Renee Vivien Translations

Renee Vivien Translations Song by Renée Vivien loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch When the moon weeps, illuminating flowers on the graves of the faithful, my memories creep back to you, wrapped in flightless wings. It's getting late; soon we will sleep (your eyes already half closed) steeped in the shimmering air. O, the agony of burning roses: your forehead discloses a heavy despondency, though your hair floats lightly ... In the night sky the stars burn whitely as the Goddess nightly resurrects flowers that fear the sun and die before dawn ... Undine by Renée Vivien loose translation/interpretation by Kim Cherub (an alias of Michael R. Burch) Your laughter startles, your caresses rake. Your cold kisses love the evil they do. Your eyes?blue lotuses drifting on a lake. Lilies are less pallid than your face. You move like water parting. Your hair falls in rootlike tangles. Your words like treacherous rapids rise. Your arms, flexible as reeds, strangle, Choking me like tubular river reeds. I shiver in their enlacing embrace. Drowning without an illuminating moon, I vanish without a trace, lost in a nightly swoon. Amazone by Renée Vivien loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch the Amazon smiles above the ruins while the sun, wearied by its struggles, droops to sleep. murder’s aroma swells Her nostrils; She exults in blood, death’s inscrutable lover. She loves lovers who intoxicate Her with their wild agonies and proud demises. She despises the cloying honey of feminine caresses; cups empty of horror fail to satisfy Her. Her desire, falling cruelly on some wan mouth from which she rips out the unrequited kiss, awaits ardently lust’s supreme spasm, more beautiful and more terrible than the spasm of love. NOTE: The French poem has “coups” and I considered various words – “cuts,” “coups,” “coups counted,” etc. – but I thought because of “intoxicate” and “honey” that “cups” worked best in English. Renée Vivien (1877-1909) was a British poet who wrote primarily in French. She was one of the last major poets of Symbolism. Her work included sonnets, hendecasyllabic verse and prose poetry. Born Pauline Mary Tarn in London to a British father and American mother, she grew up in Paris and London. Upon inheriting her father's fortune at age 21, she emigrated permanently to France. In Paris, her dress and lifestyle were as notorious as her verse. She lived lavishly as an open lesbian, sometimes dressing in men's clothes, while harboring a lifelong obsession for her closest childhood friend, Violet Shillito (a relationship that apparently remained unconsummated). Her obsession with violets led to Vivien being called the "Muse of the Violets." But in 1900 Vivien abandoned this chaste love to engage in a public affair with the American writer and heiress Natalie Clifford Barney. The following year Shillito died of typhoid fever, a tragedy from which Vivien never fully recovered. Vivien later had a relationship with a baroness to whom she considered herself to be married, even though the baroness had a husband and children. During her adventurous life, Vivien indulged in alcohol, drugs, fetishes and sadomasochism. But she grew increasingly frail and by the time of her death she weighed only 70 pounds, quite possibly dying from the cumulative effects of anorexia, alcoholism and drug abuse. Keywords/Tags: Renee Vivien, lesbian, gay, LBGT, love, love and art, French, translation, translations, France, cross-dresser, symbolic, symbolist, symbolism, surreal, image, images, imagery, metaphor, metamorphose, metaphysical, analogy The Perfect Courtesan by Michael R. Burch after Baudelaire, for the courtesans She received me into her cavities, indulging my darkest depravities with such trembling longing, I felt her need ... Such was the dalliance to which we agreed— she, my high rider; I, her wild steed. She surrendered her all and revealed to me— the willing handmaiden, delighted to please, the Perfect Courtesan of Ecstasy.