by Victor Serge
PRAISE FOR A BLAZE IN A DESERT
“The voice of Victor Serge is needed now more than ever, and James Brook provides a fine edition and translation of his poems, bringing out the close relation between poetic expression and sensibility, and humane, revolutionary political engagement. History and the cosmos, individual and collective hopes, dreams and loss trace a subtle dance in this moving collection.”
—Bill Marshall, author of Victor Serge: The Uses of Dissent and Guy Hocquenghem: Beyond Gay Identity
“In these dark times, the poetry of Victor Serge illuminates the deep continuum of revolutionary history. As all great work, it shows the power of both resistance & acceptance. Serge is noted for his prose but his poetry is in many ways more moving. It inspires the reader to stay true to the revolutionary spirit and will in its compassion, defiance, and outrage.”
—David Meltzer, author of San Francisco Beat: Talking with the Poets, When I Was a Poet, and Two-Way Mirror: A Poetry Notebook
“In this meticulously translated collection of Victor Serge’s poetry, emotion is the force that swells beneath the poet’s acute observations and his reasoning, sobriety, and restraint.”
—Summer Brenner, author of Nearly Nowhere and My Life in Clothes
“An international rebel with a cause, ever the champion of the downpressed and foreclosed, and of ‘all the broken young wings,’ Victor Serge—deported, exiled, hounded from country to country and continent to continent—inhabited a ‘planet without visas.’ But in A Blaze in a Desert Serge’s poetry, which witnessed the rise of modern totalitarian political ideologies and ideologues, comes home to Walt Whitman’s band of brothers. And James Brook’s erudite introduction guides us well through Serge’s engagement with poetry and poets and the enduring struggle for justice.”
—Gloria Frym, author of Mind over Matter and The True Patriot
A Blaze in a Desert: Selected Poems by Victor Serge
Translation and edition copyright © 2017 by James Brook
Afterword copyright © 2017 by Richard Greeman
This translation is based on Victor Serge, Pour un brasier dans un désert, Jean Rière, ed., published in France in 1998. The new translations of Résistance and “Mains” in A Blaze in a Desert supersede the translations in the 1989 City Lights edition of those poems.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be transmitted by any means without permission in writing from the publisher.
ISBN: 978–1–62963–382–4
Library of Congress Control Number: 2016959587
Cover drawing copyright © 1978 by Vlady
Cover design by John Yates / www.stealworks.com
Interior design by briandesign
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Contents
PREFACE
Mourning the Fallen, Mourning the Revolution James Brook
I. Resistance
Frontier
People of the Ural
Old Woman
Somewhere else …
Just Four Girls
The Asphyxiated Man
Tiflis
Crime in Tiflis
Russian History
Boat on the Ural
Tête-à-Tête
Dialectic
Be Hard
Constellation of Dead Brothers
Max
City
26 August 28
Death of Panait
Why Inscribe a Name?
Cassiopeia
Song
Trust
Sensation
II. Messages
Sunday
Bérangère
Suicide of Dr. C.
Marseille
The rats are leaving …
Out at Sea
Caribbean Sea
Our Children
Death of Jacques Mesnil
Altagracia
Mexico: Idyll
Mexico: Morning Litany
Mexico: Churches
Outbreaks
Philosophy
We have long thought …
Note
It takes …
After that splendid Notre Dame …
It’s salt water that quenches …
III. Mains/Hands
Mains
Hands
NOTES TO THE POEMS
AFTERWORD: The Odyssey of a Revolutionary Poet Richard Greeman
Preface
Many years ago, friends pressed me to read Victor Serge’s writings, especially Memoirs of a Revolutionary and the novels. These books turned out to be among a handful that preserved and helped recreate the human texture of an era of revolt, revolution, and darkly tragic counterrevolution that still weighs on the present. The writing was vivid, stirring, tense, modern—a source of divided pleasures in “our night with its stars askew.”
I came to the poetry much later, stumbling across François Maspéro’s 1972 reprint of Résistance (retitled Pour un brasier dans un désert) in a bookshop in Paris one day. The poems, many of them written during the “immense shipwreck” of Stalin’s ascendancy, struck me as strange, oblique, and often beautiful: they were charged with anger, hope, disappointment, irony, and passion, and they quickly shifted from clear-eyed realism to lyricism to the crack-up of the real, and back again.
A Blaze in a Desert includes translations of Résistance (1938), Serge’s sole published book of poems, and of Messages (1946), a manuscript left unpublished until 1998. In addition, it contains a translation of Serge’s last poem, “Mains” (Hands) (1947), also left in manuscript. Throughout, I have relied on Jean Rière’s superb edition of the poems: Victor Serge, Pour un brasier dans un désert (1998); his annotated edition also includes uncollected and unpublished poems and drafts of poems.
I owe a debt of gratitude to Mitchell Abidor, Claudio Albertani, Lori Fagerholm, and Georgia Smith for their encouragement and help over the years that this project took. Special thanks are due to Christopher Winks, Donald Nicholson-Smith, Renée Morel, Richard Greeman, and Summer Brenner for their crucial readings and comments when such were most needed. Richard Greeman, the translator of most of Serge’s novels, also contributed the afterword. El Centro Vlady, at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM), graciously authorized the reproduction of the sketch that Vladimir Kibalchich Russakov (Vlady) made of his father’s hands in death.
Lori, this book is for you.
James Brook
November 2016
Mourning the Fallen, Mourning the Revolution
James Brook
All my life I have seen only troubled times, extreme divisions in society, and immense destruction; I have taken part in these troubles.
—Guy Debord, Panegyric, vol. 1
Victor Serge (1890–1947) is best known for Memoirs of a Revolutionary and a series of novels based on his experience of prison in France, a failed insurrection in Spain, the early hopes and abysmal failure of the Russian Revolution, the fall of France to the invading German army, and the epic chaos of the Second World War.1 But from his anarchist youth in Belgium and France till his dying day in Mexico after the Second World War, Serge was also very much a poet. Elegiac, satiric, sometimes lyrical, his poetry speaks of experiences almost incomprehensible to us, because we are so distant from Serge’s world and our sense of history is often so weak. As he asks in his wartime notebooks, “What remains of the worlds I’ve known, in which I’ve struggled?”2 As with his memoirs, one of the tasks of Serge’s poetry is to preserve and transmit the mem
ory of those densely populated worlds.
Serge wrote much of his poetry in exile. As a prisoner of Stalin, Serge spent the years 1933–1936 in internal deportation in Orenburg, near the Russian border with Kazakhstan, where he wrote most of the poems published in Resistance (1938). Later, in his flight from the Nazi invasion of France, Serge found refuge in Mexico, where he lived from 1941 until his death in 1947. He began writing the poems collected in Messages (1946) in Paris and Marseille, with others datelined Martinique, Ciudad Trujillo, the Atlantic, and Mexico.3
For Serge, exile meant more than geographical displacement. As a core member of the Left Opposition to Stalin from the late 1920s on, Serge lived amid intense ideological conflicts that often put his life in jeopardy. From his early days as an anarchist in Belgium and France, through his participation in the Russian Revolution, and till the end of the Second World War, Serge lived the great hopes and the bitter disappointments of social revolution in the first half of the twentieth century. He witnessed the rise of first Stalinist, then Nazi totalitarianism, and he saw the world utterly transformed by a war in ways that he struggled to comprehend, all of which left their imprint on his poetry, as in “Marseille” (1941):
Planet without visas, without money, without compass, great empty sky without comets,
The Son of Man has nowhere left to lay his head,
His head a target for mechanical shooters,
His Remington portable and his last suitcase
Bearing the names of fifteen fallen cities …
Serge was a lifelong outsider. As the child of anti-czarist Russian exiles in Belgium, he was born into the bitter estrangement from bourgeois society that would lead him to individualist anarchism and to the intoxications of poetry in vogue in that milieu.4 Serge was a poet partly due to the curse of self-awareness and his conviction that the world did not have to be impoverished, unjust, and unfree. He was in effect a poète maudit in the tradition of French poets that stretches from Villon to Baudelaire and up through Surrealism. This conscious alienation, so evident in the anarchist writings of the young Serge,5 evolved to include rebellion against the stifling bureaucratic collectivism of the USSR.
Serge’s poetry has roots in the fertile Symbolist soil that nurtured Guillaume Apollinaire’s and Émile Verhaeren’s poetry, a soil that had been enriched by Walt Whitman’s long line and large spirit. Like Apollinaire, Serge can write dense, enigmatic lyrics; like Verhaeren and Whitman,6 he can enter imaginatively and sympathetically into the lives of others, no matter how different from himself. And like Jehan Rictus, a sort of ventriloquist of poverty, he has an ear for the voices of the down and out. Echoes of Baudelaire and Rimbaud also reverberate in Serge’s poetry.7
During his time in the Soviet Union, Serge was a familiar of many Russian poets, including Osip Mandelstam and Boris Pasternak. Among the Russian Symbolists, Serge’s themes have affinities with Alexander Blok’s, as in “The Twelve,” an antic poem that highlights irreconcilable conflicts within the Russian Revolution, and “The Scythians,” in which the Russian spirit is torn between Europe and Asia. And while Andrei Bely’s Petersburg is especially important to Serge’s evolution as a novelist, Serge seems also to recruit Bely’s exclamatory, fractured style in poems like “Mexico: Morning Litany” and “Outbreaks,” in which the mad violence of the Second World War is dramatized in sharp-edged fragments.
Serge’s novels often incorporate poetry, including his own. In The Long Dusk, his novel of the fall of France, Serge creates Félicien Mûrier, a late-Symbolist poet who mentally composes a poem as he wanders through the Chirico cityscape of a Paris whose streets are emptying out as the Wehrmacht advances.8 The first couplet of Mûrier’s poem is from “Song,” given here in Ralph Manheim’s translation:9
the archer succumbs, the rock splits
the flower is a cry triumphant—
“Song,” which is inspired by Apollinaire’s “La Chanson du mal-aimé” (The Song of the Poorly Loved), also figures in The Case of Comrade Tulayev: near the end of the novel, Romachkin plucks from the shelf “a book by a poet whose name he did not know” and begins reading where the book falls open, on the last stanza of “Song” (in Willard R. Trask’s translation):
Divine revolving planet
thy Eurasias thy singing seas
simple scorn for the headsmen
and behold a merciful thought we are
almost like unto heroes
Romachkin wonders: “But why is there no punctuation? Perhaps because thought, which embraces and connects by invisible threads (but do such threads exist?) planets, seas, continents, headsmen, victims, and ourselves, is ever fluid, never rests, stops only in appearance?”10 This restless infiltration of poetry into prose fiction disturbs the relationships between fiction, poetry, writer, reader, and reality—because poetry is inherently undermining, destabilizing …
Wallace Stevens, the premier American poet in the Symbolist tradition, had long meditated on the relationships between fiction, poetry, writer, reader, and reality. As remote as his work is from Serge’s, Stevens brings Serge into canto XIV of “Esthétique du Mal” (1947) and engages him in a kind of dialogue of the deaf about logic, madness, politics, and—ultimately—poetry:
Victor Serge said, “I followed his argument
With the blank uneasiness which one might feel
In the presence of a logical lunatic.”
He said it of Konstantinov. Revolution
Is the affair of logical lunatics.11
Konstantinov: In the early 1920s, as a member of the Cheka (the political police), Konstantinov had crossed swords with Serge; in the late 1920s, when Serge was in the Left Opposition, Konstantinov confided to him his theory that the Central Committee had long been betrayed from within. He tells Serge that “he knows the names, he has the proofs.” Although Serge is repelled by the man and his paranoid delusions, he sees that “in all that [Konstantinov] says, he is driven by one basic idea that is not the idea of a madman: ‘We did not create the Revolution to come to this’”12—“this” being the New Economic Policy, which unleashed a revitalized private capitalism whose corruption and growing inequality threatened to sweep away the gains, however equivocal, of the revolution. It is Stevens, not Serge, who judges that “Revolution / Is the affair of logical lunatics.” In Serge’s view, Konstantinov is symptomatic of the failings of a revolution that Serge remains intent on saving, despite everything.
No doubt Stevens would have considered Serge himself as yet another madman. And if Stevens had known of Serge’s poetry, perhaps he would have dismissed it as poetry covered by ideological blinders. But Serge was not a Konstantinov or “the lunatic of one idea / In a world of ideas, who would have all the people / Live, work, suffer and die in that idea.” If anything, Serge, whose poetry comes to grips with reality’s sharp corners, would agree with Stevens that “The greatest poverty is not to live / In a physical world” (canto XV). Another unlikely intersection of the poets: Stevens is also the author of “The Men That Are Falling,” in which he interrogates the apparition on his pillow of the bodiless head of a Republican soldier fallen in the Spanish Civil War: “This man loved earth, not heaven, enough to die.”13
Over the years, Serge continually engaged in a productive quarrel with Surrealism, a late-blooming branch of Symbolism. He had a long and difficult friendship with André Breton, and he knew many other Surrealists in Paris before the war. Later, Breton and Wifredo Lam accompanied Serge and his son Vlady (who was to become a well-known Mexican painter) on the Capitaine Paul-Lemerle as they all sailed from Marseille into exile in 1941.14 Serge and his companion, Laurette Séjourné, collected artwork by their friend Victor Brauner. And in Mexico, Serge’s circle included Benjamin Péret, Pierre Mabille, and Leonora Carrington. There, he also became friends with Octavio Paz, to whom he introduced the poetry of Henri Michaux and for whom Serge’s dissident Marxism was a decisive influence on his break with Stalinism.15
Although Serge was sympathetic
to Surrealist painting, he was impatient and critical of Surrealist poetry. The sources of this distaste are obscure; in fact, he seems torn between repulsion and attraction to Surrealist poetry. He was also of two minds regarding Surrealism as a movement: while in a notebook entry Serge approves of the Surrealist movement for its “revolt against the debased reason” of bourgeois common sense and conformism, he is alarmed that it aims at the intellect itself, at “the rational intelligence that built science and philosophy.” Surrealist rebellion, in Serge’s estimation, is “strictly literary, stuck in Paris cafés and reviews” and “in search of shock effects—scandal, publicity—not revolutionary effects that are useful and liberating,” in addition to “aiming only for a select, often rich audience.” Nonetheless, Serge continually returns in Carnets to his argument with Surrealism and Surrealists, as the many references to Breton, Péret, and others attest. His barbed criticism is often coupled with qualified praise: “The movement can be considered revolutionary for the time being because it leads to taking a stand counter to the reigning conditions (Henri Michaux: ‘I counter,’ very strong).”16
In a rare instance of convergence at the end of the war, Serge and Péret, a Trotskyist militant and a veteran of the Spanish Civil War, published their moral and political critiques of French Resistance poets, including former Surrealists Paul Éluard and Louis Aragon. Both Serge and Péret rebuked such poets for remaining silent about Stalinist tyranny even as they combated Nazi tyranny. Still, while Serge acknowledges the courage of Resistance poets in their perilous situation, Péret will have none of it as he attacks his former Surrealist comrades for their newfound nationalism, their vague religiosity, and their betrayal of the subversive spirit of poetry. Regarding the quality of the poetry, Péret writes: “Not one of these ‘poems’ surpasses the lyrical level of pharmaceutical advertising.”17
In a later notebook entry, the argument with Surrealist poetry comes to the fore as Serge struggles with a line from a Péret poem in order to distinguish his own approach to writing:18
The game of Surrealists and aesthetes consists of looking for unexpected comparisons: “The egrets of voice springing from the burning bush of lips” (Benjamin Péret)—that’s excellent because it’s possibly spontaneous; but I doubt that one can produce many spontaneous (or elaborated) images of this quality without mental concentration on this production, a concentration that must do harm to thought in general, to observation, to other concerns. Rather than inventing unusual or simply new images, I prefer considering things with simplicity, depicting them in ordinary words, and following the course of my problems. And I don’t think a middle term exists.