Art poétique (1874)
Paul Verlaine
Tr. Catharine Savage Brosman
In poems, music is everything.
For that, choose uneven-numbered lines,
not imposing, weighty—sevens, nines,
elevens, truly verses that sing.
Let your lyric be discrete, in gray.
No color! Nuance only! Shading,
marrying dream to dream, then fading.
Lines air-soluable, as though at play.
Avoid by all means murderous wit,
cruel digs, whether fanciful or real,
that bruise and bring tears to the Ideal,
and all such low-kitchen writing. Quit
eloquence! It’s stale. Go wring its neck
It too is old, boring, tedious stuff.
After millenia, we’ve had enough.
Then there’s rhyme, always at poets’ beck
and call. Discipline it, or how far
will it go? It’s hollow, not a jewel.
To peddle it as beauty is cruel,
deceiving, worthless, an old used car.
Let music flourish, forever, still;
let your verses fly off, be they love
or sadness, souls loftily above,
winging ever higher up the hill.
Let your line depend on waking birds
at morning, or the sweet scent of mint,
and thyme in afternoon sunlight’s glint.
And all that remains is merely words.
Translator’s Note: This translation is deliberately not literal. Art poétique is itself about French poetry and, above all, the ideal of musicality that emerged in late nineteenth-century French prosody as poets sought analogies with music and the other arts. Because French verse is governed by syllable count rather than stress, its rhythms differ fundamentally from those of English, which is meter-based. Whereas my previous translations have rendered French verse into English iambic meters, here I have tried to reproduce as many of Verlaine’s formal effects as possible, adapting his diction and suggesting the movement of the original through lines of uneven syllabic length while preserving the rhyme scheme—even though the poem itself derides rhyme. The result is necessarily an approximation rather than a faithful translation.
Twelfth Night, Act I, Scene 1
William Shakespeare
(Duke Orsino to Curio)
If music be the food of love, play on;
Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting,
The appetite may sicken, and so die.
That strain again! it had a dying fall:
O, it came o’er my ear like the sweet sound,
That breathes upon a bank of violets,
Stealing and giving odour! Enough; no more:
‘Tis not so sweet now as it was before.
O spirit of love! how quick and fresh art thou,
That, notwithstanding thy capacity
Receiveth as the sea, nought enters there,
Of what validity and pitch soe’er,
But falls into abatement and low price,
Even in a minute: so full of shapes is fancy
That it alone is high fantastical.
Snug Harbor
Catharine Savage Brosman
It’s not New Orleans jazz, but good enough
to put me in a sentimental mood.
The band’s eclectic, mixing smooth and rough,
with drums, bass fiddle, saxophone, an oud,
guitar, piano, and a vocalist
from Paris. Many here are Francophiles,
who understand the words or get the gist,
responding knowingly, with nods and smiles.
The leader, who’s Moroccan, plays a lute
designed in the cigar-box style. The twang
transports us to another world. (It’s moot
how he came here, or why. Our fortunes hang
on little moments, phrases, wisps of smoke.)
He’s ageless, handsome, tall, and dressed in black,
quite classically, with a masterstroke:
long tresses, curled, an aphrodisiac
to some, no doubt. He shakes them to the beat,
looks up in rapture, joining in the riffs
around him—joyful, mournful, bittersweet—
raw feeling fixed in tonal hieroglyphs.
The session closes with a low farewell
ascending, jubilant. The band has caught
for everyone tonight the city’s spell.
I leave as though the notes had turned to thought.
Catharine Savage Brosman is professor emerita of French at Tulane University; cbrosman@tulane.edu. She is the author of fifteen collections of poetry, the latest of which is Aerosols and Other Poems (2023) from Green Altar Books, an imprint of Shotwell Publishing, Brosman’s poetry has appeared regularly in AQ, along with her article “Poetry and Western Civilization” in the spring of 2023. She last appeared in these pages in the fall of 2025 with “Poetry in the Service of Truth,” a review of Kites: Poems by Jonathan Chaves.
Photo by Lorenzo Spoleti on Unsplash