The Center for the  Art of Translation hosts a once a month Lit & Lunch series in a large artists’ bar just south of Market in San Francisco.  Richard Howard came to read yesterday, bringing to ear his marvelous translation of Stéphane Mallarmé‘s Afternoon of the Faun — source for Debussy’s musical piece of the same name, and Nijinsky’s scandalous ballet, indebted to both.

Howard asked us not to read along as he read.  It is a poem meant to be heard, he said.  His graveled voice rose and fell, paused and jumped as he scanned his rendtion of the famous poem.  As with some tunes, we would have had him repeat, and again, had there been time.  I can’t find an audible version to share with you, though YouTube has him reading  some of his own poetry about Bonnard.

A Faun's Afternoon

If only they would stay that way forever -- nymphs
whose rosy flesh can spur the drowsy air
to dancing.
                 Did I love a dream?
                                                  My doubt
the residue of all my dreams dissolves
into a branching maze, this grove of trees:
proof that what I took for rapture was
an artifice of ... roses.
                                     Just suppose
these...women had no more reality
than figments of a faun's deluded mind:
illusion seeping like spring water from
the coy one's cold blue eyes, contrasting
with the other's sights--a if the day's warm breeze
had fondled my pelt.
                                   And it was a lie!

... for the rest, you'll have to find a book, as here, or here, or ...