My Tender Buttons:
There’s a perfectly good edition of Tender Buttons from Green Integer, and it’s collected several other places, including the first volume of the dreadful Library of America compilation. But I wanted one of my own. And you can have one of your very own, courtesy of Lulu. N.b. I still haven’t seen the first one of these, and this one only took me half-an-hour to put together, so no guarantees.
Suggestions for further volumes (preferably 64-page volumes like these) are welcome.
but in fact is not:
(I have not actually seen this book, but it seems an interesting direction for Lonely Planet to be taking, and almost makes me wish that I’d stayed in the travel guide business. Also: I wish I’d thought of it first. That too.)
At some point, I should collect a list of online things devoted to translation. Until then:
I move in darkness—widowed—beyond solace,
The Prince of Aquitaine in a ruined tower.
My one star is dead; the black sun of sadness
Eclipses the constellation of my guitar.
O you who brought me light in the night of the tomb,
Bring back Posillipo and the Italian sea;
Bring back the flower that made my sad heart glad,
The grove where the rose and vine twined joyously.
Am I Eros or Apollo, Lusignan or Biron?
My brow still burns red from my Queen’s kisses.
I dreamed such dreams in the cave of a swimming siren,
And I’ve crossed Acheron in glory, twice
To play on the lyre of Orpheus and intone
The sighs of the saint and the fairy’s clear cries.
(Gérard de Nerval, originally published 1854, trans. Daniel Mark Epstein, at, hold your nose, The New Criterion in 2000.)
The French original (from here):
El Desdichado
Je suis le ténébreux, – le veuf, – l’inconsolé,
Le prince d’Aquitaine à la tour abolie :
Ma seule étoile est morte, – et mon luth constellé
Porte le soleil noir de la Mélancolie.
Dans la nuit du tombeau, toi qui m’as consolé,
Rends-moi le Pausilippe et la mer d’Italie,
La fleur qui plaisait tant à mon coeur désolé
Et la treille où le pampre à la rose s’allie.
Suis-je Amour ou Phébus ? . . . Lusignan ou Biron ?
Mon front est rouge encor du baiser de la reine ;
J’ai rêvé dans la grotte où nage la sirène . . .
Et j’ai deux fois vainqueur traversé l’Achéron :
Modulant tour à tour sur la lyre d’Orphée
Les soupirs de la sainte et les cris de la fée.
On consideration: I think, not knowing any French that the above translation is a bad one. Did Epstein lose the italics of the French for stylistic reasons, or did they just get lost in the transition to the web? Not sure. Also odd: that Epstein takes the title (Spanish in the original French, in draft the French “Le Destin”) and turns it into plain English (“The Disinherited”). Some background and analysis of the poem here, though note they manage to lose the italics in the French.
The bench, the sewermouth, the hydrant placed
On the street are attractive and foolproof,
Their finish is in republican taste
The expense, on democratic behoof.
People wear the city, the section they use
Like the clothes on their back and their hygiene
And they recognize property as they do news
By when to stay out and where to go in.
Near where a man keeps his Sunday plyers
Or young men play regularly, they place
Next to acts of financial empires
An object as magic as a private face.
No use to distinguish between hope and despair
Anyone’s life is greater than his care.
Edwin Denby, originally published in Poems written to accompany photographs by Rudy Burckhardt collected in The Complete Poems. Not sure when it was written. Also: MP3 (0:56, 888kb) of a 1983 reading, from Edwin Denby’s page at Pennsound.
“She and Cook used to write the most lugubrious letters to each other about the unpleasantness of sunrises met suddenly. Sunrises were, they contended, alright when approached slowly from the night before, but when faced abruptly from the same morning they were awful.”
(Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, p. 820)
“Hélène had her opinions, she did not for instance like Matisse. She said a frenchman should not stay unexpectedly to a meal particularly if he asked the servant beforehand what there was for dinner. She said foreigners had a perfect right to do these things but not a frenchman and Matisse had once done it. So when Miss Stein said to her, Monsieur Matisse is staying for dinner this evening, she would say, in that case I will not make an omelette but fry the eggs. It takes the same number of eggs and the same amount of butter but it shows less respect, and he will understand.”
(Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, p. 665)
“Our only other conversation was the description and names of the dogs that were then fashionable. This was my subject and after I had described she always hesitated, ah yes, she would say illuminated, you wish to describe a little belgian dog whose name is griffon.”
(Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, p. 684)