Collected French Translations: Prose

by Ashbery, John

  To celebrate the return of the prodigal son, the father gave a large reception a few days later to which Hebdomeros and his friends were invited. The garden of the villa was lit by Venetian lanterns hung on the trunks of the eucalyptuses, and in the veranda, from which all the plants and flowerpots had been cleared for the occasion, a buffet, devoid of idle sumptuousness, but where the guests could find an abundance of wholesome and appetizing delicacies, had been set up. The sky was still light in the west, for in this occidental country the summer days continued until very late and night was extremely slow in falling. High in the sky, little purple clouds, tinted a delicate pink on one side by the rays of the setting sun, were arranged in tiers; but the countryside all around the city began to be invaded by darkness; the shapes of trees grew dark and the whiteness of the houses faded more and more; from far off one heard the sound of a train, moving away somewhere, toward the north. Soon the clocks of the town hall struck nine; the first guests began to arrive. Hebdomeros arrived too, surrounded by his friends, but contrary to what he had hoped and wished, his arrival and presence were not particularly noticed. Out of respect for the mental suffering of the master of the house, suffering which the recent return of his son had certainly palliated but had unfortunately not suppressed, the guests abstained from dancing. Having foreseen this delicate consideration on their part, and in order to divert them, the elder Lecourt had had the idea of setting up a little stage in the main salon of the villa, in front of which were placed several rows of chairs rented from a nearby café. On this stage, amateur actors performed short comedies which were warmly applauded. The elder Lecourt, with his daughter Clotilde on his left and his son Thomas on his right, was sitting in the first row and it was he who always gave the signal for the applause. Everything went perfectly; a delightful cordiality and charming simplicity reigned over the party despite several couples who tried to act smart by moving slowly out toward the shadows of the park, in a silence pregnant with reveries. One would have sworn that this agreeable evening would end as calmly as it began, when a most unfortunate incident occurred; two actors who were performing in the third and last comedy were the cause; in this one-act comedy the scene was a school classroom; while the schoolmaster was lecturing the pupils played all kinds of pranks on him; but one schoolboy in particular proved especially mischievous, and his specialty was pinning the figure of a buffoon cut from a page of notepaper on the schoolmaster’s frock coat whenever the latter turned away from the class to write on the blackboard. The actor playing the role of the schoolmaster was a short man of about fifty with a little gray turned-up mustache. He had a particularly irascible and touchy character; he was an old acquaintance of the master of the house; it was said of him that he had been for a time consul in the Orient and that he was very fond of snipe-hunting. At the moment when the actor playing the role of the scapegrace was pinning for the tenth time the buffoon on the tail of his frock coat, he turned suddenly around and no doubt finding that the other put too much zeal in the operation, said sharply to him: “Sir, in my opinion you go too far.” To which the other replied in no less vexed tones: “And you, sir, are forgetting that we are actors here, on a stage, and that what we are performing is only a fiction; besides, having had the honor of knowing you for some time, I am convinced that you have no sense of humor.” This retort, actually quite a reasonable one, was the last straw for the ex-consul; losing all self-control he stepped forward and slapped his interlocutor in the face. The other actors, joined by the spectators who had hastily climbed onto the stage, immediately intervened, but nothing less than the venerable presence of the master of the house, supported by the shoulders of his children, was necessary in order to calm these overexcited tempers. The comedy was called off. The spectators, deeply perturbed, moved toward the buffet, commenting vehemently on this disagreeable episode, while the ex-consul’s wife, leading her husband, still pale with fury, toward the eucalyptuses of the park, said in a voice loud enough for all to hear: “I am proud to have a husband like that!”

  The evening was coming to an end; the last guests, and Hebdomeros with them, paid their respects to the master of the house and his children and left the villa, whose park was already plunged in darkness. Outside, the sky offered an unforgettable spectacle: The constellations were laid out so perfectly that they formed real figures drawn with dotted lines, as in illustrated dictionaries. Hebdomeros, delighted, stopped and began to point them out, which was in fact quite simple for him since they were easily recognizable and someone completely void of astronomical learning would have recognized them without difficulty. One could see the Twins, leaning on each other in a classic pose of tranquility; one could see the Great Bear, obese and touching, dragging his pelt against the darkness of the profound ether; farther on the Fish were slowly revolving, always at the same distance from each other, as though attached to the same axis; and Orion, solitary Orion was moving off into the depths of the sky, his club on his shoulder, followed by his faithful Dog. The Virgin with her precise and opulent curves was reclining on a cloud, gracefully turning her head so as to look down at the world, still asleep in the last hours of night which was drawing to a close; farther on to the left was the Scales, the Scales with its pans empty and motionless in their perfect horizontality; there was something there for everyone and even for the most exaggerated requirements. No one felt like going home. Hebdomeros, who felt all emotions more violently than the others and was always ready to go into raptures about something, neglecting all self-control, proposed then and there that they settle down at a table in a little café that stayed open until morning because workmen and engineers repairing the railroad came there to refresh themselves and rest.

  Down in the port the fishing boats were casting their moorings; a sound of cars came from the highway and lights began to appear at the windows of the houses; one felt that day was not far off; life was slowly waking up all around. Fresh gusts from the sea passed through the air like a mute call; in the east, the sky was growing lighter. “Insomnia,” thought Hebdomeros, and his back felt a little cold, for he knew what that meant … He knew them well, those mornings after wakeful nights, those mornings after summer nights peopled with the great sculpture of antiquity and during which famous temples, vanished centuries ago, profile their profound lines against the ridge of the dark mountains; he knew them well, those hot days that follow nights of great visions, and the sun as relentless as the obstinate song of the sacred and invisible cicadas, and the impossible coolness sought at noon at the edge of a muddy river.

  “But in that case,” thought Hebdomeros, “what is the meaning of that dream of combat on the seashore, those dugout canoes pulled up on the beach and those trenches hastily dug in the sand, and over there behind the trenches, tiny hospitals, the trim little hospitals where even the zebras, yes, the poor injured zebras, are cared for with skill and tenderness, and go away bandaged, bound up, stitched up, patched up, disinfected, put into shape again, in a word made good as new! Could it be that life was only an immense lie? Could it be that it was only the shadow of a fleeting dream? Could it be that it was only the echo of the mysterious blows struck against the flank of the rocky mountain whose opposite slope had apparently never been seen by anyone and at whose summit one could perceive during the day dark masses with irregular profiles which were no doubt forests, but from which, at night, came stifled sighs and groans as though a chained giant were suffering without hope up there under the great sky quivering with stars?” Thus spoke Hebdomeros to himself while yet again night fell on the metropolis. People passed him, regularly, continually, as though riveted to a chain moved by perpetual motion. These people looked at him without seeing him and saw him without looking at him; they all had the same face; sometimes a few would detach themselves from their invisible chain to stop in front of the jewelers’ blinding shop windows. Cameo, Luxus, Irradio were the sonorous names of the diamonds henceforth renowned which formerly had ornamented the crowns of monarchs assassinated on moon
light nights in palaces hidden in the depths of dark parks. Now these inestimable stones darted in all directions their iridescent sparkles and miniature aurora borealises; on little pedestals made of a cube covered with red velvet they gleamed in the center of the window, as in the depths of the sky on a tranquil summer night gleams the star which through the centuries has seen wars, cataclysms, and scourges sweep down upon the world and destroy what men have built. Sometimes a precise, rapacious hand, like the razor-sharp claw of the full-grown vulture, would slip through the heavy draperies which served as the backcloth of this obscene, brilliantly lighted little theater where luxury, hypocritically masking lust, shamelessly flaunted its maleficent flares. And then revolts would arise as storms arise in the sultry sky of a summer day. Fierce, resolute men, led by a kind of colossus with the beard of a god of antiquity, hurled enormous beams snatched from construction yards at the armored doors of the luxury hotels. The most prudent had already fled; others had fallen at the first blows and it was precisely the ones who had never wanted to believe in the revolt and who had claimed that all those rumors that were circulating were utterly groundless, that they had been started by grasping bankers to provoke a drop in the stock market, so as to be able to speculate afterward on the rise which would follow the denial of these alarming reports. They were the same persons who always ended their optimistic speeches with phrases like: Our people have too much good sense … etc., etc.

  Art and Literature 4 (Spring 1965).

  THAT EVENING MONSIEUR DUDRON …

  That evening, M. Dudron returned home feeling a bit tired, since he had run several errands in the center of the city and seen some people; also the weather was oppressive and charged with electricity; gusts of wind swept the streets and M. Dudron remembered the malicious mirth of passersby confronted with the spectacle of uncoiffed women madly pursuing their hats which a powerful blast from Aeolus had snatched from their heads and pushed ever farther on the sidewalk and sometimes even into the middle of the street, where the vehicular traffic was most intense, which complicated the misadventure and made it even slightly dangerous and almost dramatic. He remembered too the soiled papers and the newspapers carried away and floating upward as high as the fifth story. But what wearied him most was the people he had met; starting with the enthusiasts and the admirers; on the other hand, those in whose presence he felt mistrust, hostility, and ill-will tired him less, first of all because he curtailed the conversation as much as possible, and then also because he had long trained himself to be on guard against their attacks, to ward them off and skillfully give as good as he got. A canny psychologist, he guessed immediately the reason and the first cause of their hostility, and with a flick of the tongue, so to speak, was able to turn the tables on them by revealing what he had guessed; generally speaking, men don’t like that, and those armed with malice are particularly afraid of being judged. But what fatigued him most was his admirers, for there he felt himself totally disarmed. The flattery they dispensed moved him not at all, for he knew that it in no way corresponded to the intrinsic value of his work. All those enthusiastic cries ended up not only boring him profoundly but also irritating him. Certain questions put him beside himself, for instance: “But wherever did you get the idea of painting horses?” Another thing which caused him profound horror was when they spoke of dreams and mystery regarding his pictures. “You paint the sky of dreams!…” M. Dudron knew perfectly well that the sky of dreams doesn’t exist; he had never dreamed of skies either in his sleep or in daydreams. He studied the sky as it was in nature, his eyes wide open, observing the real sky and also the skies in the paintings of the old masters, and trained himself to remember the different aspects the celestial vault assumes according to the times of day, the seasons, and atmospheric conditions. But all was useless; M. Dudron understood that his friends and admirers enjoyed expressing themselves in that way and that the wisest course was to let them, all the more since each time he had tried to explain to them the true state of things, he had noticed on their faces such an expression of disappointment, of discouraged hope, that his enormous sensitivity prevented him from proceeding further. So it was that M. Dudron returned home somewhat weary that evening; he undressed and went to bed after inspecting carefully to see that the indispensable chamber pot was in its niche in the night table and that those objects he was accustomed to see within his reach when he prepared himself to leave on a voyage to the mysterious kingdom of Morpheus were laid out on the night table, to wit: a glass of water, a pillbox containing remedies for a possible headache or toothache; a fountain pen duly filled with ink; two pencils, one soft, the other harder, a rubber eraser, a notebook for sketches, writing paper, a book or a newspaper, his carefully wound-up watch, his tobacco pouch filled with his favorite mixture, his pipe, an ashtray, a box of wooden matches, and a penknife. He also habitually placed beside his bed, so as to be able to examine it closely, the painting or drawing on which he was working at the moment. That evening M. Dudron placed on the floor, leaning it against an armoire, a canvas which he had roughed out the night before; even though it was scarcely begun, one could already distinguish a figure with a severe profile, draped in a long cloak, a fold of which encircled his neck; he was astride a little black horse, lean and nervous, whose very lively eye glowed red in the shadows like a live coal; around the horseman and his steed unfolded an alpine landscape of tragic cliffs and profound ravines; M. Dudron had already baptized his painting: Hannibal. He contemplated it, all the while smoking his pipe and thinking of the work that still remained to be done. At the same time that name, Hannibal, came back to him. Hannibal, that was the name of a young barber who worked in a shop where M. Dudron customarily went once a month to have his hair cut. M. Dudron had trained Hannibal to cut his hair according to his wishes and not according to the barber’s whim; he wanted his hair cut very short on the nape; in front and on the sides, he wanted it merely trimmed. Above all he had trained Hannibal not to make at the end of the session the fatal suggestion of a scalp massage, a suggestion which terrified him. M. Dudron was in the habit of going to the barber on Tuesdays, immediately after lunch, since he knew that at that time the shop was almost empty of customers; as he entered, the lads would be dozing in their chairs, and, on catching sight of him, the one named Hannibal would get up and invite M. Dudron to sit down in the barber’s chair. This scene, which was repeated regularly every month, reminded M. Dudron of another, almost the equivalent of it. It was when he went to a certain brothel that he was also in the habit of visiting at such and such a day and hour which he knew to be particularly favorable for not running into other clients. There too, on his arrival, the pensioners were yawning, standing or stretched out on divans, or quietly knitting in a corner; upon his arrival, the one with whom M. Dudron was accustomed to go upstairs would stand up and, without a word, wearily precede M. Dudron on the stairway which led to the floor above. The similarity between the two scenes had finally produced a strange feeling in M. Dudron’s sensitive soul, and when he entered the barber’s shop he felt disturbed; he had the impression that Hannibal might have begun wearily to climb the stairs to the floor above and that he, M. Dudron, might be following him—Hannibal! The fog of sleep arose in M. Dudron’s mind. It grew as thick as that produced by the smoke from his pipe, which now extended its floating veils around his bed…; and now, slowly through this fog with its strong scent of tobacco, a scene loomed slowly and then grew distinct against the shadowy backdrop of the bedroom. An alpine landscape…; a long caterpillar of men and quadrupeds unfurled and crawled painfully up the steep paths. The men had piled their arms and gear and also the wounded on the backs of their steeds, which bent under the weight. One heard cries, commands, the icy wind whistling through the branches of pine trees, sounds of waterfalls, prolonged whinnying of the horses; rocks detached themselves and rolled down the slopes as the marching horde passed by, bouncing and knocking against the tree trunks whose bark, rotted by the damp, displayed a livid wound after the sho
ck; while, now and again, awaking echoes in those wild and solitary sites, the long braying of elephants resounded in the darkened valleys. Doubled over in the teeth of the gale, a captain, a chief, rode alone at the head of the savage horde; sometimes he would stop to encourage those who were weary or whom fear had begun to overtake, sometimes too, he would draw to one side, urging his mount toward a retired spot where he found himself alone, and there he would gaze for a long time, interrogating them, one might say, at those high summits clad in snow, standing motionless and mysterious like unknown deities, above a frantic sea of vast white clouds…; and then a night fell, like a lowered curtain, on the background of M. Dudron’s bedroom; another night than that which weighed on the roof of his sleeping house. Bivouac fires tinted the darkness with large red spots. The chief had now lain down, surrounded by his harried staff. He listened to the thousand sounds, often inexplicable, of the mountain plunged in shadow. He listened to the continuous roar of torrents which, with the odor of dampness, issued from the bottom of those ravines one could no longer see; he listened also, with a vague disquiet, to the poignant singsong of the young mercenaries hastily recruited from the other side of the mountains, in those savage settlements of the Iberian Peninsula, whose plaintive chants rose, like an evil omen, into the great night.

  Hebdomeros: With Monsieur Dudron’s Adventure and Other Metaphysical Writings (Cambridge, Mass.: Exact Change, 1992).

  IT WAS SOMETHING LIKE …

  It was something like the fear of leaving on summer vacation, the fear of girls’ taunts and that of military service. So joy too might have been of a different quality: mingled with surprise, as for example, finding fish in an underground river, or else settling down, with one’s family, as a professor of drawing in a small town isolated among high mountains. M. Dudron had often thought fondly of this project, but his friends advised him against it, for, they said, it was a project unworthy of him … And yet he would have liked to settle in one of those little-known and seldom visited towns, which are like those small islands situated far from the routes taken by ships of the major navigation lines. He saw himself there, living in a house with many bedrooms and with terraces and verandas perched above torrents whose bed was littered with large stones and whose edges were ornamented with ferns. In the morning, he would get up early and take his café au lait on the veranda while looking out over the romantic landscape of the wooded, shadowy valley and the sinuous course of the streams; then he would go out and walk to school to give himself a bit of exercise. During his course in drawing he would survey the pupils and give them practical advice on how to draw a face by simplifying its planes and giving them geometrical forms, on measuring with the plumb line and wire that was straight and rigid and on modeling by making shadows using the technique of crosshatched parallel lines. He would circulate in the studio, going from student to student, among the plaster casts and lithographs representing Belisarius and Antinous, Alexander the Great and Cicero, as well as hands of men and women in all the positions; hands of warriors clasping swords or lances, hands of orators, making in front of invisible crowds the sign that accompanies and emphasizes speech, hands of mothers holding gently against their breast, in a gesture filled with tenderness, the large curly heads of their children, or hands of virgins lifting a veil with a movement of chaste gracefulness. When the clock struck noon, thus announcing the end of the class, M. Dudron, who ordinarily didn’t have lunch until one, would take his cane and hat and go for a stroll through the port; there he would interest himself in the departure and arrival of ships, in the life of those classic sailboats which seem eternally moored at the docks and in which entire families live soberly, drying their laundry in the sun and cooking their meals on the deck in the midst of coiled cables and buckets of tar, and the eternal mongrel dog with intelligent and docile eyes and short tail curled in a spiral. M. Dudron would also go and look at the mermaids who habitually emerge from the water at the stroke of noon, covered with seaweed, and hoist themselves with difficulty on the stone blocks of the pier under construction. There they stay for a long time, elbows resting on the cold, rough stone, with their chins in the palms of their hands, gazing with a nostalgic air at the town with its factory chimneys, its houses, its palaces, its white, straight streets, its squares surrounded by trees and ornamented at the center with a monument in stone or bronze depicting a hero, a politician, a poet, an artist, or a scientist; they listen, sad and dreamily, to the thousand sounds of that life in which they will never be able to share. And toward the most beautiful of the mermaids the thoughts of M. Dudron went and went again, ceaselessly. In a voice cracked with emotion, she told him of her son, that Alfred, whom she romantically called Alfredo, and whom she had left behind up there, toward the north, in that city as it were lost in the cold mists of Septentrion. M. Dudron knew that this Alfred had, though still very young, shown remarkable aptness at drawing and painting. “Besides,” M. Dudron said to himself, “it’s not for nothing that he’s the son of a mermaid; one peculiarity of the sons of mermaids is that they never run the risk of falling in love with a woman, for they are always in love with their mothers, and I remember very well having known the son of a mermaid once, a captain in the merchant marine, who, even at the age of sixty, had a mother who was still desirable. This captain attributed that to the effect of salt water, which preserves the fresh aspect of the flesh for a long time; he claimed that lake and river mermaids, and freshwater mermaids in general, stay young for a much shorter time. One of his colleagues to whom he had spoken about the virtues of salt water made his wife take saltwater baths every day, summer and winter, baths which his servant, a former sailor, went every day to draw in buckets from the harbor; but the captain, fearing that if it were taken near the quays it might, because of the sewers, be contaminated with typhoid fever bacteria, obliged the ex-sailor to go and draw the water at the far end of the pier, which was quite fatiguing, especially in hot weather, and provoked, on the part of the servant, complaints and protests and even threats of leaving the house.” To return to Alfred, the child was considered by many to be a child prodigy. M. Dudron was wary of child prodigies, but he thought that in Alfred’s case things might be different, that it was by no means a matter of one of those cases of violent precociousness which end like soap bubbles, but that the child was, quite simply, gifted. Having received a box of watercolors as a gift one Christmas, Alfred had painted on a page of one of his school notebooks a tiger’s head that was really impressive in its ferocity; this tiny masterpiece had excited the admiration of all who had seen it. Another time, Alfred had rescued an uncle of his, who had one Sunday invited him to lunch in a restaurant, from an embarrassing position. Alfred’s uncle had found himself in serious difficulties after unwise speculations on the stock exchange; nevertheless, generous and carefree as he was, he had invited his young nephew to a restaurant known throughout the city for its elevated prices. When at the end of a copious repast the waiter brought the bill, the uncle perceived with terror that the sum of the latter was higher than the amount of money he had on him. But Alfred, perspicacious, had guessed everything in the blink of an eye. He asked his uncle to give him a large stickpin in the shape of a riding crop that he wore on his shirtfront, then, using several matches, he blackened the reverse side of a plate and, with the point of the pin, drew on the blackened surface a horse’s head with dilated nostrils and flowing mane. He accomplished this with so much bravura and talent that the people having lunch drew closer to watch the little artist at work, and when he had finished and signed his handiwork they applauded him enthusiastically just as one applauds a tenor at the end of an aria. The restaurant owner hastened to carry away the plate with a delighted air, declaring himself most satisfied to be paid with such a handsome drawing.