Nicholas Moore, Stevens and the Fortune Press

Abstract

On 6 October 1968, the book pages of The Sunday Times in London announced a poetry translation competition to be judged by George Steiner. The poem to be translated was the third of Baudelaire’s four spleen poems, the one beginning:

Je suis comme le roi d’un pays pluvieux,

Riche, mais impuissant, jeune et pourtant très-vieux …

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The three winners would receive copies of The Voyage and Other Versions of Poems by Baudelaire, edited by Robert Lowell and illustrated by Sidney Nolan, and to show how it might be done, the paper printed two earlier translations, one by Lowell and the other by Roy Campbell. In an accompanying article Steiner analysed these efforts, not particularly kindly, but praised the concept of poetry translation itself, asserting that ‘few exercises do more to give insight into poetry and into the nature of a language, where it is singular, and where it relates to other languages’.