The Ultimate Vehicle of Earthly Bliss - 21. Trapped

It has to be a challenge to find rhyming words which fit the meaning of the original poem.  

This evokes desperation, description, endurance, and yet -- joy and love.

Trapped is most apt a title for this poem. Schwabe makes me feel the granular frustrations of day to day life in a small, sclerotic town with no pulse, no heartbeat. Beyond the roof - the limits of that town - I sense vibrant, warm life, as the first eight lines suggest. Beneath there is greyness and dull despair. Thank you for bringing yet another gem to us. 

This evokes quite a few things.

On 6/11/2024 at 10:51 AM, ReaderPaul said:

It has to be a challenge to find rhyming words which fit the meaning of the original poem.  

This evokes desperation, description, endurance, and yet -- joy and love.

It's an interesting topic you raise. Rhyming in translations.

I have sometimes felt matching the original poet's rhyme-scheme to be amazingly liberating (like my efforts with Lorca's "Love from the Darkness Sonnets"). I cannot explain how this works. How what might seem like a limitation becomes expansive horizons. But with Lorca's work, to me the rhymed versions of the poems are infinity closer to the power the originals have.

But other times, like dealing with August von Platen's Sonnets, I do a rhymed version and feel I've not captured the mood of the poem as well as a non-rhymed version can.

So, an interesting topic. One I can't speak about coherently, lol 🤣 

On 6/11/2024 at 1:20 PM, Parker Owens said:

Trapped is most apt a title for this poem. Schwabe makes me feel the granular frustrations of day to day life in a small, sclerotic town with no pulse, no heartbeat. Beyond the roof - the limits of that town - I sense vibrant, warm life, as the first eight lines suggest. Beneath there is greyness and dull despair. Thank you for bringing yet another gem to us. 

Thanks, Parker. I have read that Verlaine, after being imprisoned in Belgium for his Gayness, retired to a teaching job in small French town. There he was miserably unhappy until he met Julian Letinos, a seventeen-year-old student of his. Their love was great, and after the young man graduated, Verlaine resigned his position and bought a farm for them to settle down as squires. 

So I imagine the poet came to love the town he laments over in the poem above      

On 6/11/2024 at 4:08 PM, chris191070 said:

This evokes quite a few things.

Thank you, Chris. This poem was challenge to "get right," but I enjoyed the process of working it out