`French and English constitute a single language," wrote Wallace Stevens in his Adagia. The rich influence of French on English poetry, in the early part of the century at least, make this less of an idle boast than it may at first appear. Hulme, Eliot, Pound and Stevens all borrowed heavily from French sources. Irish poetry too has always had a strongly Francophile bent, from Beckett and Devlin to Montague and Mahon. Now comes Ciaran Carson's The Alexandrine Plan (Gallery Press, £6.95), thirty-four sonnets after three of the very greatest French poets, Baudelaire, Rimbaud and Mallarme. Dope-fiend and dropout, Rimbaud has been co-opted so often as a Jim Morrison avant la lettre that it's easy to forget the sheer classical perfection of his work. Again, unlike the hippy caricature of him, he is also very funny, a feature that comes through strongly in Carson's translations. His selections all date from 1870, when the sixteen-year-old poet ran away from dull, provincial Charleroi to join the Paris Commune. Sadly, this means there's no room for "Voy elles", surely one of the most remarkable of Rimbaud's poems, but if "Le Mal" and "Le Cabaret Vert" are juvenilia by Rimbaud's standards they are still marvellous poems by anyone else's.
Baudelaire has never wanted for English translators, but it's a pleasure to see the laureate of spleen as sympathetically rendered as he is in "The Maid of Brobdingnag", Carson's fanciful title for "La Gigante": "I would love to be a leisurely ex- plorer / Of her Mount Parnas- sus, all the foothills of her, / When she sprawls herself on heat-dazed summer meadows; // And I could chill out in the shadow of her lapsed / Titanic body in these regions where I doze, / A hamlet overlooked by snowy Alpine paps." Unlike the other poets, Baudelaire gets two sections, and Carson has chosen well: "Bohemiens en voyage", "Parfum exotique" and "Correspondances" are all here, the last in a new version, having already appeared in Carson's 1993 collection First Language.
This leaves Mallarme, whose icy cerebrations have long defied translators. Carson does a splendid job of humanising this most difficult of poets: his version of "Rememoration d'amis belges" shows how almost sociable Mallarme can be made to sound. The sequence of tombeau poems (elegies) is excellent, dazzling like a string of black pearls. But is a ptyx a pyx (the notorious "sonnet en -yx"? Just what is a ptyx anyway? No one seems to know. There are some slips and disappointments. "Brief Encounter" and "O Happy Death" both end weakly. Translating "les gens stupides" as "oxymorons" is risky, and "franchise" as "franchise" dangerously indulges a faux ami. And what is a French soldier doing shouting "Up the Huns" (not in the original) in "Poster Advertising the Amazing Victory at Sarrebruck"? Carson is also not above padding out a line for the sake of a rhyme, as when the peremptory "Et jamais je ne pleure et jamais je ne ris" in "La Beaute" becomes the much more non-committal "I do not think, nor smile. So everybody thinks". This may be because, in a brave decision, he has used the Alexandrine line throughout rather than iambic pentameter (hence the title, presumably).
"Alexandrian" is a good adjective to describe the proliferation of Carson's interests over the course of his last few books, in both poetry and prose. The Alexandrine Plan is dedicated to Paul Muldoon, and Carson is proving almost as difficult as Muldoon to keep up with. It's a highly enjoyable pursuit, and with another Carson book still to come this year we can consider ourselves lucky indeed. If this leaves hardly any space to talk about Tristan Corbiere, it won't be the first time the author of Les Amours Jaunes (trans. Christopher Pilling, Peterloo, £14.95 in UK) has been elbowed aside by his more famous contemporaries. This is a shame, because Corbiere (1845-1875) is a writer everyone should know. Self-mocking, sarcastic, bawdy and irrepressible, he is a poet of laughing unhappiness, spraying his irony like an insecticide on our Romantic delusions. Masterpieces such as "La rapsode foraine", "Le poete contumace" and "Cris d'aveugles" reintroduce something to French poetry that had been missing since Villon. He is also one of the great poets of the sea, as in his sequence "Gens de mer" on the Breton sea coast and its hardy old salts. Christopher Pilling deserves, at the very least, to be made a freeman of Roscoff or Morlaix for so massive a gift of translations.