Verhaeren, for better or worse, was a compulsive meddler in his own poems, constantly amending them at each new edition. This makes both a translator’s and an editor’s job something of a headache, however interesting such changes may be to scholars. Critics and admirers in Verhaeren’s day were often nonplussed at these constant changes and many had reservations; even the ever-faithful Zweig implied there was no need to ‘interfere’ with the originals. The English critic Edmund Gosse was of the opinion that what had been good enough for twenty years ago was surely good enough now. The problem was that not all the changes were for the better; they sometimes seemed needlessly to dilute the unconscious freshness of the original image. However, the Brussels publishing house Labor is, true to its name, currently producing, laboriously and heroically, a new edition of all his works in a definitive series which displays all the different versions. As a critical source this is of course invaluable, but it does not provide easy or accessible reading, as one is impeded continually by footnotes and columns of alternative versions; readers of Verhaeren in French must still make their choice from the versions available. Unsurprisingly, the older editions are more likely to be the original (or closer to the original) versions, whereas newer editions tend to be the last version Verhaeren left behind. For this collection I have used whichever versions seemed the stronger. For example I have used the originals of poems from Les Villes tentaculaires since later versions omit whole sections and in certain places tend to smooth out the imaginative creases that in the original lent a richer complexion. For instance, there is a section in the poem ‘The Plain’ where Verhaeren evokes brilliantly the body of a worker being absorbed into the machine:
Their eyes, they are the eyes of the machine,
their backs bend beneath it and their spines,
their determined fingers, that complicate
a thousand fingers precise and metallic…
(‘The Plain’, p. 85)
which, in later versions, is watered down so that the whole frenzied image of fingers merging into the infinite cogs or bobbins is sadly lost. Having conferred with curators at the Verhaeren museum in Sint Amands as well as with one of the editors of the Labor editions, Professor Michel Otten, about the different versions I have taken the path indicated above, for better or worse, at the same time feeling the need to inform readers that alternatives exist should they wish to seek them out.
Will Stone