Assies toy sur le bort d'une ondante riviere
I've been working my way through John Hollander's anthology Sonnets: From Dante to the Present. It has its flaws (especially Hollander's invention of titles for untitled sonnets, whereby John Donne's "Batter my heart..." becomes "The Soul to Her Rescuer," which is crapulently unequal to such a brilliant piece of poetry), but is on the whole a lovely little book. (I love the Everyman anthologies, so perfectly pocket-sized and pretty, with their built-in cloth bookmarks.) And it has some surprises in it. Such as a sonnet by Jean-Baptiste Chassignet (1571-1635), as translated by Frank Warnke:
Water Never the Same [another of Hollander's lame inventions, methinks]
Beside a flowing river sit and gaze,
And see how it perpetually runs
In wave on wave, in many thousand turns,
As through the fields it takes its fluid ways.
Thou'lt never see again the wave which first
Flow'd by thee; water never is the same;
It passes day by day, although the name
Of water and of river doth persist.
So changes man, and will not be tomorrow
That which he is today, he cannot borrow
That strength which time doth alter and consume:
Until our death one name we do retain;
Although today no parcel doth remain
Of what I was, the name I still assume.
***
Assies toy sur le bort d'une ondante riviere
Assies toy sur le bort d'une ondante riviereTu la verras fluer d'un perpetuel cours,
Et flots sur flots roulant en mille et mille tours
Descharger par les prèz son humide carriere.
Mais tu ne verras rien de ceste onde premiere
Qui n'aguiere couloit, l'eau change tous les jours,
Tous les jours elle passe, et la nommons tousjours
Mesme fleuve, et mesme eau, d'une mesme maniere.
Ainsi l'homme varie, et ne sera demain
Telle comme aujourd'huy du pauvre cors humain
La force que le temps abbrevie, et consomme :
Le nom sans varier nous suit jusqu'au trespas,
Et combien qu'au jourd'huy celuy ne sois-je pas
Qui vivois hier passé, tousjours mesme on me nomme.
***
I've had a bash at it, trying to make it sound like a more contemporary poem in English:
THE SAME MAN NEVER STEPS INTO A RIVER TWICE
Find yourself a flat stone by the riverbank,
Sit down and watch the river purl and froth
And flow; note where it pools and how its flanks
Straighten and bend into bows. It is both
See the same wave twice; the molecules
Of H2O won’t sit still and make fools
Of sages who would fix them. But clever
Fitful stream of fluxity, nailing its
Matrix, water, and its channel, river,
As if they were as still as stone. A man sits
By a river. He is no more the same
Man he was, yet he bears a constant name.
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