Gedichte I

Saturnian Poems, Gallant Festivals, The Good Song, Wordless Romances, Wisdom. "Caesura is the heartbeat of the poetic spirit and cannot be imitated, like euphony." Heinrich Heine. This translation of the poetic works of Paul Verlaine, based on the classical Garnier edition by J. Robichez (with some preliminary prints in Sinn und Form 2017), consistently reproduces the Alexandrine as the French verse form of all things, determining the poetics of this poet ("Eloquence must be turned around the neck") based on its proximity or distance. Precision in the use of meters, rhyme schemes, caesura, etc., especially the use of patterned forms, harkens back to the old French musical tradition: Verlaine composed volumes of poetry like suites with dance movements and referred as early as 1889 in the preface to Parallèlement to "the particular tonality of this part of an entire sequence." The translator analyzed this musicality in 2009 in Germanisch-Romanische Monatsschrift. It revolutionized modern poetry, not least in the exploration of Christian mysticism. The translation aims for a straightforward sentence structure and natural linguistic flow in accordance with the original.