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A review by mxhermit
Fe-Lines: French Cat Poems through the Ages by Olga Pastuchiv, Norman R. Shapiro
3.0
I don't usually read non-fiction, so picking up this volume was a bit of a departure for me. I do love cats, though, so that helped me make up my mind to give it a try.
Poetry can be a difficult subject to discuss because the flow and the content make it a very personal topic. This is a volume of translated work, which made the assortment of poems even more interesting. There are pieces in it from hundreds of year ago to more modern times, which is a nice variety.
Some of the older pieces I did not care for because the language was a product of its time and thus very different from what I am used to. This difficulty was especially evident in the older poems of a longer length.
One of my favorite poems was The Cat and the Dog by Andre Auguste Tandon (1759-1824). It typifies the relationship between cat and dog in a humorous way. The translator had to do a bit of work with this one regarding the dog's voice as there's a stammer there, but I think that he managed to capture the attitude of the dog.
Another favorite was The Clock by Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867). This was one that was more of the poetic prose sort that read more like a story to me, but in such a lyrical way that I would certainly call it poetry. It speaks to the cat lover's soul, illustrating the serenity that one might enjoy in the company of your feline.
Something that was an interesting feature was that the first half of the book is the translated works and the second half of the book was the originals. It was not as much of a draw for me because I cannot read French, but for someone that does, it could be fun to flip back and forth to see the differences between the original and the translated work.
The illustrations by Olga Pastuchiv were a great choice to include in this volume. Looking at them on a Kindle screen, they look like delicate pencil sketches that are smudged in just the right places. It gives the poems a sort of ethereal quality that fits most of the poems.
The reason that I am giving this a 3 star rating is that the older poems selected for the beginning of the book were too heavy for me; they felt as though they were dragging too much.
Another drawback was the introduction that also had that dragging feeling. It could easily be skipped, though, and wouldn't need to be read more than once if you were indeed interested in pushing through it.
Poetry can be a difficult subject to discuss because the flow and the content make it a very personal topic. This is a volume of translated work, which made the assortment of poems even more interesting. There are pieces in it from hundreds of year ago to more modern times, which is a nice variety.
Some of the older pieces I did not care for because the language was a product of its time and thus very different from what I am used to. This difficulty was especially evident in the older poems of a longer length.
One of my favorite poems was The Cat and the Dog by Andre Auguste Tandon (1759-1824). It typifies the relationship between cat and dog in a humorous way. The translator had to do a bit of work with this one regarding the dog's voice as there's a stammer there, but I think that he managed to capture the attitude of the dog.
Another favorite was The Clock by Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867). This was one that was more of the poetic prose sort that read more like a story to me, but in such a lyrical way that I would certainly call it poetry. It speaks to the cat lover's soul, illustrating the serenity that one might enjoy in the company of your feline.
Something that was an interesting feature was that the first half of the book is the translated works and the second half of the book was the originals. It was not as much of a draw for me because I cannot read French, but for someone that does, it could be fun to flip back and forth to see the differences between the original and the translated work.
The illustrations by Olga Pastuchiv were a great choice to include in this volume. Looking at them on a Kindle screen, they look like delicate pencil sketches that are smudged in just the right places. It gives the poems a sort of ethereal quality that fits most of the poems.
The reason that I am giving this a 3 star rating is that the older poems selected for the beginning of the book were too heavy for me; they felt as though they were dragging too much.
Another drawback was the introduction that also had that dragging feeling. It could easily be skipped, though, and wouldn't need to be read more than once if you were indeed interested in pushing through it.