The Alexandrine plan: Versions of sonnets by Baudelaire, Mallarmé, and Rimbaud - Hardcover

Carson, Ciaran

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1852352191 ISBN 13: 9781852352196

Publisher: Gallery Books, 1998

Synopsis

In these translations from the sonnets of the major nineteenth-century French poets Rimbaud, Baudelaire, and Mallarmé the relation of the poet to his world is adapted to the wild, fruitful imagination of Ciaran Carson, while formally the poems hold to their Alexandrine plan,” twelve-syllable lines in the rhyme schemes of the original. As Carson carries these poems across his own idiom and sensibility, he restores, with startling freshness, the essential joy and verve of the earlier poems. In French and English.

About this title

About the Author

Born in 1948 in Belfast, Northern Ireland, Ciaran Carson studied at Queen’s University, Belfast, where, from 2003 2015, he served as the director of the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry. Though recently retired from that post, he continues to teach a postgraduate poetry workshop there, in addition to overseeing the Belfast Writers’ Group. Earlier in his career (from 1975 1998), Ciaran Carson acted as an arts officer for the Arts Council of Northern Ireland. He is also a member of Aosdána and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. A writer of both poetry and prose fiction and non-fiction alike Ciaran Carson has also translated many texts, including The Midnight Court, a work of the eighteenth-century poet Brian Merriman, and a version of Dante’s The Inferno, which won the Oxford Weidenfeld Translation Prize. His other awards include the first-ever T. S. Eliot Prize (1994, for First Language), and the Forward Prize for Best Collection (2003, for Breaking News). As well as being a significant poet and careful translator, Carson is also a scholar of traditional Irish music; he frequently plays the flute alongside his wife, the accomplished Irish fiddler Deirdre Shannon. He has said: I’m not interested in ideologies . . . I’m interested in the words, and how they sound to me, how words connect with experience, of fear, of anxiety . . . Your only responsibility is to the language.”

Review

"A reader with even a smattering of French might appreciate how thoroughly Carson both translates- that is, carries across- and then transplants in an altogether different soil and climate the richness of those originals" --The Boston Review

About this edition

• Publisher: Gallery Books
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 1852352191
• ISBN 13: 9781852352196
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 87