Excerpt from The Poets of Modern France The second relation which the translated poem must sustain to its original concerns the far more difficult and exacting matter of form. The lan guage involved will, ofmthe charac ter of the translator's problem. If he is dealing with languages that have practically the same pro sodic system, any two Germanic languages for in stance, he must scrupulously preserve the music, the exact cadences of his original. If he is trans lating from a language that has a quite different prosody, such as the French, he must interpret the original forms by analogous forms. Thus I have rendered all poems written wholly in alex andrines into English heroic verse, but I have sought to make that verse as fluid and as various in movement as the types of alexandrine in my originals. When the prosodic contour of a poem, however, depended definitely upon the contrast of alexandrines with longer or shorter verses, I have preserved the exact syllabic lengths. In lyrical measures the aim must be, of course, to hear the characteristic music, to transfer this and to follow its modulations from line to line and stanza to stanza. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.