by Alain-Fournier, Henri; Costello, Anthony; Howell, Anthony
– comme des morceaux de cailloux ou de miroirs,
dans l’herbe et les fleurs de blé noir.
Ô Taille-Mince,
on va dire, dans les champs,
que votre taille tiendrait dans
la ceinture des deux mains ainsi jointes.
Ô Blonde,
Ô ardente apparue, ô cheveux blonds,
on va vouloir vous couronner,
pour vous faire honneur, de la fleur
des moissons –
et de soleil, cueillis au faîte des batteuses
qu’on entend lointainement ronfler par la campagne
et haleter, et qui crachent,
dans les cours, la paille poussiéreuse.
Oh! mon amie,
j’appuierai ma tête
j’appuierai ma tête sur votre robe
dans la salle basse et froide où nous sommes assis,
et ce sera comme si
depuis l’aube
nous étions partis à travers blés pour la folle journée;
comme si, tous les deux, nous avions entendu,
en passant au bourg,
le roulement lourd
de la porte humble et du volet vermoulu,
et, en passant à travers champs,
le haletant bourdonnement des machines des champs;
puis ce sera comme si nous étions arrivés
au soir, dans la salle basse de la ferme inconnue
où nous irons demander du lait.
SOME NOTES ON THE TRANSLATION
JULIAN BARNES came to Alain-Fournier late – he was in his late thirties when he first read Le Grand Meaulnes,1 and for me it was later still, for I first read Fournier’s novel in my late forties (in 2013). I was living in Brittany with Anita Marsh, who was recuperating from one bout of chemotherapy undertaken in London and about to start another in St Brieuc. We settled down to watch our favourite French television programme, Le Grand Librairie, presented by François Busnel. The book-review edition focused on French writers who had died during the First World War. Alain-Fournier’s Le Grand Meaulnes was mentioned, and its massive impact on the French literary imagination. One academic mentioned the poems of Alain-Fournier in Miracles, which we subsequently discovered had never been translated into English.
The anticipation and excitement on receiving a 1957 Oxford World Classics edition of The Lost Domain: Le Grand Meaulnes and a 1924 Gallimard edition of Miracles is still palpable. The hardback pocket edition of The Lost Domain, translated by Frank Davison and introduced by Alan Pryce-Jones, with its front cover of broken gates and tilting pillars behind which a gravel path flanked by fruit trees leads to an abandoned château or manor house, is still my favourite rendering of Fournier’s classic. I read Fournier’s novel and Yves Bonnefoy’s L’Arrière-pays in the café at L’hôpital Yves le Foll in St Brieuc, during breaks from the treatment rooms six floors above.
Perhaps I, too, was transported, Peter Pan-like, by Fournier’s magical tale, a journey, but also a grail-like quest, with Meaulnes searching for something, while unable to articulate convincingly the nature of the thing he searches for. My search, or dream-like hope, in these writing and reading sessions at the café was for a miracle: that Anita would be cured, and would live, and that we could exist eternally in a lost Eden.2
I was aware that my personal feelings toward Anita sometimes bordered, Fournier-like, on the idealistic, if not the obsessive. There was something of a prophecy come true about our liaison, given that I had dreamed about being her lover ten years earlier when we were work colleagues in a London bookshop (while I was still happily married to another woman). It was ten years later that we came together, a year after my divorce. By this time, Anita was already receiving treatment for secondary cancer at Charing Cross Hospital in London.
Our love had been given a sentence of tangible finitude. However, I was in denial about its termination, planning even in the last few months of her life for a French idyll in southern Brittany where Nantes nods in the direction of the Loire, heading toward that landscape of Bonnefoy’s Tours and Fournier’s Sologne. I identified, then, with Meaulnes’ obsessive pursuit of the beautiful and mysterious Yvonne de Galais in Le Grand Meaulnes, empathised with the narrator’s unrequited love and sense of loss in the poems in Miracles.
I felt I could almost breathe the air with Fournier on Ascension Day in 1905, could see in Renoir’s portraits of women reading or walking in gardens, shaded by their parasols, the same mysterious vision – both Fournier’s real obsession, Yvonne de Quiévrecourt, and Anita herself.
John Fowles, invoking the work of Georges Bataille in Eroticism and Death, suggests that Fournier’s writing demonstrates that ‘paradox at the heart of the human condition, that the satisfaction of the desire is also the death of the desire’;3 the implication that what kept Fournier’s love for Yvonne de Quiévrecourt so potently alive was a state of fervour concerning a love that was to be immaculately unconsummated. All the other women in Fournier’s life that he had actual relationships with – another Yvonne (Yvonne G.), Jeanne Bruneau, Loulette, Simone – were poor imitations of a portrait of Yvonne de Quiévrecourt.
In my case, and countering this theory, satisfaction of desire with Anita Marsh led to more desire, the singular possession and ownership of my own favourite portrait contingent upon the vagaries of cancer, and leading me to a landscape of ‘desert places’. By reading Fournier, I was both escaping, and in denial of, Anita’s passing. In breaks from my own writing, and while she was hooked up to intravenous tubes, I was planning the food on the table for the evening meal over which I would ask her to be my co-translator of the poems in Miracles.
* * *
Three days after undergoing an operation at a London hospital in August 2013, during which a biopsy was taken to determine if I had cancer, I hobbled to the Poetry Place, 22 Betterton Street where Anouche Sherman had organised an evening dedicated to French poetry in translation. I duly read three versions of Alain-Fournier’s poems that Anita Marsh and I had translated in the spring of 2013. Anthony Howell was in the audience and I met him, briefly, at the soirée after the reading. He expressed a long-standing admiration for Le Grand Meaulnes and was intrigued and encouraging of the ‘lovely project’ Anita and I had been working on, translating the eight long prose poems in the 1924 Gallimard edition of Miracles. He suggested two outlets for the Fournier poems: his own online Grey Suit poem stream and The Fortnightly Review, where he is a contributing editor. Some of the translations appeared there and soon after others were accepted by Acumen and The French Literary Review. Anita Marsh knew of these publishing achievements before she died on 17 October 2013.
In the summer of 2014, after many months of depression, I vowed to honour Anita’s life and work by finding a publisher for our manuscript. I read and researched Fournier’s life and works and wrote an introduction to the poems. I then contacted Anthony Howell and asked if he would read (and potentially edit) the manuscript. Fluent in French, he showed me certain discrepancies in my own versions, and so I decided to leave Anita’s notebook with him, so that he could work on the poems in his own way. The meandering evolution of this translation from dreamy idea to publication would not have been possible without his input. He argued that we should ‘have faith in the mundane’, which I took to mean paying attention to the detail in the French original and (even more profoundly) that we should have faith in Alain-Fournier.
He subsequently found six more poems in a later edition than ours, and translated these too. I feel that this ‘labour of love’ is a genuine collaboration between us all.
ANTHONY COSTELLO
1. Julian Barnes, The Guardian, Friday 13 April 2012. A Francophile, Barnes rediscovered his love for Alain-Fournier in 2011–12 and took part in a BBC Radio 3 programme that sought to explore the terrain around Fournier’s childhood home. Barnes feels that Fournier’s oeuvre is indicative of ‘a last explosion of Romanticism’ before the onset of World War 1.
2. Allan
Massie thinks Le Grand Meaulnes is a search for a lost Eden, Daily Telegraph, 12 October 2013.
3. John Fowles, ‘Afterword’, The Wanderer, Signet, 1971.
NOT SIMPLY THE MEANING
ANTHONY COSTELLO contacted me early in 2014. He sent me the versions he had done of the poems of Alain-Fournier. These intrigued me. I had loved reading Le Grand Meaulnes as a young man. Anita Marsh, already dying of cancer, had made word-for-word translations of the texts for him, a final act. I never met her. I wish I had. He visited, and left me the beautiful notebook with a cover decorated with a garden in spring in which Anita had written out the words in French; the lines numbered, and the words in English opposite, with their alternatives and ambiguities in brackets. He also left me the battered Gallimard edition, its pages turning brown, of Miracles, the collection of short prose works by Fournier which includes these eight visions, apparently forming his entire poetic oeuvre, and a comprehensive introduction by Jacques Rivière. While Anthony’s versions were the prompts which got me started, I mainly worked from the French, and from Anita’s notes.
On purchasing my own copies of Miracles, I discovered that the 2011 Livre de Poche edition included six poems that were not in the original Gallimard edition used by Anthony and Anita. These I have translated and have added in the order they appear in that 2011 publication.
It should be noted that while I have tried to be as true to the originals as I can be, my versions are not exactly literal translations, or, to put it another way, I seek to translate the poetry, not simply the meaning. Thus, ‘Sur la nacelle …’:
Sur la nacelle
Une ombrelle
De satin.
La tache est rouge
L’eau ne bouge
Ce matin.
This might be correctly translated as:
On the skiff,
A parasol
Of satin.
The stain is red,
The water does not move
This morning.
But the short lines are cross-connected by rhyme in the original, and it is this poetic music that I seek to capture, yes, even at the cost of tampering with the meaning: Nacelle and parasol, satin and matin … one senses that the poem grew out of these coincidences, and so I seek for equivalents in my own language. Nacelle being the French name for a type of boat, I keep it in my version, but I can’t retain matin without sounding like Wallace Stevens, and so I find a rhyme for satin that works for me in English:
On the nacelle,
A parasol
Of satin.
A stain of red,
A breeze to seize
Your hat in.
Out of sheer enthusiasm, it is easy to go too far, and find oneself writing one’s own poem. This I have held back on, very much helped by Luke Allan of Carcanet, and Peter Jay, who set this book. Their suggestions have been appreciated, as well as their willingness to put up with all the fine-tuning it has taken to get these poems into another language. I would also like to thank Gwendolyn Leick and Chloe Chard for resolving queries about the original French.
ANTHONY HOWELL
About the Authors
Alain-Fournier was the pseudonym of Henri-Alban Fournier, a French author and soldier. He was the author of a single novel, Le Grand Meaulnes (1913), which has been twice filmed and is considered a classic of French literature. In 1914 he started work on a second novel, Colombe Blanchet, but this remained unfinished when he joined the Army as a lieutenant in August. He died fighting near Vaux-les-Palameix (Meuse) one month later, on 22 September 1914. His body remained unidentified until 1991, when he was interred in the cemetery of Saint-Remy-la-Calonne. Most of his writing was published posthumously: Miracles (a volume of poems and essays) in 1924, his correspondence with Jacques Rivière in 1926 and his letters to his family in 1930. His notes and sketches for Colombe Blanchet have also been published.
Anthony Howell is the author of a dozen collections of poetry and translations, from Inside the Castle (1969) to Silent Highway (2014). In 1973 he took part in the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa. His translations include Statius: Silvae (with Bill Shepherd) and Plague Lands by Fawzi Karim, a Poetry Book Society Recommendation in 2011. He founded The Theatre of Mistakes and is editor of Grey Suit: Video for Art and Literature.
Anthony Costello is a writer, editor, teacher and horticulturist. His first poetry collection, The Mask, was published in 2014 and a second, Angles & Visions, in 2016. He is co-editor of The High Window Journal and an associate publisher at The High Window Press. He is currently working on a book about artists and their physicians.
Anita Marsh studied English and French at Southampton University. She worked as a language assistant in Belgium, a translator for BNP Paribas and a senior bookseller in London. She had a lifelong love of the French language and French literature and spent her last year living in France and translating the poems of Alain-Fournier. She died in 2013.
Copyright
Every effort has been made by the publisher to reproduce the formatting of the original print edition in electronic format. However, poem formatting may change according to reading device and font size.
First published in Great Britain in 2016 by Carcanet Press Ltd, Alliance House, 30 Cross Street, Manchester M2 7AQ.
This eBook edition first published in 2017.
Introduction © Anthony Costello 2016. English versions © Anthony Howell 2016. The right of Anthony Howell and Anthony Costello to be identified as the authors of these translations, and as the book’s editors and authors of their respective editorial material, has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988. All rights reserved.
This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publisher, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
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The publisher acknowledges financial assistance from Arts Council England.