Pomegranates by Paul Muldoon, from Paul Valéry’s Grenades

Muldoon_Cover.jpg

Paul Valéry’s Grenades, a landmark French poem published a few years after the end of World War One, creates a conundrum for the conscientious translator: How to translate the title, which can be rendered as both “pomegranates” and “grenades” in English? In his 2003 collection Moy Sand and Gravel, Irish-born poet Paul Muldoon opts for the former, emphasizing the poem’s explosion of ruby seeds. Yet Muldoon pushes the limits of this semantic threshold, coyly commenting on his more munificent translational take in the book’s very next poem: “Munificence—right? Not munitions, if you understand / where I’m coming from. As if the open hand / might, for once, put paid / to the hand grenade.”
—Kareem James Abu-Zeid

Paul Muldoon. "Paul Valéry: Pomegranates" and "Pineapples and Pomegranates," from Moy Sand and Gravel. London: Faber and Faber, 2002.

Paul Valéry. "Les Grenades," from Poems. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971.