/lit/ - Literature

>There is no form of rational and assured government save an aristocracy. […] There are but three beings worthy of respect: the priest, the warrior and the poet. To know, to kill and to create. The rest of mankind may be taxed and drudged, they are born for the stable, that is to say, to practise what they call professions.

holy fucking based

Best English translation

Is Baudelaire worth reading in translation? Before the snobs start deriding me for reading translations I should tell you I can already read French at a high level. However I still fail to grasp some of its nuances and only really enjoy reading poetry in English.

I want to read Baudelaire in the original French
Now personally I don't really love Baudelaire all that much and I find him to be quite boring in translation and I don't expect my opinion to change all that much after learning French but still, that's my goal
Since my goal with learning French is to read poetry I figure that I should learn pronunciation of the language but I'm not sure if that's something I should be doing now or only later on?
My main question is if anyone here had any suggestions for great French reader editions or any recommended prose that I could start using as input
Would greatly appreciate any anon's thoughts on their own French learning journey with some tips

Where did he even get his giantess fetish from? I know I got mine from cartoons, attack of the 50 foot woman posters, and the Pizza Girl Jonas brothers music video. Did it just naturally occur to him or was there an especially tall girl in his village or something?

reminder that this dude wrote a poem about his giantess fetish

>>19740816
The best option is to utilize both within the same poem in an intelligent pattern i.e. the way Baudelaire and other French Symbolists did.

What's the best English version of Baudelaire's Les Fleurs Du Mal? Mainly focused on the translation aspect but I am also looking for a physical book if there's a good copy out there, paperback or otherwise. I'm learning French (slowly) so if there's a version with English and French that would be ideal

Alright, I have a challenge for all of you who think poorly of reading in translation. Here is a poem by Charles Baudelaire, selected from Les Fleurs du mal, with a translation. Tell me right fucking now what is lost in translation. Give me your brilliant analysis of exactly why and how this translation is worthless.

Original: "Correspondances"
La Nature est un temple où de vivants piliers
Laissent parfois sortir de confuses paroles;
L'homme y passe à travers des forêts de symboles
Qui l'observent avec des regards familiers.

Comme de longs échos qui de loin se confondent
Dans une ténébreuse et profonde unité,
Vaste comme la nuit et comme la clarté,
Les parfums, les couleurs et les sons se répondent.

II est des parfums frais comme des chairs d'enfants,
Doux comme les hautbois, verts comme les prairies,
— Et d'autres, corrompus, riches et triomphants,

Ayant l'expansion des choses infinies,
Comme l'ambre, le musc, le benjoin et l'encens,
Qui chantent les transports de l'esprit et des sens.

Translation: Correspondences
Nature is a temple of living pillars
Where often words emerge, confused and dim,
And man goes through this forest, and with familiar
Eyes of symbols always watching him.

Like prolonged echoes mingling far away
In a unity tenebrous and profound,
Vast as the night and as the limpid day,
Perfumes, sounds, and colors correspond.

There are perfumes as cool as children's flesh,
Sweet as oboes, as meadows green and fresh;
--Others, triumphant and corrupt and rich,

With power to fill the infinite expanses,
Like amber, incense, musk, and benzoin, which
Sing the transports of the soul and the senses.

This guy reads like an angsty teenager

Thoughts /lit/? Do you live this guy? Hate him? Is he overrated as an edge lord or does he make sense among contemporaries? Does he make sense in our current culture? Favorite poems?

One should always be drunk. That's all that matters; that's our one imperative need. So as not to feel Time's horrible burden that breaks your shoulders and bows you down, you must get drunk without ceasing.

But what with? With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you choose. But get drunk.

And if, at some time, on the steps of a palace, in the green grass of a ditch, in the bleak solitude of your room, you are waking up when drunkenness has already abated, ask the wind, the wave, a star, the clock, all that which flees, all that which groans, all that which rolls, all that which sings, all that which speaks, ask them what time it is; and the wind, the wave, the star, the bird, the clock will reply: 'It is time to get drunk! So that you may not be the martyred slaves of Time, get drunk; get drunk, and never pause for rest! With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you choose!'

Can someone explain to me the French alexandrine? I understand the rhyme scheme, the masculine/feminine endings, the twelve (plus one) syllables per line divided in half. What I don't understand is that sometimes there's iambs, and sometimes there's anapests. Like in L'Albatros below, the first line is in iambs, but the sixth line is in anapests. Is there no set rule? And is the iamb/anapest important to the meaning of the poem?

>Souvent, pour s'amuser, les hommes d'équipage
>Prennent des albatros, vastes oiseaux des mers,
>Qui suivent, indolents compagnons de voyage,
>Le navire glissant sur les gouffres amers.
>
>À peine les ont-ils déposés sur les planches,
>Que ces rois de l'azur, maladroits et honteux,
>Laissent piteusement leurs grandes ailes blanches
>Comme des avirons traîner à côté d'eux.
>
>Ce voyageur ailé, comme il est gauche et veule!
>Lui, naguère si beau, qu'il est comique et laid!
>L'un agace son bec avec un brûle-gueule,
>L'autre mime, en boitant, l'infirme qui volait!
>
>Le Poète est semblable au prince des nuées
>Qui hante la tempête et se rit de l'archer;
>Exilé sur le sol au milieu des huées,
>Ses ailes de géant l'empêchent de marcher.

People attribute the decline of interest in /lit/erature to shorter attention spans, the internet, instant gratification etc, so why does poetry seem harder hit than novels or even non-fiction books? Maybe I read poetry wrong but generally I read the poem a few times and think about it over the course of day to day life, re-read it and do the same. This seems perfect for people with a lower attention span - you only read it paying attention to all of it a couple of times, after that you are reading it scanning for what you have been thinking of.

How would one go about editing a book of poems, in terms of compiling them, the order etc. I have a lot of poems, but just don't know the order to put them in to create a unified book.

Is Tristan und Isolde about a will to death, or an exemplification of life before and irrespective of death?

https://vocaroo.com/194Z3akJqRp2

>>16379297
Hey pal, have you considered going to the doc?

>Always be a poet, even in prose.

Remember: the greatest writer of modernity was ugly as hell

'Come, my fine cat, to my amorous heart;
Please let your claws be concealed.
And let me plunge into your beautiful eyes,
Coalescence of agate and steel.

When my leisurely fingers are stroking your head
And your body's elasticity,
And my hand becomes drunk with the pleasure it finds
In the feel of electricity,

My woman comes into my mind. Her regard
Like your own, my agreeable beast,
Is deep and is cold, and it splits like a spear,

And, from her head to her feet,
A subtle and dangerous air of perfume
Floats always around her brown skin.'


Aww, that's nice. Any other good poems about cats? I've read the one that Halina Poświatowska wrote, in the original language that time round, and really liked that one too.

In a rich, heavy soil, infested with snails,
I wish to dig my own grave, wide and deep,
Where I can at leisure stretch out my old bones
And sleep in oblivion like a shark in the wave.

I have a hatred for testaments and for tombs;
Rather than implore a tear of the world,
I'd sooner, while alive, invite the crows
To drain the blood from my filthy carcass.

O worms! black companions with neither eyes nor ears,
See a dead man, joyous and free, approaching you;
Wanton philosophers, children of putrescence,

Go through my ruin then, without remorse,
And tell me if there still remains any torture
For this old soulless body, dead among the dead!

What do you guys think of this edgelord? (Your opinion only counts if you've read the original French)

Fil de la poésie française
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