I have a couple of mediocre biblically-themed original poems up here, but what I really do is translate poetry between the French and English languages. I'm sort of thinking of translating all of Charles Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mal into English, but it's already been done. Plus it's a huge corpus of poetry- too large a task to do just for fun. Seems more like dissertation or senior thesis material to me. But whatever, maybe I'll get around to it one day. I tend to translate in trickles, only when I'm inspired. And right now I'm looking at Apollinaire, not Baudelaire. Verlaine, Nerval, even Blake, it's all fun to do.
But I do worry that I'm tampering with great art. Baudelaire is utterly sublime and I know that my while versions can never do him complete justice, I can rest assured that most people really don't read French and need a translation, so I might as well do it if it's entertaining for me anyway.
As a final note, I always keep rhyme in some form or another. Verlaine once said "de la musique avant toutes choses" : "music before all else." It means that without lyricism, there is no poetry, only a collection of words.
FictionPress.com - let the words flow
