French Symbolism and the English Language

Abstract

H AVING once written that modern American poetry speaks French, I was called to account by several critics who took my statement in its strictly literal sense, and whose nationalism was outraged. I now dare write that in Mallarme's time French poetry began to speak English. There is nothing calculated to shock in either of these statements, above all in the second. Since Rousseau, fashions in literary style have abandoned their old Latin or Italian models to discover richer variations in the English language. The process of adapting English linguistic values was not accomplished in so abrupt a fashion as the acquisition of Italo-Latin values in the sixteenth century, at least so it seems to us in this year of 1953; it may seem otherwise in future years to persons further removed from the phenomenon. As in the Renaissance, translations have been the principal means of assimilating expressive values from another language. The various translations of Whitman's works and Marcel Schwob's translation of Hamlet show that French cultivated a sort of jargon resulting from a transposition of the etymological and racial values of English words. But we must not carry the search for such analogies too far. During the Renaissance the French language in all its forms-written and oral, prose and verse-was transformed; in the 1890s poetry alone was really affected by this revolution-a revolution, moreover, which had been going on for at least a century. And therein lies the source of much misunderstanding. When considering the verse of the Nordic poets the critics said: If they speak so strangely, it's because they come from a strange land. Their language, which today no longer seems strange to French readers, had been enriched by linguistic acquisitions amassed since the romantic period. But the same critics became confused when they read Mallarme. The question of the source of Mallarme's language has often been discussed. Numerous critics attribute his vocabulary and syntax to English influence. Mrs. Turquet-Milnes, in a preface to an English translation of Mallarme's Poesies, unhesitatingly declared that he becomes intelligible as soon as he is translated into English. Moreover, she added, his popularity began in France when the government,