Sunday 26 February 2012

Four Poems by Rimbaud

Well, the rebinding of the Sylvan Press edition of Four Poems by Rimbaud: the problem of translation is complete and I'm quite pleased with it.
The book is all about the difficulties of translating poetry in general and Rimbaud in particular. Do you go for a straight transliteration so the message gets through loud and clear, or do you try and reintroduce rhyme and metre at the risk of changing the meaning?
So I made a label that auto-translates from English into French by pulling a little vellum tag. Smart, eh?
The book's size was coincidentally ideal for a couple of papers that have been hanging around the Invisible Bindery for years. The box was covered with another lovely crinkly paper with flower inclusions from Kate's Paperie, the book with a charming Japanese printed washi, again floral but very regimented in hexagons.
However, a couple of bloopers revealed how out of practice I am.
The nasty misalignment of the text was broadly corrected when I re-sewed the text block, but one sheet had been slightly misplaced by the original binder (curse him) and I failed to spot that. I should have flattened out all the sheets and made absolutely sure they were aligned as God intended. The result is one page that is still skew whiff.
And I should have lined the box in white paper before pasting on the flower paper, which is very gossamery. The effect is not bad but a bit greyer than I had intended.



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