Then Deguy turns to the challenges of handling poetic craft, recalling Rimbaud’s title “Or le bateau, pour être ivre,” which Baldridge has as “Now the boat, though drunken.” Deguy is reaching for a sense of a continuing experience that carries Rimbaud’s nautical voyage as a journey through poetic creation, which might see “pour être ivre” as “still drunken” to more directly retain a process of motion. The poem then, if it were set in a more conventional English arrangement, with the admittedly questionable transposition here of “sailor” to “singer” as further metaphoric extension:

Deguy might regard the reconstruction of “Forme” into another “Form” as inimical to his purposes, while I would like to propose the possibility of this rearrangement as a commentary in the spirit of Deguy’s comments on Rimbaud’s philosophy of composition. To follow Deguy’s single-paragraph setup would arguably work as well. With respect to specific verbal choices, while Baldridge has “braves, crosses, invents” from Deguy’s “affronte, parcourt, invente,” there is a closer sonic correspondence with “confronts, crosses, creates” while “confront” is a more personal involvement than “brave.” The process through which “coxswain” is replaced by “sailor” which is stretched toward “singer” is clearer in the explanation than in the translation. Perhaps it operates as an effective selection in the totality of the poem. I offer this not as a claim that it is a “better” version than the one which Baldridge has made, but as another way of seeing (and “hearing”) Deguy in an American English.

…the idea of a voiceless verse is exactly the kind of conundrum that philosophy is designed to address; the inherent paradox reaching back toward Plato’s preference for reason over emotion, precisely the problem that Deguy’s work seeks to explore. The problem for the translator of his poetry, then, is to keep both components in action, to hold them continuously in a mental construct.

In an essay on the life and thought of Niccolò Machiavelli, Claudia Roth Pierpont declares, “A translator’s work is meant to be transparent, providing access to a text without agenda or interpretation,” a plausible position but not entirely applicable when the original work, like Deguy’s, is intricately involved with an interpretive agenda as a part of its purpose. As Boileau’s reported quip about Descartes having “cut the throat of poetry” implies, the idea of a voiceless verse is exactly the kind of conundrum that philosophy is designed to address; the inherent paradox reaching back toward Plato’s preference for reason over emotion, precisely the problem that Deguy’s work seeks to explore. The problem for the translator of his poetry, then, is to keep both components in action, to hold them continuously in a mental construct. Baldridge has done this admirably. The full measure of the difficulty that this task presented, as well as the fascination that it has for the poet and translator, might be approached from Gregory Rabassa’s contention that a shift from one language to another involves access to a different part of the brain, so that the translator literally becomes a different “self” — perhaps paralleling the continuing shifting in terms of the emphasis between emotion and reason. If that is so, then the translator is especially equipped to travel along this continuum, and to use two languages in tandem toward an exploration of the poetic reason that is the essence of Deguy’s writing. Seen that way, other translators could be considered a welcome, if not a necessary part of the process, bringing a different “self,” a different location on the continuum, in their responses to the task.