Sri Aurobindo

Letters on Poetry and Art

SABCL - Volume 27

Part 2. On His Own and Others’ Poetry
Section 2. On Poets and Poetry
Comments on Some Examples of Western Poetry (up to 1900)

Samain and Flecker

I am sending you two poems — one is Albert Samain’s famous Pannyre aux talons d’or and the other is Flecker’s much-praised translation of it. I shall be very much interested in your comparison of the two. Here is Samain:

Dans la salle en rumeur un silence a passé...

Pannyre aux talons d’or s’avance pour danser.

Un voile aux mille plis la cache tout entière.

D’un long trille d’argent la flûte la première,

L’invite; elle s’élance, entre-croise ses pas,

Et, du lent mouvement imprimé par ses bras,

Donne un rythme bizarre à l’étoffe nombreuse,

Qui s’élargit, ondule, et se gonfle et se creuse,

Et se déploie enfin en large tourbillon...

Et Pannyre devient fleur, flamme, papillon!

Tous se taisent; les yeux la suivent en extase.

Peu à peu la fureur de la danse l’embrase.

Elle tourne toujours; vite! plus vite encor!

La flamme éperdument vacille aux flambeaux d’or!...

Puis, brusque, elle s’arrête au milieu de la salle;

Et le voile qui tourne autour d’elle en spirale,

Suspendu dans sa course, apaise ses longs plis,

Et, se collant aux seins aigus, aux flancs polis,

Comme au travers d’une eau soyeuse et continue,

Dans un divin éclair, montre Pannyre nue.

Here is Flecker:

The revel pauses and the room is still:

The silver flute invites her with a trill,

And, buried in her great veils fold on fold,

Rises to dance Pannyra, Heel of Gold.

Her light steps cross; her subtle arm impels

The clinging drapery; it shrinks and swells,

Hollows and floats, and bursts into a whirl:

She is a flower, a moth, a flaming girl.

All lips are silent; eyes are all in trance:

She slowly wakes the madness of the dance,

Windy and wild the golden torches burn;

She turns, and swifter yet she tries to turn,

Then stops: a sudden marble stiff she stands.

The veil that round her coiled its spiral bands,

Checked in its course, brings all its folds to rest,

And clinging to bright limb and pointed breast

Shows, as beneath silk waters woven fine,

Pannyra naked in a flash divine!

“All here,” says a critic, “is bright and sparkling as the jewels on the dancer’s breast, but there is one ill-adjusted word — pointed breast — which is perhaps more physiological than poetic.” Personally I don’t somehow react very happily to the word “girl” in line 8.

Samain’s poem is a fine piece of work, inspired and perfect; Flecker’s is good only in substance, an adequate picture, one may say, but the expression and verse are admirable within their limits. The difference is that the French has vision and the inspired movement that comes with vision — all on the vital plane, of course,— but the English version has only physical sight, sometimes with a little glow in it, and the precision that comes with that sight. I do not know why your critical sense objects to “girl”. This line [“She is a flower, a moth, a flaming girl”] and one other, “Windy and wild the golden torches burn” are the only two that rise above the plane of physical sight.

But both these poems have the distinction of being perfectly satisfying in their own kind....

P.S. “Flaming girl” and “pointed breast” might be wrong in spirit as a translation of the French — but that is just what Flecker’s poem is not, in spite of its apparent or outward fidelity, it is in spirit quite a different poem.

23 June 1932