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UNIVERSITÉ
SORBONNE NOUVELLE–PARIS 3 - INSTITUT DU MONDE ANGLOPHONE
The translations of the poetry of Algernon Charles Swinburne
presented
by Thibaud Ochem, M1 enseignement, Paris 3
Directeur
de recherche : Mrs. Stephens Jessica
Introduction
1) Swinburne
today : a national poet ?
Charles Algernon
Swinburne (1837-1909, both in London) may sometimes be considered a
minor poet, even from the English point of view, since he was already
out-of-fashion before Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot became famous, though
the latter wrote an article of
poetry criticism
devoted to advise the readership to read
Swinburne. The decadentism
of his life and works, now a topos
of the Victorian times,
made him a classic, as it did for Baudelaire for whom he wrote an
epitaph, thus testifying from the proximity between the two authors.
According to Pascal
Aquien, professor at Paris
IV and editor in chief of the journal
Etudes Anglaises,
Swinburne's lack of acclaim
originates
in the rejection of his works
by the Victorian
critics. Now that the
controversies have long faded about the “indecencies”
of his poems, readers and critics can turn their looks away from the
“racks and rods” that shape the caricatural Swinburne, and
contemplate the true pantheist beauty of his writings, largely
commented by Pascal Aquien
in his introduction to his own Swinburne anthology, Poèmes
Choisis.
In this view, the
theme of the Sea and the liquid
element in the
writings of Charles Algernon Swinburne are what make of him a British
national poet. The importance of the biographical element must be
noticed here : Swinburne was the eldest of six children born to
Captain, and later Admiral Charles Henry Swinburne; he grew up on the
Isle of Wight. Pascal Aquien offered as an explanation to Swinburne's
fascination for the act of drowning the fact that as a child, the
admiral Swinburne taught him to swim by force, thus drowning him de
facto several times. By
going a little further, I can link this with the universal feeling of
“drowning” to which we could all have been exposed in the
amniotic fluid. Therefore, the Sea -or the Seas, the mare nostrum
of the British empire-
would be the universal mother of all men, explaining the universal
celebration of it that is present in Swinburne's works, a sea that he
would have traveled only by proxy through the person of his father
the admiral. Be it true or not, this obsession or carefulness
about water of the lyrical “I” coincides with a major national
theme of the British collective unconscious : “the Sea, the Sea”,
the very source of the power of the leading country of the world at
that time. Is Swinburne's Republicanism a contradiction? Even in his
Republican poems, the liquid element comes back in “Les
Noyades”, a baroque indictment of the excesses of the French
Revolution in the episode of the noyades de Nantes,
very ambiguous as we explored the poet's relationship to drowning...
The liquid element exults in “The Triumph of Time”, a long
pantheist poem where the only subject may be the oceans of the pink
Empire on which the sun never sets. ...
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