I am moved by fancies that are curled
Around these images and cling:
The notion of some infinitely gentle,
Infinitely suffering thing.T.S. Eliot, “Preludes”Rêveries émouvantes qui s’accrochent
À ces images et s’y plantent:
Notion d’une chose infiniment douce,
Infiniment souffrante.
Scientific Method
Check out this exciting web series, featuring the Professor.
About Mad Beppo
Why art thou sad, my Beppo?"
Mad Beppo (aka the Professor) is neither sad nor mad. He delights in French, poetry, film, and Baroque music. More about Mad Beppo…
The lines of this quatrain by Eliot could be taken as (loosely) iambic tetrameter, with second and fourth lines rhyming. I have tried for something similar in my French version: a décasyllabe (ten syllables), an octosyllabe (eight), another décasyllabe, and lastly…I couldn’t manage another octosyllabe (not a good-sounding one): it’s just a héxasyllabe (six syllables).
(On the other hand, you could read all the lines of the English quatrain as trimeters… I think that, in any event, the original lines hint at regularity, without necessarily settling down to anything definite.)
I have not observed the rule of alternating masculine and feminine endings of lines; they are all feminine here.