Poems of Jules Laforgue

 Poems of Jules Laforgue by Jules Laforgue, translated by Patricia Terry, 100 pages

Largely forgotten today, in his time Jules Laforgue was very much in the vanguard of French poetry. 

Her eyes said, "Do you understand?

Why don't you understand?"

But neither would take the first step;

We wanted to fall together to our knees.

(Do you understand?)

His verse often, unfortunately for him, reads like an echo of Baudelaire.

Man and his wife, to the body

Slaves, whirlpooling sewers

Webbed with harp-string nerves,

Serfs to all and jumping their tracks

Under miscellaneous attacks.

Yet even then, he has a voice that is uniquely his own.

And even if we trample where we like,

Never will we be as cruel as life...

Jules Laforgue died at the age of 27.  As always, one wonders what he might have been had he been given more life.  As it is, his verse proved more influential in the Anglosphere than it ever was among the Francophones, inspiring Pound and Eliot.

Like the thorn that sees the petals

Falling, by evening excused, from his best rose.