Greetings to the one who walks in certainty by my side,
to the end of the poem.
Who will tomorrow pass STANDING under the wind.
These letters, about which he used to often speak, convey his attitude “after the disaster”: not to tell on the others (let the pigs communicate with the pigs—we shall keep silent), not to betray anyone, but to remain as far from the monstrous as possible, so as not to become a monster oneself. That he had been forced to lose the partisan Roger Bertrand was its own excruciating punishment: there was, and remained, no point in bringing up further punishment for the others. To besmirch the enemy, Char thought, is to besmirch oneself, to bend low. To remain standing in that field meant, precisely, to be true to one’s own dignity. That was the part of refusal, as he wrote in 1948, in the last note to Francis Curel:
Refus de siéger à la cour de justice, refus d’accabler autrui dans le dialogue quotidien retrouvé, decision tenue enfin d’opposer la lucidité au bien-être, l’état naturel aux honneurs, ces mauvais champignons qui prolifèrent dans les crevasses de la sécheresses et dans les lieux avariés, après le premier grain de pluie.
(Refusal to sit in the court of justice, refusal to crush anyone in the daily dialogue taken up again, a decision finally maintained to oppose lucidity to well-being, the natural state of things to the honors, those poisonous mushrooms proliferating in the “cracks of aridity” and in the deteriorating places, after the first drop of rain.)
“… [J]e redevenais journalier” (… [A]nd so I became daily again), he concludes.
In that same year, Char wrote his “Prière rogue,” his pagan prayer, if you like, which resounds in its courageous clarity as an “Unbending Prayer,” this pagan beseeching providing a perfect description of his position in the world of necessary decisions:
Gardez-nous la révolte, l’éclair, l’accord illlusoire, un rire pour le trophée glissé des mains, même l’entier et long fardeau qui succède, dont la difficulté nous mène à une révolte nouvelle. Gardez-nous la primevère et le destin.
(Preserve for us rebellion, lightning, the illusory agreement, a laugh for the trophy slipped from our hands, even the whole lengthy burden that follows, whose difficulty leads us to a new rebellion. Preserve for us fate and the primrose.)
This is rebellion itself, and indeed, written by hand on one copy of the “Pulverized Poem” of 1947, we find these unforgettable lines:
Mon poème est mon voeu en révolte. Mon poème a la fermeté du désastre: mon poème est mon soufflé futur.
(My poem is my oath of rebellion. My poem has the firmness of disaster; my poem is my future breathing.)
Something about breath and breathing, the anima of being, had a crucial importance for this poet. He was eager for a book being written on him to include the notion of breathing in its title, and that indeed was the inspiration—in the strong etymological sense of the word—for whatever energy it was to find.
The poem is always married to someone, says the poet. So the literal ties of the texts to the life matter, but they do not necessarily have to be spelled out in order for the text itself to resound. Think of the poem “to A***”—like Breton’s “X” at the end of Nadja. We do not have to know specifics; we have only to believe that none of these loving texts are floating aimlessly about, as “just” literature. The fact that Breton’s celebrated poem “L’union libre” (“Free Union”) was used as a valentine to one woman and as a love letter to another in no way divests it of its literal weight; it remains poetry.
This consideration brings up, urgently, another issue for the translator. Take Breton’s “Free Union,” in which the first line begins, memorably, “Ma femme,” and continues in like manner, with the anaphoric style, every line beginning the same way. So, clearly, the phrase has major importance. In my view, it cannot be translated “My woman,” nor, for biographical as well as poetic reasons, can it be rendered as “My wife,” because she certainly was not his spouse, each time he used it. I believe one has to say something like “My beloved” or then “My love,” the gender distinction being less crucial by far than the ghastliness of the first two options.1 Now the difference between this poem and the idea of “Mad Love” is immense. The mad love described in the volume of that name, that overcoming and deeply personalized passion for Jacqueline Lamba (who had entered the café where she knew she would find the poet, who instantly conflated his earlier poem “Tournesol” [“Sunflower”] with this experience, as a poetic premonition) is indeed attached, and permanently, to her memory. It could not be otherwise, as it recounts their voyage to Tenerife and concludes with Breton’s letter to their daughter, Aube, headed “Ecureuil de noisette.” The beginning explains that he has always loved the same person, in other guises (“in her red dress”) and so on, but the rest leads to the unique love. What he is faithful to is the very idea of love, in every guise it might take.
On the other hand, when the specific biographical details are not urgently included in the text, the options are more numerous. In the case of the general statement, such as the concluding line of Char’s memorial prose poem “Fastes” (“Annals”): “Je t’aimais, changeant en tout, fidèle à toi” (I loved you, changing in every way, faithful to you) there is no issue. Even in the magnificently difficult epic “Le visage nuptial,” the end, with its religious echo of salvation and presentation: “voici, voici”—which, alas, feels very male-oriented to me, and here the hero is standing once more—poses no problem to the translator for that reason:
Voici le sable mort, voici le corps sauvé:
La Femme respire, L’Homme se tient debout.
(This is the sand dead, this the body saved:
Woman breathes, Man stands upright.)
So for this poem, this rightness. But in the super-erotic center of the poem lies a specific detail:
Prends, ma Pensée, la fleur de ma main pénétrable,
Sens s’éveiller l’obscure plantation.
(Take, oh my Thought, the flower of my penetrable hand, Feel the dark planting waken.)
The poet asked if the translator knew for whom this was written (for the then wife of Tristan Tzara, Greta Knudsen, who was a Scandinavian blonde) and then smiled his explanation: poetic license.
Furthermore, both poets had a firm belief in a kind of mystery. Breton would insist on not sharing the most profound of surrealist beliefs with just anyone, not scattering them at random: “Ne distribuez point le pain maudit aux oiseaux” (Don’t distribute the pain maudit to the birds)—in which case, of course, the maudit or “damned” is the equivalent of “blessed.” Yes, the manifestos—the first one, certainly—advocated the glories of automatic writing, which would unleash the too-rational of what has been already thought (the dreaded déja pensé) because it is expected and is not the glorious unexpected for which the surrealist was always, is always, waiting: the not-yet-thought. But the second manifesto is already speaking to the initiated, from whose circle those found wanting are banished, by the word of the leader, always Breton. Along the same lines, it is crucial not to “unfold the heart of the rose,” Char would say, and, moreover: “We wish to remain unknown to the curiosity of those who love us. We love them.” Or then, “Free birds do not let anyone look at them. Let’s remain obscure, let’s renounce ourselves, near them.”
One of the heights of surrealist writing and thought is surely André Breton’s Le surréalisme et la peinture, with its variegated essays on the widely differing artists he contemplates. Char’s writings on art and on other writers demonstrate his closeness to certain creators, from the classics to the contemporary, each meaningful to him for particular reasons: Heraclitus among philosophers for his aphoristic style; Rimbaud among poets for his youthful energy and impassioned illuminations, in all the sense of the word; Van Gogh among painters for his love of Char’s own region in Provence (Les voisinages de Van Gogh [The Neighborhoods of Van Gogh], 1985); and Georges de La Tour for his Prisoner, a reproduction of which he kept by him th
roughout the Resistance, and for his Magdalen, whom the poet celebrates repeatedly, in prose and in poetry. Her vigil-lamp lights much of his writing, and the impossibility of any solution speaks, like any great poetry, more than it spells out. Char, a pagan, calls her Madeleine, he insists, for she is a young girl and not a statue, not a religious icon like the Magdalen, and his “Madeleine with the Vigil-Lamp, by Georges de La Tour” moves toward her, the girl with her hand on the skull, whom he addresses directly:
Je voudrais aujourd’hui que l’herbe fût blanche pour fouler l’évidence de vous voir souffrir: je ne regarderais pas sous votre main si jeune la forme dure, sans crépi de la mort. Un jour discrétionnaire, d’autres pourtant moins avides que moi, retireront votre chemise de toile, occuperont votre alcôve. Mais ils oublieront en partant de noyer la veilleuse et un peu d’huile se répandra par le poignard de la flamme sur l’impossible solution.
(I would wish today that the grass were white to trample the visible signs of your suffering: I’d not look under your hand, so young, at death’s hard form without rough-cast. One discretionary day, others, though less avid than I, will remove your rough linen blouse, will occupy your alcove. But they will forget to extinguish the lamp in their departing and a little oil will spill out by the dagger of the flame onto the impossible solution.)
Now the painters he celebrates: Braque, Vieira da Silva, and Nicolas de Stael were all close to him, and he worked with each of them in close collaboration. Composed during his sleepless nights of 1972, La nuit talismanique reminds us of the hours in which he painted small and larger pebbles, some of which he gave as talismans—and many of which indicate the kind of flame or vigil light just seen—to celebrate the moment when a family becomes pays, that is, part of the countryside. The whole idea of gift is crucial to the sense of the poetic. As for the nakedness of “Le nu perdu,” it reminds us of the bare heights of the windy Mont Ventoux and how everything is lost there except, perhaps, the essential that matters, even in its nudity. Recherche de la base et du sommet (Search for the Base and the Summit, 1955) expresses in its title the importance of the dynamic climb of Char’s poetry at its foundation and height, in its own region, its lofty vision destined to spread outward.
These two poets, each of whom has had an immense influence on contemporary thinking and writing, take us, in a monumental climb, to the summit of which Char’s title speaks. We are there with them, a stance they would permit.
NOTE
1. It was for this reason that the translation of this essential poem was removed from the Norton Anthology of Poetry, since it could not be changed without making a whole new edition. Too bad, but “my woman” is worse by far than the omission.
WORKS CITED AND RECOMMENDED FURTHER READING
The major work to be consulted for André Breton is Oeuvres complètes, ed. Marguerite Bonnet, Philippe Bernier, Etienne-Alain Hubert, José Pierre, and Marie-Claire Dumas, 4 vols., Collection Pléiade (Paris: Gallimard, 1988–2088). For a good biography, see Mark Polizzotti, Revolution of the Mind: André Breton (Boston: Black Widow Books, 2009). The English translations of the principal works discussed here are Nadja, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Grove/Atlantic, 1994); Mad Love, trans. Mary Ann Caws (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1988); Communicating Vessels, trans. Mary Ann Caws and Geoffrey T. Harris (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997); and Surrealism and Painting, ed. Mark Polizzotti (Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, 2002). For the translations of poems, there are many; those used here are very often from the Poems of André Breton, trans. and ed. Jean-Pierre Cauvin and Mary Ann Caws (Boston: Black Widow Books, 2006).
For information on René Char and his texts, see René Char: Oeuvres complètes, introd. Jean Roudaut, Collection Pléiade (Paris: Gallimard, 1983; new ed., 2013). For biographies in French, see Jean-Claude Mathieu, La poésie de René Char, ou, Le sel de la splendeur [The salt of splendor], vol. 1: Traversée du surréalisme [Crossing of surrealism]; vol. 2: Poésie et résistance [Poetry and resistance] (Paris: José Corti, 1984); and Laurent Greilshamer, L’éclair au front: La vie de René Char [Lightning on his forehead] (Paris: Fayard, 2004). For critical works in English, see Nancy Piore, Lightning: The Poetry of René Char (Evanston, IL: Northeastern University Press, 1981); and Mary Ann Caws, The Presence of René Char (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976.) For translations, see Selected Poems of René Char, ed. Mary Ann Caws and Tina Jolas (New York: New Directions, 1992); The Brittle Age and Returning Upland, trans. Gustav Sobin (Denver: Counterpath Press, 2009); Furor and Mystery and Other Writings by René Char, ed. and trans. Mary Ann Caws and Nancy Kline, with an essay by Marie-Claude Char and an introduction by Sandra Bermann (Boston: Black Widow Books, 2010).
Césaire
Poetry and Politics
MARY GALLAGHER
Aimé Césaire, a writer and statesman, was born in Martinique in June 1913 and died there in April 2008. He is best known as the author of the epic poem Cahier d’un retour au pays natal (Notebook of a Return to the Native Land) and as the creator—or at least co-creator—of the influential anticolonialist concept of négritude, to which Césaire gave a more political inflection than the cultural one perhaps more associated with the thinking of the Senegalese poet Léopold Sédar Senghor. Certainly, the value of this revolutionary slogan was subsequently decried. The Nigerian novelist Wole Soyinka, for example, dismissed it as a pious abstraction, declaring that a “tiger does not declare its tigritude,” but rather springs and pounces. In the French Caribbean islands (Martinique and Guadeloupe), the battle cry of negritude was gradually replaced by less universal slogans, more culturally than racially tinged: antillanité (Caribbeanness) or créolité (Creoleness), for example.
Yet, whether it was crafted in the fiery vividness of his poetry or in the ice-clear trenchancy of his dramatic prose, Césaire’s literary exposure of colonialism and of the racism on which imperial expansion and plunder were founded counter any simplistic dismissal of negritude. In his “Discours sur la négritude” (“Discourse on Negritude”) delivered at a conference in Miami in 1987, Césaire admitted to not being enamored of his brainchild mantra every day of his life. More than fifty years after its launch, however, he still regarded it as necessary and valid, as addressing an undeniably real problematic.
Césaire’s entire oeuvre could be read as a defense and illustration of negritude, not as a biological or metaphysical postulation, but rather as a historical reality. His writing only makes sense as an impassioned engagement with, as he puts it in the “Discours sur la négritude,” “one historical shape taken by the human condition.”1 It never deviates from the fundamentally political articulation, reen-dorsed five decades following its first affirmation, of negritude as the voicing of “community based on a common experience of oppression.” In other words, Césaire was concerned to skewer from the start the intertwined power of racism and colonialism, which diminished, violated, and even obliterated the humanity of all those whom they contaminated. The Cahier in particular set off an anticolonialist charge that anticipated the general global detonation of decolonization in the 1950s and 1960s, and the rest of Césaire’s work charted the enduring colonialist fallout (that is, postcolonialism), as witnessed by the endless challenge of real decolonization.
The importance of Aimé Césaire’s work goes far beyond the two achievements for which he is best known: the resonance of the landmark epic and the reach of a rallying cry that aimed to mobilize the oppressed of Africa and especially of its involuntary diaspora. For Césaire’s literary oeuvre steadily blossomed through the trente glorieuses, as the three postwar decades are termed in France, before coming to a near standstill in the early 1970s (with the exceptional flashes of two poetry collections published in 1976 and 1982). As a result of those three highly productive decades, his literary legacy includes not just six major poetry collections, but also four plays and several prose essays and discourses. Césaire’s poetry has often been linked to the surrealist revolution; in a much more genera
l sense, however, all of his writing must be seen as fundamentally disjunctive, both politically and in its literary and cultural positioning. His work is part of a movement of decolonization that is at once political, cultural, and literary.
In addition to writing poetry, drama, and essays, Césaire also involved himself in three major collaborative literary ventures. In Paris in 1934, he set up the journal L’Etudiant Noir (The Black Student) along with his near compatriot and fellow-poet, Léon-Gontran Damas from Guyana, and another expatriate student, the future Senegalese statesman-poet, Senghor. It was in this short-lived student review that Césaire used the term négritude for the first time. His input into collaborative critique continued in 1939, upon his return to Martinique from Vichy France. Back in “the native land,” he co-founded in 1941, along with several compatriot authors, the highly influential critical journal Tropiques, which was published right through the war years when Martinique was effectively blockaded under the collaborationist rule of Admiral Robert. The journal ceased publication, however, in 1945, the year when Césaire’s destiny definitively changed direction. Two years later in Paris, he would once again be involved, with Alioune Diop, Paul Niger, and others, in the founding of another publication, Présence Africaine. This review is still flourishing, as is the prolific publishing house into which it blossomed as a space of nurture for African and African-related expression in French, based in the Latin Quarter of Paris, but with African outreach. As this cultural leadership shows, Césaire from the outset played the role of public intellectual in collaborative literary and critical activism as well as through his own poetics. Writing and publication were not destined, however, to be his sole contribution to public life.
A History of Modern French Literature Page 69