by Various
1 Marius defeated the Teutons in 102 B.C. The field is near Pourrières.
2 The stone bench is at the entrance to the village bistrot, the Cercle Saint-Hubert.
1 A type of cigarette.
1 The ambiguity of ‘Ses Yeux’ (are they the eyes of a man or woman, a human being or God?) is of course impossible to translate.
1 Alternative translation: ‘How she weeps…’
1 ‘Gésine’: also a place for giving birth.
1 ‘Tempos’ may be suggested, or even ‘tenses’.
2 Reference to Os Lusiadas (1572), a long lyrical and epic poem by the Portuguese writer Luis de Camões.
1 Godown: a dockside warehouse, in India and the Far East.
2 Le roi Dagobert: one of the Merovingian dynasty of kings, rulers of Gaul from about A.D. 500 to 751.
1 ‘Déspoilé’, a very unusual past participate, suggests hilarity, but also has the archaic sense of ‘unbunged’, the removal of an obstruction.
2 ‘Le trèfle’ is also ‘Clubs’ in a pack of cards.
1 The emphasis here may be on abstinence, but mid-Lent is also associated with festivals, masquerades, a break from abstinence. The ambiguity is typically Laforguian.
1 A river in Lydia in which Midas was said to have washed away his golden touch.
1 ‘Pitch’, ‘key’ and ‘tune’ are alternative possibilities here.
1 Vae soli: ‘Woe to the lonely man.’
1 There is a later version of this poem, in which the emotional elements have been replaced by more objective description of the ‘huttes’. The resulting loss of poetic force leads me to prefer this original version.
1 ‘Volontaires’ has a double meaning: ‘willing’ as well as ‘wilful’.
1 These titles are given by Joseph Hanse to groups of poems in his 1965 edition of Maeterlinck’s Poésies complètes.
1 A beautiful Greek courtesan.
1 Toulet has Gallicized the word ‘copla’, which refers to a traditional Spanish verse-form.
1 The island where St John the Divine is said to have written the Book of Revelation.
2 The King of Salem and high priest who blessed Abraham.
1 rames: both oars and boughs.
1 ‘Amour’, in Valéry’s terminology, is an awakened, creative state of the intellect, and the poem’s eroticism is thus not its only level of meaning.
1 i.e. a condition of the soul, one of an infinity of experienced or potential conditions.
1 ‘My soul, do not strive for immortality, but make the most of what is practicable.’ (Pindar. Pythian Odes, III.)
1 Mythical Emperors: Houang-ti, Chao-Hao and Tchouan-Hui.
1 An Emperor. He married his daughter to a flute-player whose wonderful music could charm birds. The couple flew away with the phoenix from the palace he had built for them.
1 Confucius.
1 La rampe: also a ramp, or slope.
2 Luminescent marine organisms.
1 ‘Laus’ is the Latin word for praise, glory or merit. Jacob seems to be referring to les laudes (‘Lauds’ in English), a service of praise involving the singing of psalms early in the morning. I have retained his singular (in both senses) noun.
1 The old royal palace in Prague.
1 crachats: slang for ‘médailles’.
1 In Greek mythology, Amphion was a harpist whose music moved stones during the building of Thebes.
1 The daughters of Tyndareus who became unfaithful wives (Helen and Clytemnestra).
1 An island in the Antilles named by Columbus.
2 A fabulous worm used by Solomon in the building of the Temple. It had the power to cut stone (God had forbidden the use of iron tools).
1 The word-play here (‘turns’ and ‘towers’) is not readily translatable.
1 Either the thirteenth-century Chronicle of Novgorod (a major trading city), or one of the byliny, the heroic oral poems of medieval Russia, written down by scholars in more recent times. Cendrars refers here to the monk reading the legend, but later in the poem he is singing it.
1 This is offered tentatively as a translation of ‘ferlin’. Cendrars appears to be combining ‘fer’ and ‘filin’ (a hempen rope).
1 Despite the odd spelling, Cendrars is probably referring to Prince Pyotr Alexeyevich Kropotkin, a Russian anarchist imprisoned first in his native country and later in France. He settled in England in 1886 and wrote Memoirs of a Revolutionist.
1 Though the problematic phrase ‘poule au gibier’ may refer simply to a meal, its connotations are complex: ‘poule’ may be a bet or sweepstake; a tournament pool of players; a kitty to which all contribute; a horserace; there could even be a reference to Henri IV’s ambition that every French family should have a ‘poule au pot’ on Sundays… And ‘gibier’ is used colloquially to designate a mug, a sucker, a fall-guy.
1 A powerful and toxic drug obtained from plants such as henbane. Used as a smooth-muscle relaxant, sedative, and truth-serum. Affects the central nervous system, and has dangerous side-effects.
1 Anabasis: a large-scale military advance; specifically, the expedition across Asia Minor (401 B.C.), made by Greek mercenaries led by Cyrus the Younger of Persia, as described by Xenophon.
1 un lé also means a breadth of linen.
1 Maecenas: a rich patron of Virgil and Horace, and a minor author in his own right.
1 ‘You the carrier of death’ is an alternative translation, but seems to run counter to the sense of the poem.
1 Apollinaire’s funeral coincided with the Armistice celebrations.
1 As in ‘clockwise’ (‘dans le sens des aiguilles d’une montre’); ‘sense’, ‘direction’ and ‘alignment’ are also possibilities.
1 Many writers and artists, most notably Picasso, responded to the destruction of the Spanish town of Guernica by German bombers in 1937.
1 Mazeppa: a seventeenth-century Governor of the Ukraine. In his youth he had been strapped naked to a wild horse as a punishment for adultery. Subject of a poem by Byron and a symphonic poem by Liszt.
1 Conceivably ‘to the past’.
1 Gabriel Péri, a Communist deputy shot as a hostage in 1941, defiantly singing the ‘Marseillaise’. The event features in many wartime poems. The words attributed by Aragon to this Resistance martyr are based on a letter written by Péri on the eve of his execution.
1 Henri IV, reputed to have become a Catholic purely to secure the loyalty of Paris, and to have said in 1593: ‘Paris vaut bien une messe.’ His approach is compared ironically with that of Shakespeare’s Richard III.
1 Words from the ‘Marseillaise’: “Contre nous de la tyrannie l L’étendard sanglant est levé…”
2 The Internationale.
1 ‘… aux’ here is ambiguous. It could be dependent on ‘semblable’.
1 Marshal Pétain’s phrase for French life under German occupation, in his message to the people of France after the capitulation to the Nazi forces.
1 A painful inflammation where the fingernail or toenail meets the skin.
1 la rogue: fish roe (also a cluster of little spheres) used as bait.
1 ‘occupation’ suggests seizing and holding as well as work or activity; ‘curieux’ can mean ‘meticulous’ and ‘inquisitive’.
1 ‘ampoules’: blisters, bulbs, flasks… and a ‘style ampoulé’ is an inflated literary style.
2 ‘affectation’: not only ‘striving after effect’ but also the assigning or appointing of someone to a position or task.
1 ‘Anole’: lizard found in the West Indies and warmer areas of North and South America. Changes colour, and sometimes mistakenly called ‘chameleon’.
1 piquer: also to sting; une ruche: also a beehive. The word-play here defies translation.
1 In its original form, published in Soleil cou coupé (1948), this poem was longer and more diffuse. This condensed version appeared in Cadastre (1961), and has a more intense impact.
2 Not literally the state of Guinea (despite the reference to the Fouta-Dja
llon, a mountain range in that country), at least in the poem’s original version which predated the establishment of Guinea as an independent nation. At that stage Césaire was evoking the mythical Guinea of Caribbean culture, the African homeland which is the destination of the soul.
3 mora: a hand game dating back to ancient Rome, similar to ‘odds and evens’ and ‘scissors, paper, stone’.
1 This line could be translated as: ‘and by the closed woman opening upon her yearning’.
2 Ophir: an ancient country famed for its gold and precious stones, mentioned several times in the Old Testament. Its precise location is uncertain, but it was probably on the Somali or Arabian coast.
1 A play on the artistic term ‘nature-morte’, a still-life drawing or painting.
1 ‘évaporé’ often means ‘flighty, capricious, hare-brained, foolish…’ But such a term would be uncharacteristic for Char, and I think he has a more literal sense in mind.
1 Valuable translations of some recent French poetry are to be found in anthologies by Paul Auster (The Random House Book of Twentieth Century French Poetry, published by Vintage Books) and by Graham Dunstan Martin (Anthology of Contemporary French Poetry, published by Edinburgh University Press and the University of Texas).
1 See Technicalities, page xxix and xxx.