Sully Prudhomme, tr. Toru Dutt: The Swan

Where, like a mirror, spreads the glorious lake

Profound and calm, behold the swan awake

A noiseless ripple, as serene she glides!

How beautiful the down upon her sides!

It seems its dazzling whiteness to have won

From April's snows bright-flashing in the sun;

But of a duller white appears the wing

That vibrates in the mild breath of the spring,

Proud of its strength. Above the tangled reeds

She lifts her neck, then plunges it, and feeds,

Then lengthens it upon the wave, then swerves,

Arching its outline in acanthus curves

Where are the line of beauty she preserves.

Now in her shining silver throat or breast

Her ebon beak, half-hidden, is at rest;

Now moves she under pines of sombre shade

Where Peace and Silence have pavilions made;

Now winds, abandoning the herbs, her fare

That trail behind like thick and glossy hair,

With languid movements, graceful, stately, slow.

To any goal where fancy bids her go.

The grotto where the poet loves to dream.

And hears high mysteries in evening's gleam.

The fount that mourns one absent or at rest

With an eternal murmur, please her best;

Here, while she moves or lingers by the hour,

Perchance a willow leaf, or faded flower,

Drops on her shoulder in the shadow dim;

Sometimes from woods obscure, away to swim

She feels a pleasure, then superb and grand

She rides into the open, far from land;

Her own white purity better to admire.

She chooses just the spot that seems on fire

Beneath the sun's fierce, red, and blinding rays;

There, incandescent, like a ship she sways,

Then, when the water's edge no more is seen

At twilight's witching hour, and all between

Are spectral vapours, lines confused, and shapes

Chaotic, and in black the blue sky drapes,

Save in one point of the horizon, whence

Shoots forth a long, long streak of red intense;

Then, when no reeds, no waterlilies stir.

And birds commence their songs upon the fir

Far, far away, and glow-worms light their spark

Beneath the moon just rising in the dark;

Then, when the lake more deep, more sombre, shows

A sky beneath, dark-violet, where glows

The milky way, the splendour of each star.

And all that meets the gaze above, afar;

Like a bright silver vase 'mid diamonds strown,

With her head buried in her wings, alone.

She sleeps, between two firmaments dim-seen,

A queen of beauty, Nature's chosen queen.

What faded fustian! Prudhomme won the inaugural Nobel Prize for Literature, a choice which now looks as dated as that of Bob Dylan will look in another century. The poem's included as a salute to its translator, the prodigious Toru Dutt (1856-1877). It’s a pity she lived, all too briefly, in an age when she would naturally incline towards choosing this sort of material for translation, although her versions of Victor Hugo are worth looking at as something close to what Hugo might have written had he been an Englishman.