The Penguin Book of French Poetry
Page 51
Le ciel plus lisse que ton oeil
Le cou tordu d’orgueil
Ma vie dans la coulisse
D’où je vois onduler les moissons de la mort
Toutes ces mains avides qui pétrissent des boules de fumée
Plus lourdes que les piliers de l’univers
Têtes vides
Cœurs nus
Mains parfumées
Live Flesh
Rise up carcass and walk Nothing new under the yellow sun The last of the last of the gold pieces The light flaking away under the membranes of time The lock on the bursting heart A silken thread A leaden wire A trickle of blood After these waves of silence these signs of black-maned love The sky smoother than your eye The neck twisted with pride My life in the wings From where I see the harvests of death undulate All those avid hands kneading balls of smoke Heavier than the pillars of the universe Empty heads Naked hearts Perfumed
Tentacules des singes qui visent les nuées
Dans les rides de ces grimaces
Une ligne droite se tend
Un nerf se tord
La mer repue
L’amour
L’amer sourire de la mort
hands Monkey tentacles aiming at the clouds In the wrinkles of these grimaces A straight line stretches taut A nerve twists The sated sea Love The bitter smile of death
Catherine Pozzi
(1882–1934)
Catherine Pozzi is distinguished from Anna de Noailles and other early twentieth-century women poets by her concision and intellectual control; and her small but excellent output of verse has a classical quality. A highly intelligent and cultivated woman with a strong interest in science and theology as well as literature, she shared the refined artistic spirit of Mallarmé and Valéry. She made use of the decasyllabic line, like Valéry in ‘Le Cimetière marin’, to achieve a similar harmony of feeling and intellect.
Her collected Poèmes were published posthumously in 1935. In spite of prolonged illness, she had also been able to translate works by Stefan George into French, and to devote time to her friendships with Rilke, Valéry, Heredia, Jouve and Benda.
It was Benda who saw in her work a ‘linear perfection’, and who said of Catherine Pozzi herself: ‘In the earthly realm, she seemed already to be outside time and beyond the perishability of life.’
Ave
Trés haut amour, s’il se peut que je meure
Sans avoir su d’où je vous possédais,
En quel soleil était votre demeure,
En quel passé votre temps, en quelle heure
Je vous aimais,
Très haut amour qui passez la mémoire,
Feu sans foyer dont j’ai fait tout mon jour,
En quel destin vous traciez mon histoire.
En quel sommeil se voyait votre gloire,
O mon sèjour…
Quand je serai pour moi-même perdue
Et divisée à l’abîme infini,
Infiniment, quand je serai rompue,
Quand le présent dont je suis revêtue
Aura trahi,
Ave
Most lofty love, if it be possible that I die without knowing whence I possessed you, within what sun was your abode, within what past your time, within what hour I loved you,
Most lofty love outliving memory, fire without hearth from which I composed all my daylight, within what destiny you inscribed my story, within what sleep your glory was manifest, O my dwelling-place…
When I am lost from my own sight and fragmented in the infinite abyss, infinitely, when I am broken, when the present that clothes me has committed its betrayal,
Par l’univers en mille corps brisée,
De mille instants non rassemblés encor,
De cendre aux cieux jusqu’au néant vannée,
Vous referez pour une étrange année
Un seul trésor
Vous referez mon nom et mon image
De mille corps emportés par le jour,
Vive unité sans nom et sans visage,
Coeur de l’esprit, O centre du mirage
Très haut amour.
Shattered into a thousand elements across the universe, from a thousand moments not yet conjoined, from ashes winnowed to the skies until nothingness, for a strange year you will re-create a single treasure
You will re-create my name and my image from a thousand elements swept away by the daylight, a living unity without name and without face, heart of the spirit, O centre of the mirage Most lofty love.
Nyx
A Louise aussi de Lyon et d’Italie
O vous mes nuits, ô noires attendues
O pays fier, ô secrets obstinés
O longs regards, ô foudroyantes nues
O vol permis outre les cieux fermés.
O grand désir, ô surprise épandue
O beau parcours de l’esprit enchanté
O pire mal, ô grâce descendue
O porte ouverte où nul n’avait passé
Je ne sais pas pourquoi je meurs et noie
Avant d’entrer à l’éternel séjour.
Je ne sais pas de qui je suis la proie.
Je ne sais pas de qui je suis l’amour.
Nyx
For Louise, also of Lyon and Italy
O you my nights, O anticipated blacknesses O proud land, O stubborn mysteries O prolonged gazes, O clouds striking thunder O flight granted beyond the sealed skies.
O great longing, O surprise spread wide O beautiful journey of the enthralled spirit O worst of sufferings, O grace descended O open door where none had entered
I know not why I die and drown Before I enter the eternal abode. I know not whose prey I am. I know not whose love I am.
Scopolamine
Le vin qui coule dans ma veine
A noyé mon coeur et l’entraîne
Et je naviguerai le ciel
A bord d’un coeur sans capitaine
Ou l’oubli fond comme du miel.
Mon coeur est un astre apparu
Qui nage au divin nonpareil
Dérive, étrange devenu!
O voyage vers le Soleil–
Un son nouvel et continu
Mon cœur a quitté mon histoire
Adieu Forme je ne sens plus
Je suis sauvé je suis perdu
Je me cherche dans l’inconnu
Un nom libre de la mémoire.
Scopolamine1
The wine that flows in my veins has drowned my heart and carries it away And I will sail the sky aboard a heart with no captain where oblivion melts like honey.
My heart is a newly manifest star that swims in the peerless sublime Drift on, strange metamorphosis! A new and perpetual sound is the web of your slumber.
My heart has relinquished my story Farewell Form I have no more feeling I am saved I am lost I seek for myself in the unknown a name free from memory.
Jules Supervielle
(1884–1960)
Supervielle’s family had its origins in the Basque country, but he was born in Montevideo. Orphaned as a baby, he was brought up by relatives in Uruguay, then sent to school in France. His memory is filled with sea-crossings and with images from the South American landscape. Ocean, pampas and sky are mythologized in Débarcadéres and Gravitations into dream-worlds.
On the margins of Surrealism but pursuing an independent course, Supervielle is a ‘natural’ poet, enjoying a lively Franciscan dialogue with the animal, vegetable and mineral world. Writing quite spontaneously in deceptively simple, free and metrical forms of great musicality, he blends in an unproblematic way the abstract and the concrete, the past and the present, cosmic and commonplace perceptions, in a lyrical and humorous amplification of reality. His penchant for the fable (in prose and drama as well as verse) leads him to a volume of creation myths, La Fable du Monde, in which his kinship with all living things is expressed poignantly through his identification with a hesitant, vulnerable God.
The heartbeat has a primary importance in his work
too. Supervielle suffered from cardiac problems, and was unusually aware of the fundamental pulse of life. Fearful of death, yet also with a calm and intimate curiosity that almost welcomes it, he is drawn in his awareness of inner space towards the idea of an absorption into nothingness and an eventual rebirth. A particularly strong recurring image is that of the drowned man who is not dead but has become a participant in an underwater dream-world of the unconscious. Supervielle always seems to exist on the frontier between life and death, body and soul, reality and dream, yet there is a lightness of touch and a humour that save his poetry from becoming too weighty.
The image of the drowned man typifies his attachment to the pictorial; thought for him always takes on a concrete shape. Memory, for example, is frequently represented as a ship’s wake. There is no delirium in his imaginative universe, and his confidence in his ability to communicate a metaphysical truth through simple language has been rewarded by the popularity of his work. That popularity was enhanced by his Second World War poetry, in which the pain and bewilderment of exile is powerfully counterbalanced by hope and the spirit of resistance.
Major volumes: Dèbarcadères 1922, Gravitations 1925, Le Forçat innocent 1930, Les Amis inconnus 1934, La Fable du Monde 1938, Poèmes 1939–45 (published 1947), Oublieuse Mémoire 1949, Naissances 1951, L’Escalier 1956, Le Corps tragique 1959.
Montévidéo
Je naissais, et par la fenêtre
Passait une fraîche calèche.
Le cocher réveillait l’aurore
D’un petit coup de fouet sonore.
Flottait un archipel nocturne
Encor sur le liquide jour.
Les murs s’éveillaient et le sable
Qui dort écrasé dans les murs.
Un peu de mon âme glissait
Sur un rail bleu, à contre-ciel,
Et un autre peu, se mêlant
A un bout de papier volant
Puis, trébuchant sur une pierre,
Gardait sa ferveur prisonnière.
Montevideo
I was being born, and through the window there came a bright new barouche.
The coachman was rousing the dawn with a ringing little whipcrack.
An archipelago of night floated still over the liquid daylight.
The walls were awakening and the sand that sleeps compressed within the walls.
A fragment of my soul was gliding on a blue rail against the background of the sky,
And another fragment mingling with a flying scrap of paper
Then, stumbling on a stone, kept its fervour captive.
Le matin comptait ses oiseaux
Et toujours il recommençait
Le parfum de l’eucalyptus
Se fiait à l’air étendu.
Dans l’Uruguay sur l’Atlantique,
L’air était si liant, facile,
Que les couleurs de l’horizon
S’approchaient pour voir les maisons.
C’était moi qui naissais jusqu’au fond sourd des bois
Où tardent à venir les pousses
Et jusque sous la mer où l’algue se retrousse
Pour faire croire au vent qu’il peut descendre là.
La Terre allait, toujours recommençant sa ronde,
Reconnaissant les siens avec son atmosphère,
Et palpant sur la vague ou l’eau douce profonde
La tête des nageurs et les pieds des plongeurs.
The morning was counting its birds and kept on starting again.
The scent of the eucalyptus was entrusting itself to the outstretched air.
In Uruguay on the Atlantic the air was so engaging, so easy-going, that the horizon’s colours were coming closer to see the houses.
It was I who was being born down into the blanketed depths of the woods where the shoots are slow in coming and down beneath the sea where the seaweed curls upward to make the wind believe it can penetrate down there.
The Earth was moving on, for ever beginning its round once more, identifying its own with its atmosphere, and feeling upon the wave or the gentle deep water the heads of the swimmers and the feet of the divers.
Haute mer
Parmi les oiseaux et les lunes
Qui hantent le dessous des mers
Et qu’on devine à la surface
Aux folles phases de l’écume,
Parmi l’aveugle témoignage
Et les sillages sous-marins
De mille poissons sans visage
Qui cachent en eux leur chemin,
Le noyé cherche la chanson
Où s’était formé son jeune âge,
Ecoute en vain les coquillages
Et les fait choir au sombre fond.
High Seas
Among the birds and moons that haunt the underside of the seas, their presence sensed on the surface in the lunatic phases of the foam,
Among the blind testimony and the underwater wakes of a thousand faceless fish that hide their course within themselves,
The drowned man seeks the song in which his youth took shape, listens in vain to the shells and lets them sink to the dark ocean bed.
Dans la forêt sans heures
Dans la forêt sans heures
On abat un grand arbre.
Un vide vertical
Tremble en forme de fÛt
Près du tronc étendu.
Cherchez, cherchez, oiseaux,
La place de vos nids
Dans ce haut souvenir
Tant qu’il murmure encore.
In the timeless forest
In the timeless forest a tall tree is felled. An upright void vibrates in the form of a bole near the outstretched trunk.
Seek, seek, birds, the site of your nests in this tall memory while it murmurs still.
Les Poissons
Mémoire des poissons dans les criques profondes,
Que puis-je faire ici de vos lents souvenirs,
Je ne sais rien de vous qu’un peu d’écume et d’ombre
Et qu’un jour, comme moi, il vous faudra mourir.
The Fish
Memory of fish in the deep-water coves, what can I do here with your slow-moving recollections, I know no more of you than a hint of foam and shadow and that one day, like me, you will have to die.
Alors que venez-vous interroger mes rêves
Comme si je pouvais vous être de secours?
Avez en mer, laissez-moi sur ma terre sèche,
Nous ne sommes pas faits pour mélanger nos jours.
Why then do you come and gaze questioningly into my dreams as if I could be of help to you? Go away to the sea, leave me on my dry land, we are not made to mingle our days.
Tristesse de Dieu
(Dieu parle)
Je vous vois aller et venir sur le tremblement de la Terre
Comme aux premiers jours du monde, mais grande est la différence,
Mon oeuvre n’est plus en moi, je vous l’ai toute donnée.
Hommes, mes bien-aimés, je ne puis rien dans vos malheurs,
Je n’ai pu que vous donner votre courage et les larmes,
C’est la preuve chaleureuse de l’existence de Dieu.
L’humidité de votre âme c’est ce qui vous reste de moi.
Je n’ai rien pu faire d’autre.
Je ne puis rien pour la mère dont va s’éteindre le fils
Sinon vous faire allumer, chandelles de l’espérance.
God’s Sadness
(God speaks)
I see you coming and going upon the trembling of the Earth as in the world’s first days, but great is the difference, my work is no longer within me, I have given it entirely to you. Men, my beloved, I am powerless in your misfortunes, I could give you only tears and your courage, which are the warm evidence of God’s existence. The moisture in your soul is what you have left of me. I could do no more. I can do nothing for the mother whose son is going to die except to give light to you, candles of hope. If it were not so, would you know, you undefended little beds, the p
aralysis of children. I am cut off from my work, what is finished is far away and goes further still each day. When the brook runs down from the mountain can there be any going back? I can no more speak to you than a potter can speak to his pot, of the two one is deaf, the other dumb before his handiwork and I see you advancing towards blinding precipices and cannot even identify them for you, and I cannot hint to you how you should set about them, you must get yourselves out of trouble alone like orphans in the snow. And I tell myself each day beyond a vast silence: ‘There’s another doing all wrong what he could do right, another stumbling by not looking where he should. And here’s another leaning much too far over his balcony, forgetting gravity, and that one who hasn’t checked his engine, farewell aeroplane, farewell man!’ I can do no more for you, alas, if I repeat myself it is through enduring it. I am a memory descending, you are living in a memory, the hope that climbs your hillsides, you are living in expectation. Shaken by the prayers and the blasphemies of men, I am everywhere at once and cannot show myself, without moving I move about and pass from heaven to heaven, I am the wanderer within myself and the inwardly teeming hermit, familiar with distances, I am very distant from myself, I stray deep within myself like a child in the woods, I call myself, I haul myself in and draw myself towards my centre. Man, if I created you it was to see it more clearly and to live in a body, I who have neither hands nor face. I want to thank you for doing earnestly all that will have only a brief time on the beloved earth, O my child, my precious one, O courage given by your God, my son, you have gone roaming the world in my place ahead of me in your so vulnerable body with its great poverty. Not a small parcel of skin where deep decay may not form. Each of you knows how to be a dead man without the need to learn, a perfect corpse that can be rolled and rolled again in all directions, in which no fault can be found. God outlives you, he alone survives in the midst of a great massacre of men, women and children, even alive, you are constantly dying a little, make your peace with life, with your trembling loves. You have a brain, fingers to fashion the world to your taste, you have talents to give life to reason and madness within your shell, you have all the animals that form Creation, you can run and swim like the dog and the fish, move forward like the tiger or the week-old lamb, you can bring death to yourself like the reindeer, the scorpion, yet I remain the invisible one, undiscoverable on the Earth, have pity on your God who could not make you happy, small fragments of myself, O throbbing sparks, I offer you only a furnace where you will find fire once again.