LES ARMOURS JAUNES
THESE JAUNDICED LOVES
Poems by Tristan Corbière
Translated by Christopher Pilling

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These Jaundiced Loves is the very first complete translation into English of the 101 poems that make up Tristan Corbière’s 1873 volume Les Armours Jaunes and it is printed with facing French text. Corbière, born 150 years ago in 1845, was a joker, an ironist, a total original. A short section of Christopher Pilling’s translation appeared in the Oxford Book of Verse in English Translation (ed. Charles Tomlinson, OUP 1980).

“If anybody thinks translation is a dead duck, he or she should try … Christopher Pilling’s Englishing of Corbière. It’s work like this … that redeems the whole concept of translating from one language to another.”
Gavin Ewart, The Observer

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Malevolent Landscape

Sands of old bones - The sea draws
Last gasps: its swell bursting, sound on sound …
- To see the night through, the moon trawls
Pallid swamp, gulping fat worms down.

- Calm of the plague, kiln of fever …
The damned will o’ the wisp is languishing.
- Through fetid grass the lily-livered
Warlock of a hare is vanishing …

- The white Washerwoman spreads
The dirty linen of the dead
Under the wolves’ sun … - Schools

Of toads, small, melancholy
Succentors, with their bags of colic,
Poison the mushrooms, their stools.

Guérande Marsh. – April

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LES ARMOURS JAUNES / THESE JAUNDICED LOVES
Price £14.95 per copy post free (£10.00 post free to Associate Members)
Cover Illustration: drawing by Tristan Corbière
Publication: SPRING 1995. (354 pages laminated paperback)