Albert Giraud's Pierrot Lunaire (New Odyssey Series)

Rating:
Summary: Wait for another translation. Lifeless translation.
Review: Although helpful in including the original French text by Giraud, the German translation by Hartleben (used by Schoenberg), and an English translation from the original, I found the latter translation by Gregory C. Richter disappointing and very poor: it lacks the spiraling insanity and verbal vigor I have read from other translations. For example. Here are excerpts of Richter's translation of The Sick Moon:

"O Moon, nocturnal phthisic,
On the black pillow of the skies,
Your huge and feverish face
Attracts me like strange music!

...But thinking of physical pleasures,
A lover passes by, uncaring..."

Compare that to Stanley Appelbaum's translation (found in Verklarte Nacht and Pierrot Lunaire, Dover Publications):

"You moon, gloomy and sick to death
There on the black cushion of the sky,
Your eye, so feverishly enlarged,
Casts a spell over me like a strange melody.

...The lover, who in ecstacy,
is going off, carefree, to this sweetheart..."

This could be argued as an unfair comparison because the Appelbaum's translation is from the German translation from Giraud's text, but still, you can see how Richter's text lacks a singing quality, it feels "rushed", and the moon the does not really come out, where there is never a breath between the lines. If you are not convinced, here is another example, this time comparing Richter's text to another French translation. These are parts from Richter's translation of Sunset:

"The Sun has slit its veins
On a bed of russet clouds:
Its blood, through gaping chasms,
Sprays out in crimson fountains.

The agitated branches of the oaks
Convulse the crazed horizons...

...Like a Roman debauchee
Overcome with loathing
Who lets his sickly lifeblood flow
Into the filthy gutters..."

Now compare that to John Porter Houston and Mona Tobin Houston's translation (from An Anthology: French Symbolist Poets, Indiana University Press):

"The sun has cut his wrists
On a bed of reddish clouds:
His blood, through gaping holes,
Spurts in red fountains.

The oaks' convulsive branches
whip the mad horizons...

...Just like a delicate debauchee,
after the Roman Shame,
a debauchee allowing his sickly arteries
to bleed into filthy sewers..."

From looking at this comparison between Richter and the Houstons, I find Richter's choice of words and placement in poor judgement, lacking a musical harmony that constantly misses the point of the illustrative details of Giraud's text. Richter, in his treatment to Pierrot, is either over-simplifying or over-complicating (by not paying attention to connotations, and the different degrees of effectiveness of words that share the same meaning) or doing both at the same time; it feels frustrating. The other two fantastic translations I have pointed out by Appelbaum and the Houston's treat Pierrot with a sincere diabolicalness; in their versions, you could feel the quietly clandestine moon flowers' rage because Pierrot, the moon, the Madonna, the tides, the blood...are all written in details that let the mind wander freely in Pierrot's landscape. Richter's version puts the mind in a mental boxcar: get to one poem, stop, and then quickly get to next one. I suggest to wait until someone else will translate the whole Pirrot Lunaire series and skip this book, or rather perhaps write letters to Dover and Mr. Appelbaum, or the Houstons and plead to them to offer a new translation of Giraud's mad text.

(I apologize for speaking abstractly, but when your talking about what is musical, often it is difficult to not get abstract.)

Rating:
Summary: the white clown prowls at midnight, midnight prowls in him
Review: I mostly agree with the other reviewer's statements about the quality of the translation but it's the only copy of the poem cycle I got so I will review it.
Pierrot is an archetype and Pierrot struck by the moon and left to reel through a phantasmagoria is even more of an archetype. Pierrot, the poor white clown, is not merely a victim of human persons he becomes a victim of moods, states of exalted or lowered conciousness, a victim of the moon, at last a victim of himself. He commits suicide - what else could he do? - but he comes back to haunt the night like a vampire sent by demons to prey on himself.
The images in this dream cycle are lurid, apocalyptic, and - unaccountably but wonderfully - witty.
A witty apocalypse? Read these poems for yourself. You will behold at its beginnings one of the strangest movements to sweep ( or should I say creep?) through the arts and letters of European civilization: a deep obsession with the famed commedia del'arte or commedia del'italia. The commedia del'arte was popular entertainment for centurys; a story of the white clown and other figures such as Columbine and Harlequin. Something aristocratic, child-like, and utterly decadent in the European soul seized on this rustic fun and transformed it into an aesthetic wonderland part ecstatic, part enchanting, and part ominous.
What, after all, does Pierrot truly signify? And why was the Belgian poet Albert Giraud mad enough to try and hint at it with draggers?