Toad
after Le Crapaud by Tristan Corbière

Listen! There’s a song this airless night.
See that slice of shiny tin? Moonlight,
a cut-out backdrop of deep green dark.

A song: its vibrely creaky echo
from the rockery beyond the decking.
It’s shut its gob. Let’s have a dekko!

Toad! Why are you so scared of me?
I’m your faithful servant. Don’t you know it?
Just look at him: a baldy wingless poet.
Junk-dump nightingale. Singing … horribly.

Well, is it really such an awful croak?
Can’t you see the bright glint in his eye?
No? He’s buggered off, crawled beneath his rock.
Old toady-boyo’s really me – Okey-Doke. Goodbye!

Cliff Forshaw’s latest collection, French Leave: Versions and Perversions, follows his Rimbaud verse-biography RE:VERB and broadens the scope, gathering poets from the earlier 19th century and travelling through the fin de siècle to reach Valery and Apollinaire. Forshaw’s anti-hero, Rimbaud, is revisited, and a few entirely fictional poets make their debut. Forshaw is in a playful mood, and, as the collection’s subtitle warns the purist, he intentionally makes linguistic choices that nudge close to current English idioms and his own poetic voice. Frankness about his method, and the fact that most of the poets are well-represented elsewhere by more exact English translations, provide sufficient exoneration. In literature’s serious play area, one of the extra pleasures is an encounter with the translator-as-rival-personality.

Arthritic and tubercular, Tristan Corbière (1845-75) had a short, often dismal life. His single collection, Les Amours Jaunes, was “published at the author’s expense”. The poète maudit (as Verlaine dubbed him) seems to have discovered a kindred spirit in the toad: at least, he had nailed the dried-out corpse of one above the mantelpiece in the family home.

His poem, Le Crapaud, an inverted sonnet, has its own sour fun with voice and tone, but Forshaw goes further, seizing the opportunity for a rich brew of English and American-English slang, with terms such as “gob”, “dekko”, “buggered off”, “old toady-boyo”, clobbering the ear with melancholy-merry gusto.

The opening “scene” of the original is nocturnal, but scarcely signals romantic assignation: “La lune plaque en métal clair …” In English, the “slice of shiny tin” might suggest outdoors drinkers’ litter – which remains litter, moonlit or not. Forshaw’s location is contemporary; the reference to “decking” – the fashionable garden variety, one presumes – tells us so, and provides a happy moment of bathos as well as a key sound effect in the second triplet. In line four, the coined word “vibrely” demonstrates the life-giving properties of a well-designed neologism. Corbière’s phrase is “tout vif”. Forshaw’s “vibrely” gets vibrancy and vibration into the picture.

Corbière rhymes the two opening triplets AABCCB. His cadence is a mixture of the delicate (“air/clair”) and the gravid (“sombre/l’ombre”). The croaky triple para-rhyme of “echo/dekko/decking” in Forshaw’s version makes sure we hear from the full-throated toad early on. His rhyme-scheme is appropriately jagged: AABCCC.

The usual interpretation of Le Crapaud has the speaker talking with a companion, ironically presenting himself as her “faithful soldier”. Forshaw’s speaker addresses the toad directly in line one of the first verse and seemingly goes on to himself as the toad’s “faithful servant”. He might be speaking in asides to another person from line two (“Just look at him”) or addressing the reader, or simply muttering aloud. Absence of a third party intensifies the poet-toad encounter, and increases his reluctant but inescapable empathy with the “junk-dump nightingale. Singing … horribly.” (Notice the ellipsis slipped between the present participle of the verb, “singing” and the no-holds-barred adjective “horribly”: it shows a nice sense of comic timing.)

Rhyme enhances the rueful comedy of the quatrains. Although “know it/poet” is an old familiar, it’s refreshed by the two ruthless epithets the speaker applies to himself: “baldy, wingless”. Finally, more alone than ever, he shrugs off what might be seen as the ultimate rejection. The crestfallen toad has “buggered off” and now the poet will do likewise, having announced, “Old toady-boyo’s really me”. This sounds like a confession of failure, but the questions at the start of the stanza have sounded their warning: “Well, is it really such an awful croak? / Can’t you see the bright glint in his eye?” Toads, like poets, should not be underestimated.

• French Leave: Versions and Perversions is published by Broken Sleep Books. You can view paintings, poems and previous titles by Cliff Forshaw here, and check out his earlier Poem of the week here.

• Note: in the printed Toad, the poem’s final “Goodbye!” has a line to itself, and sits on its own, on the right-hand side of the page.