The Penguin Book of French Poetry Read online

  Il cligne ses yeux d’or hébetés de sommeil;

  Et, dans l’illusion de ses forces inertes,

  Faisant mouvoir sa queue et frissonner ses flancs,

  Il rêve qu’au milieu des plantations vertes,

  Il enfonce d’un bond ses ongles ruisselants

  Dans la chair des taureaux effarés et beuglants.

  José-Maria de Heredia

  (1842–1905)

  Born in Cuba of a French mother and Spanish father, Heredia was educated in France, and trained as an archaeologist. He shared Leconte de Lisle’s fascination with ancient and exotic civilizations, but not the older poet’s chilling pessimism about humanity. A pleasing warmth, enthusiasm, colour and even eroticism characterize the work of this otherwise most Parnassian of poets, whose 118 collected sonnets were not published until 1893, in a volume called Les Trophées.

  Critical evaluations of Heredia vary considerably. For some he is an ingenious, rich-rhyming and eventually tedious fabricator of tableaux full of erudition and visual richness. For others he comes close to Gautier’s ideal of the pure artist, the serene and dedicated Cellini depicted in ‘Sur le Pont Vieux’, engraving with consummate skill the combat of the Titans on the pommel of a dagger. His rating in this anthology is unashamedly strong, for Heredia is a rarity, a positively enjoyable Parnassian poet in whose apparently static, luminous pictures beats a pulse of real drama.

  Soir de bataille

  Le choc avait été très rude. Les tribuns

  Et les centurions, ralliant les cohortes,

  Humaient encor dans l’air où vibraient leurs voix fortes

  La chaleur du carnage et ses âcres parfums.

  D’un oeil morne, comptant leurs compagnons défunts,

  Les soldats regardaient, comme des feuilles mortes,

  Au loin, tourbillonner les archers de Phraortes;

  Et la sueur coulait de leurs visages bruns.

  C’est alors qu’apparut, tout hérissé de flèches,

  Rouge du flux vermeil de ses blessures fraîches,

  Sous la pourpre flottante et l’airain rutilant,

  Au fracas des buccins qui sonnaient leur fanfare,

  Superbe, maîtrisant son cheval qui s’effare,

  Sur le ciel enflammé, l’Imperator sanglant.

  Evening after Battle

  The conflict had been very harsh. The tribunes and centurions, rallying the cohorts, in the air resonant with their strong voices still breathed in the heat of the slaughter and its acrid scents.

  With dulled eyes, counting their dead comrades, the soldiers watched the bowmen of Phraates1 swirling in the distance like dead leaves; and the sweat poured down their brown faces.

  At that moment appeared, all bristling with arrows, red with the vermilion flow of his newly gathered wounds, beneath the undulating purple and the fiery reddened bronze,

  In the din of fanfare-sounding trumpets, magnificent, master of his frightened horse, against the blazing sky, the bloodstained Imperator.

  Ariane

  Au choc clair et vibrant des cymbales d’airain,

  Nue, allongée au dos d’un grand tigre, la Reine

  Regarde, avec l’Orgie immense qu’il entraîne,

  Iacchos s’avancer sur le sable marin.

  Et le monstre royal, ployant son large rein,

  Sous le poids adoré foule la blonde arène,

  Et, frôlé par la main d’où pend l’errante rêne,

  En rugissant d’amour mord les fleurs de son frein.

  Laissant sa chevelure à son flanc qui se cambre

  Parmi les noirs raisins rouler ses grappes d’ambre,

  L’Épouse n’entend pas le sourd rugissement;

  Et sa bouche éperdue, ivre enfin d’ambroisie,

  Oubliant ses longs cris vers l’infidèle amant,

  Rit au baiser prochain du Dompteur de l’Asie.

  Ariadne

  As shining, vibrant, brazen cymbals clash, naked, stretched on the back of a great tiger, the Queen watches as Bacchus, bringing vast Orgy in his wake, advances along the seashore.

  And the kingly monster, flexing its broad loins, beneath that beloved burden paws at the sandy arena, and, brushed by the hand that trails the rein at random, roars with love as it bites the flowers of its bit.

  Letting her hair cascade down the arching flank, amber clusters amid the black grapes, the Bride does not hear the muted bellow;

  And her ecstatic mouth, drunk at last with ambrosia, forgetting its prolonged cries to the faithless lover,1 welcomes, laughing, the imminent kiss of the Conqueror of Asia.

  Sur le Pont-Vieux

  Antonio di Sandro orefice

  Le vaillant Maître Orfèvre, à l’oeuvre dès matines,

  Faisait, de ses pinceaux d’où s’égouttait l’émail,

  Sur la paix niellée ou sur l’or du fermail

  Epanouir la fleur des devises latines.

  Sur le Pont, au son clair des cloches argentines,

  La cape coudoyait le froc et le camail;

  Et le soleil montant en un ciel de vitrail

  Mettait un nimbe au front des belles Florentines.

  On the Ponte Vecchio

  Antonio di Sandro orefice

  The stout-hearted Master Goldsmith, at his work since Matins, with his brushes dripping with enamel, brought forth on the inlaid niello paten or on the golden clasp the flower of Latin inscriptions.

  On the bridge, to the limpid sound of the silver-toned bells, cloak rubbed shoulders with cowl and capuchin; and the sun rising in a stained-glass sky cast a halo on the brow of the fair Florentine women.

  Et prompts au rêve ardent qui les savait charmer,

  Les apprentis, pensifs, oubliaient de fermer

  Les mains des fiancés au chaton de la bague;

  Tandis que d’un burin trempé comme un stylet,

  Le jeune Cellini, sans rien voir, ciselait

  Le combat des Titans au pommeau d’une dague.

  And, responsive to the passionate dream that bewitched them so well, the apprentices, lost in thought, forgot to join the hands of betrothal on the stone of the ring;

  While with an engraving needle tempered like a stiletto, the young Cellini, seeing nothing, was carving the struggle of the Titans on the pommel of a dagger.

  Les Conquérants

  Comme un vol de gerfauts hors du charnier natal,

  Fatigués de porter leurs misères hautaines,

  De Palos de Moguer, routiers et capitaines

  Partaient, ivres d’un rêve héroïque et brutal.

  Ils allaient conquérir le fabuleux métal

  Que Cipango mÛrit dans ses mines lointaines,

  Et les vents alizés inclinaient leurs antennes

  Aux bords mystérieux du monde Occidental.

  Chaque soir, espérant des lendemains épiques,

  L’azur phosphorescent de la mer des Tropiques

  Enchantait leur sommeil d’un mirage doré;

  The Conquistadores

  Like a flight of gerfalcons from the eyrie of their birth, weary of bearing their haughty destitution, from Palos de Moguer soldiers of fortune and captains set out, drunk with a heroic, brutal dream.

  They were going to conquer the fabulous metal matured by Cipangu1 in its distant mines, and the trade winds tilted their yards towards the mysterious shores of the Western world.

  Each evening, in hope of epic morrows, the phosphorescent blue of the Tropical sea bewitched their sleep with a gilded mirage;

  Ou penchés à l’avant des blanches caravelles,

  Ils regardaient monter en un ciel ignoré

  Du fond de l’Océan des étoiles nouvelles.

  Or leaning over the bow of white caravels, they watched as in an unknown sky from the depths of the Ocean there rose new stars.

  La Sieste

  Pas un seul bruit d’insecte ou d’abeille en maraude.

  Tout dort sous les grands bois accablés de soleil

  Où le feuillage épais tamise un jour par
eil

  Au velours sombre et doux des mousses d’émeraude.

  Criblant le dòme obscur, Midi splendide y rôde

  Et, sur mes cils mi-clos alanguis de sommeil,

  De mille éclairs furtifs forme un réseau vermeil

  Qui s’allonge et se croise à travers l’ombre chaude.

  The Siesta

  Not a single sound of insect or plundering bee. Under the overpowering sun all sleeps in the forest where the dense foliage filters a light with the texture of1 the dark soft velvet of the emerald mosses.

  Sifting through the dark dome, resplendent Noon prowls up there and, above my half-closed sleep-languid lashes, with a thousand furtive flashes forms a rose-red web stretching and interlacing across the warm shade.

  Vers la gaze de feu que trament les rayons,

  Vole le frêle essaim des riches papillons

  Qu’enivrent la lumière et le parfum des sèves;

  Alors mes doigts tremblants saisissent chaque fil,

  Et dans les mailles d’or de ce filet subtil,

  Chasseur harmonieux, j’emprisonne mes rêves.

  Towards the fiery gauze woven by the rays flies the delicate swarm of rich butterflies intoxicated by light and the scent of sap;

  Then my trembling fingers grasp each thread, and in the golden mesh of this tenuous net, a harmonious hunter, I imprison my dreams.

  Soleil couchant

  Les ajoncs éclatants, parure du granit,

  Dorent l’âpre sommet que le couchant allume;

  Au loin, brillante encor par sa barre d’écume,

  La mer sans fin commence où la terre finit.

  Sunset

  The vivid gorse, the adornment of granite, gilds the harsh hilltop fired by the sunset; in the distance, still shining through its band of foaming surf, the endless sea begins where the land comes to an end.

  A mes pieds, c’est la nuit, le silence. Le nid

  Se tail, l’homme est rentré sous le chaume qui fume;

  Seul, l’Angélus du soir, ébranlé dans la brume,

  A la vaste rumeur de l’Océan s’unit.

  Alors, comme du fond d’un abîme, des traînes,

  Des landes, des ravins, montent des voix lointaines

  De pâtres attardés ramenant le bétail.

  L’horizon tout entier s’enveloppe dans l’ombre,

  Et le soleil mourant, sur un ciel riche et sombre,

  Ferme les branches d’or de son rouge éventail.

  At my feet there is darkness, silence. The nest falls silent, man has gone back beneath his smoking thatch; only the evening Angelus, ringing in the mist, is joined with the vast murmur of the Ocean.

  Then, as if from deep in a chasm, from the sunken roads, from the moors, from the gullies, rise distant voices of lingering herdsmen bringing in the cattle.

  The whole horizon is wrapped in shadow, and the dying sun, against a rich dark sky, closes the golden branches of its red fan.

  Stéphane Mallarmé

  (1842–98)

  Rejecting suggestions that he should follow family tradition by entering government service after his education, Mallarmé taught English in several provincial towns before returning to his native Paris in 1871. A remarkable degree of stability characterized his life, despite chronic financial difficulties, and his marriage to Marie Gerhard survived his affair with Méry Laurent. He suffered two painful bereavements, losing a sister in his youth and his eight-year-old son in 1879. The poet’s bedside notes on the latter experience reveal an extraordinary capacity for analytical thought within or alongside emotional anguish.

  In 1866-7 he had undergone a profound existential, metaphysical and artistic crisis. He ‘overthrew God’, only to be faced with a vertiginous awareness, both enthralling and terrifying, of a void into which all reality seemed inexorably to be sucked. He accepted this ‘abolition’ of the world, envisaging a resurrection of his intellect through the conscious creation of a supreme and indestructible fiction, radiant with light, and truly poetic. ‘Poetry is the expression, through human language restored to its essential rhythm, of the mysterious meaning of existence: it thus grants authenticity to our time on earth and constitutes the unique spiritual task.’ It may be unattainable except literally in death, but the struggle to produce this creative rebirth, this presence within absence, is at the centre of Mallarmé’s artistic life. It is dramatized in a number of poems, notably ‘Le vierge, le vivace et le bel aujourd’hui’, ‘Ses purs ongles très haut dédiant leur onyx’ and ‘L’Après-midi d’un Faune’. Understandably, unfinished works are another Mallarméan characteristic, the most significant being the verse tragedy Hérodiade and the prose poem Igitur, and he never progressed beyond notes for ‘The Book’, a monumental projected work which was to be the sum of all books, a universal statement: ‘The world exists to end up in a book’.

  Though his cryptic musicality can appeal to the uninitiated, the serious reader of Mallarmé needs to arm himself with exegeses. Malcolm Bowie’s title, ‘Mallarmé and the Art of being difficult’, is humorously appropriate, but also pays homage to one of the French language’s most refined exponents, a perfectionist whose exemplary commitment to an uncompromising aesthetic ideal is breathtaking. Mallarmé is not difficult for the sake of being difficult. His hermeticism has a purpose.

  Poetry alone, for Mallarmé, has reality, permanence and value. The surface of life is a contingent, uninteresting flux. The artist is in contact with a superior world of analogies, affinities or ‘correspondances’ (to use the Baudelairean term) forming an ineffable harmony. He is, paradoxically, obliged to use words in seeking its expression. Now the creations of Poetry are to be holy, necessarily veiled in secrecy, necessarily elliptical and ambiguous, to prevent Beauty from contamination by vulgar thought and its medium, commonplace language: ‘All that is sacred and wishes to remain sacred wraps itself in mystery’. Mallarmé’s own highly selective language is therefore syntactically convoluted, inward-turned, self-protecting in order to ‘give a purer meaning to the words of the tribe’. He seeks an immaculate expression of an idea or perception in the most compressed, concrete terms imaginable, often suppressing conjunctions, articles and prepositions, and re-inventing grammatical relationships. Yet all this takes place within lines of verse that are for the most part firmly Alexandrine or octosyllabic in structure.

  This is an entirely unspontaneous poetry, detached by patient artistry from the reality which may have been its initial stimulus: ‘Do not paint the thing, but the effect which it produces’. In his terms, the poem is the completed dice-throw that is beyond the reach of Chance, even if it does not in itself abolish Chance. Once initiated, the reader will find that he can share in this creative process as fully as he can with Baudelaire or Verlaine, and discover an intensity of emotion within the perfectionism of style.

  An uncompromising cult figure, surrounded by disciples at his regular Tuesday gatherings, and a true verbal alchemist, Mallarmé inaugurates Symbolism in French verse. His refined language is entirely distinct from prose, and its music has stronger resonances than the essentially atmospheric tone-poems of Verlaine, effectively the co-founder of that movement. It is beyond doubt that those resonances are still being felt in French poetry today, much of which is still haunted by the problem of presence within absence, of expressing the inexpressible.

  Major works: L’Après-Midi d’un Faune 1876, Les Poésies 1887, Poèmes en prose 1891, Divagations 1897, Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard 1897.

  Les Fenêtres

  Las du triste hôpital, et de l’encens fétide

  Qui monte en la blancheur banale des rideaux

  Vers le grand crucifix ennuyé du mur vide,

  Le moribond sournois y redresse un vieux dos,

  Se traîne et va, moins pour chauffer sa pourriture

  Que pour voir du soleil sur les pierres, coller

  Les poils blancs et les os de la maigre figure

  Aux fenêtres qu’un beau rayon clair veut hâler
.

  Et la bouche, fiévreuse et d’azur bleu vorace,

  Telle, jeune, elle alla respirer son trésor,

  Une peau virginale et de jadis! encrasse

  D’un long baiser amer les tièdes carreaux d’or.

  The Windows

  Weary of the sad infirmary, and of the foetid incense that rises within the banal whiteness of the curtains towards the great bored crucifix on the empty wall, the dying man artfully straightens an old back,

  Drags himself and goes, less to warm his decaying flesh than to see sunlight on the stones, to press the white stubble and the bones of the scrawny face against the windows that a beautiful limpid sunbeam wants to burnish.

  And the mouth, feverish and craving the blue azure, just as in childhood it sought and breathed in its treasure, a virginal skin of time past! fouls with a long bitter kiss the warm golden panes.

  Ivre, il vit, oubliant l’horreur des saintes huiles,

  Les tisanes, l’horloge et le lit infligé.

  La toux; et quand le soir saigne parmi les tuiles,

  Son oeil, à l’horizon de lumière gorgé,

  Voit des galères d’or, belles comme des cygnes,

  Sur un fleuve de pourpre et de parfums dormir

  En berçant l’éclair fauve et riche de leurs lignes