The Alexandrine Plan

In these translations from the sonnets of the major nineteenth-century French poets—Rimbaud, Baudelaire, and Mallarmé—the relation of the poet to his world is adapted to the wild, fruitful imagination of Ciaran Carson, while formally the poems hold to their “Alexandrine plan,” twelve-syllable lines in the rhyme schemes of the original. As Carson carries these poems across his own idiom and sensibility, he restores, with startling freshness, the essential joy and verve of the earlier poems. In French and English.