Les Symbolistes

My purpose in making the translations which follow was simply to better understand these important poems and to practice reading French. In the process, I consulted some other translations, notably Roger Fry’s beautiful work on Mallarmé, some translations of other Symbolist poets by C.F. MacIntyre, and the prose translations Carol Clark made of Baudelaire. I decided to do a poetic translation of my own whenever the French original touched an emotional chord for me and when I thought I could contribute something beyond what others had already done in their English renderings.