Book Three with a photo by Stanley Stellar

… When I recently saw the photo by Stanley Stellar of a beautiful painting of a phallic man with a dolphin, I remembered some lines from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, a tale told by the captain of a ship who tries to … Continue reading

© 2017 . All rights reserved.

Le Léthé par Charles Baudelaire

.. Viens sur mon coeur, âme cruelle et sourde, Tigre adoré, monstre aux airs indolents; Je veux longtemps plonger mes doigts tremblants Dans l’épaisseur de ta crinière lourde; Dans tes jupons remplis de ton parfum Ensevelir ma tête endolorie, Et … Continue reading