Fun with Rimbaud in Tutoring: The “Navy”

NAVY

Silver and copper chariots—
Steel and silver prows—
Beat the sea froth—
And extricate the roots of brambles.
The moorland’s currents
And the vast furrows in the ebb tide
Slip off eastward in spirals
Towards the forest’s pillars,
Towards the stout wood on the jetty,
Angled into bludgeoning eddies of light.

MARINE

Les chars d’argent et de cuivre —
Les proues d’acier et d’argent —
Battent l’écume, —
Soulèvent les souches des ronces.
Les courants de la lande,
Et les ornières immenses du reflux,
Filent circulairement vers l’est,
Vers les piliers de la forêt,
Vers les fûts de la jetée,
Dont l’angle est heurté par des tourbillons de lumière.

******

Rimbaud is an attractive poet to discuss and translate in French-language tutoring. He is well into the public domain in the United States and elsewhere. I can accordingly document to my heart’s content how I handled his work. I especially feel like discussing him on my corporate blog, moreover, because the translation of a poem that I can offer up to you as an example is part of an oeuvre that others have translated so many times that I sense I will not miss out by not submitting my example to a literary journal. There are few new things to say while pretending to be the famous boy poet.

And yet I relished discussing Rimbaud in tutoring last week because there was something that others seemingly have not said about the poem “Marine” from the collection Illuminations.

Opting for a few choices unpursued by common translations brings to the surface a theme that often sits buried. Ashbery, for example, translates this poem as “Seascape.” A “marine” is a seascape painting or other image of the sea. This term may emphasize a kind of neutrality or an enigmatic totality. There is a space by the sea and various things are happening there. 

When one translates this title as “Navy,” however, a “Marine” being a term for a country’s fleet and manpower on the ocean, the idea surfaces amidst all the odd and protosurrealist gestures that this poem is about perceiving an order consisting of all those forces upon the ocean and nearby. For one thing, the prows and chariots at the beginning of the poem are of course allusions to a naval force: the remaining lines quietly bring to mind a kind of dream logic in extending what is possible to think of as naval forces. The wind currents off the heath/moors are also “Navy.” The ploughing of brambles is“Navy” as well. Swirling light is Navy (in whatever way it is that light might swirl). Inanimate collides with animate in a kind of diagram of a kind of “fleet” of various materials in various places. (Bear in mind that the word “Marine” is not prefaced with une or la. This is neither especially a navy or the Navy.

All of this amounts to a “scape” but it is an appreciation of the potential cohesiveness of the natural hierarchies and play of forces that give this sense as well. The theme I see here is the copresence of humanity’s designs and the prime mover that is the climate, the input from the sun. 

All that said, “Seascape” and “Navy” are both admissible translations of the title. The French title capaciously refers to both things at once—that is to say that you are missing out if you only recognize one of these words as a proper translation. It is a good teachable moment in the context of tutoring because it is important for students of French to realize that, just as my AP French teacher once said, “French is not English translated.” Each word in French may possess surprising shades of meaning.

If this sounds a little unreasonable to you, bear in mind that Rimbaud in his mature phase as a poet was a man of very strange and fanciful thoughts. He is, after all, the man who brought us the expression “Je est un autre.” (“I is another [person].”)