There’s a story, perhaps apocryphal, that Brahms, having written a piano transcription of Bach’s D minor Chaconne for violin, decided to play it over to an acquaintance, an eminent Viennese musical authority of the day. The pundit, having listened and feeling obliged to offer some learned and expert opinion, hinted among other things that the transcription didn’t sound much like the violin, did it? To which Brahms muttered some retort, more gruff than polite, which was perhaps safely lost in his beard. True or not, to my mind the story sums up the objection of the purist to the whole idea of translating poetry: how can a translation be identical with the original, preserving ail its intonations, allusions, and sonorities? This simply begs the question of the whole process, which must be to transform—to put the poem into the crucible of another language and make it emerge as close as possible with the original, a twin to it, in a new verbal medium. This is to state the aim of translation as an ideal, never attainable, but there to be kept in mind.

French, at its purest, in its greatest poetry, is certainly the violin among languages. It has the plangent, nasal sonorities, the lingering or pressing vibrato, the linear suavity of that instrument. No wonder that Baudelaire—and Verlaine—have invoked it in sounds that echo its quality. But then almost any line of French verse—