The Penguin Book of French Poetry Read online

  L’amour, la mer, la mort,

  Sang vif, vert calme, violet.

  O femme, doux et lourd trésor!

  Froids vitraux, cloches, odeurs d’ambre.

  La mer, la mort, l’amour,

  Ne sentir que ce qui me plaît…

  Femme, plus claire que le jour!

  Par ce soir doré de septembre,

  La mort, l’amour, la mer,

  Me noyer dans l’oubli complet.

  Femme! femme! cercueil de chair!

  Hieroglyph

  I have three windows in my room: love, sea, death, living blood, calm green, violet.

  O woman, sweet and heavy treasure!

  Cold stained glass, bells, scents of amber. Sea, death, love, to feel only what gives me pleasure…

  Woman, brighter than daylight!

  On this gilded September evening, death, love, sea, to drown myself in entire oblivion.

  Woman! woman! coffin of flesh!

  Sonnet

  A travers la forêt des spontanéités,

  Ècartant les taillis, courant par les clairières,

  Et cherchant dans l’émoi des soifs aventurières

  L’oubli des paradis pour un instant quittés,

  Inquiète, cheveux flottants, yeux agités,

  Vous allez et cueillez des plantes singulières,

  Pour parfumer I’air fade et pour cacher les pierres

  De la prison terrestre où nous sommes jetés.

  Et puis, quand vous avez groupé les fleurs coupées,

  Vous vous ressouvenez de l’idéal lointain,

  Et leur éclat, devant ce souvenir, s’éteint.

  Alors l’ennui vous prend. Vos mains inoccupées

  Brisent les pâles fleurs et les jettent au vent.

  Et vous recommencez ainsi, le jour suivant.

  Sonnet

  Through the forest of spontaneities, thrusting aside the undergrowth, running through the glades, and seeking in the ferment of adventurous thirsts forgetfulness of paradises momentarily abandoned.

  Anxious, with hair flying and restless eyes, you go along gathering peculiar plants, to scent the insipid air and to hide the stones of the earthly prison into which we are thrown.

  And then, when you have arranged the cut flowers, you remember once more the distant ideal, and their lustre is eclipsed before that memory.

  Then tedium takes hold of you. Your idle hands break the pale flowers and cast them to the wind. And so you begin again, the following day.

  Phantasma

  J’ai rêvé l’archipel parfumé, montagneux,

  Perdu dans une mer inconnue et profonde

  Où le naufrage nous a jetés tous les deux

  Oubliés loin des lois qui régissent le monde.

  Sur le sable étendue en l’or de tes cheveux,

  Des cheveux qui te font comme une tombe blonde,

  Je te ranime au son nouveau de mes aveux

  Que ne répéteront ni la plage ni l’onde.

  C’est un rêve. Ton âme est un oiseau qui fuit

  Vers les horizons clairs de rubis, d’émeraudes,

  Et mon âme abattue est un oiseau de nuit.

  Pour te soumettre, proie exquise, à mon ennui

  Et pour te dompter, blanche, en mes étreintes chaudes,

  Tous les pays sont trop habités aujourd’hui.

  Phantasm

  I have dreamed of the scented, mountainous archipelago, lost in a deep and unknown sea where shipwreck has cast us both, forgotten, far from the laws that govern the world.

  On the sand where you are stretched out in the gold of your hair, hair which makes for you a kind of flaxen tomb, I bring you back to life with the renewed sound of my vows which neither beach nor waves will repeat.

  It is a dream. Your soul is a bird that flies away towards shining ruby and emerald horizons, and my afflicted soul is a bird of night.

  To subject you, exquisite prey, to my anxious tedium and to tame you, white being, in my warm embraces, all countries today are too densely peopled.

  Sonnet

  J’ai bâti dans ma fantaisie

  Un théâtre aux décors divers:

  – Magiques palais, grands bois verts –

  Pour y jouer ma poésic.

  Un peu trop au hasard choisie,

  La jeune-première à l’envers

  Récite quelquefois mes vers.

  Faute de mieux je m’extasie.

  Et je déclame avec tant d’art

  Qu’on me croirait pris à son fard,

  Au fard que je lui mets moi-même.

  Non. Sous le faux air virginal

  Je vois l’être inepte et vénal.

  Mais c’est le rôle seul que j’aime.

  Sonnet

  I have built in my imagination a theatre with different settings: – magical palaces, great green forests – in which to play out my poetry.

  Cast a little too haphazardly, the leading lady sometimes recites my lines inside-out. For want of anything better I go into raptures.

  And I declaim with so much artistry that you’d think me the dupe of her make-up, the make-up I put on her myself.

  No. Beneath that fake air of maidenly modesty I see the foolish, mercenary creature, but it’s only the role I love.

  Paul Verlaine

  (1844–96)

  A legendary ‘maudit’ who rather lacked the courage of his convictions, Verlaine followed an indulged, mother-dominated childhood with an interesting but unsavoury adult life in which one part of him watched in fascinated, impotent, bourgeois horror as the other slipped into degradation.

  His early literary contacts were with Baudelaire and the Parnassians, and the publication of Poèmes Saturniens (1866) and Fêtes Galantes (1869) brought him considerable success. But he became dependent on alcohol, and made a curious, inevitably disastrous marriage in 1870 to a girl of seventeen, Mathilde Mauté de Fleurville. They lived in illusory domestic bliss (La Bonne Chanson) until the arrival of the young prodigy Arthur Rimbaud from Charleville. Verlaine guided Rimbaud into Parisian literary circles, excusing the scruffy iconoclast’s outrageous behaviour by asserting his genius, and became infatuated with him. He left Mathilde and began an unstable homosexual relationship with Rimbaud that took them on well-documented wanderings through northern France, Belgium and England in the period of Romances sans Paroles (published in 1874).

  Periodic bouts of remorse and attempts at reconciliation with Mathilde were invariably followed by a return to Rimbaud, but the relationship between the two poets, briefly productive in terms of mutual artistic stimulation, was intense and stormy. In 1873 Verlaine, always the more dependent and desperate partner, shot Rimbaud in the wrist during a quarrel and was imprisoned for two years. Sheltered in prison from his emotional problems, Verlaine experienced a religious conversion, and in a new mood of repentance and discipline began the volume Sagesse (published in 1881). These good intentions were no doubt as sincere at the time as anything Verlaine ever felt or believed, but they were typically superficial and short-lived, and with hindsight can even appear a little nauseating.

  A distasteful later life of alcoholism and difficult relationships, financial problems and mediocre poetry was relieved only by his influential 1883 articles entitled Les Poètes maudits, in which he surveyed the current poetic climate and helped to establish a number of reputations, notably those of Corbière, Mallarmé, Rimbaud and Cros. He tried teaching, farming, even a period in a Trappist monastery, but could not halt the decline into illness and degradation. His literary fame was considerable, but it was based on his earlier work rather than the late volumes Jadis et Naguère (1884), Amour (1888), Parallèlement (1889) and Bonheur (1891).

  At its best, his poetry contains no ideas, no rhetoric, and explores neither social reality nor metaphysics. It avoids both sentimental effusion and Parnassian detachment. It is a brilliant, original art of extreme musicality ‘sur le mode mineur’, a subtle transmission of intimate nuances of mood and feeling through sound pa
tterns, rhythms and images arranged in an incantatory tone-poem. It has no finality, but lingers as a dreamlike ‘paysage intérieur’, the objective yet deliberately blurred expression of an inner state. The style is unemphatic, fluid, deceptively naïve, an evocative mixture of light and shade. Sense is subordinated to sound, or rather the two are inseparable, in a discreet, filtered kind of lyricism and allusive mystery not far removed from Impressionist painting or some of the music of Debussy and Ravel. Feelings and images are captured as they fade, and there is a sense that time is suspended, the poet’s melancholy sensibility entranced with it in a somnolent, dangerously amorphous state. Consciousness is an attenuated, passive entity, unlike the powerfully present and active ego of Baudelaire, Rimbaud or Laforgue. Our identification with this music is intuitive and subtle, and its features will combine with Mallarméan aesthetics to form the basis of Symbolism.

  In terms of versification, Verlaine is revolutionary and highly influential. He weakens the dominance of rhyme and guides it towards assonance, further relaxes the restraints on poetic vocabulary, and breaks the hold on French verse not only of the Alexandrine, whose qualities of intellectual symmetry and finality obviously do not suit such a poetic mode, but also of the decasyllable and octosyllable. He pioneers the ‘impair’ line of 5, 7, 9, 11 (or even on occasion 13) syllables, so dislocating and incomplete to the ear of a classically educated Frenchman, for his half-secret, associative, open-ended music, bringing to French verse a new rhythmic flexibility and opening the way for the Symbolists to ‘reprendre à la musique leur bien’.

  Mon Rêve familier

  Je fais souvent ce rêve étrange et pénétrant

  D’une femme inconnue, et que j’aime, et qui m’aime,

  Et qui n’est, chaque fois, ni tout à fait la même

  Ni tout à fait une autre, et m’aime et me comprend.

  Car elle me comprend, et mon coeur, transparent

  Pour elle seule, hélas! cesse d’être un problème

  Pour elle seule, et les moiteurs de mon front blême,

  Elle seule les sait rafraîchir, en pleurant.

  Est-elle brune, blonde ou rousse? – Je l’ignore.

  Son nom? Je me souviens qu’il est doux et sonore,

  Comme ceux des aimés que la Vie exila.

  Son regard est pareil au regard des statues,

  Et, pour sa voix, lointaine, et calme, et grave, elle a

  L’inflexion des voix chéres qui se sont tues.

  My Intimate Dream

  I often dream this strange and penetrating dream of an unknown woman, whom I love and who loves me, and who is, each time, not quite the same nor yet quite different, and loves and understands me.

  For she understands me, and my heart, open to her eyes alone, alas! presents for her alone no further problem, and she alone knows how to cool with her tears the clammy heat of my brow.

  Is she brown-haired, blonde or russet! – I know not. Her name? I remember that it is sweet and resonant like those of the loved ones banished by Life.

  Her gaze is like the gaze of statues, and as for her voice, distant, composed, and solemn, it has the inflexion of the precious voices that have fallen silent.

  Effet de nuit

  La nuit. La pluie. Un ciel blafard que déchiquette

  De flèches et de tours à jour la silhouette

  D’une ville gothique éteinte au lointain gris.

  La plaine. Un gibet plein de pendus rabougris

  Secoués par le bec avide des corneilles

  Et dansant dans l’air noir des gigues nonpareilles,

  Tandis que leurs pieds sont la pâture des loups.

  Quelques buissons d’épine épars, et quelques houx

  Dressant l’horreur de leur feuillage à droite, à gauche,

  Sur le fuligineux fouillis d’un fond d’ébauche.

  Et puis, autour de trois livides prisonniers

  Qui vont pieds nus, un gros de hauts pertuisaniers

  En marche, et leurs fers droits, comme des fers de herse,

  Luisent á contre-sens des lances de I’averse.

  Night Impression

  Darkness. Rain. A pallid sky serrated with spires and open towers by the silhouette of a Gothic city without light in the grey distance. The plain. A gibbet full of shrivelled corpses convulsed by the greedy beaks of crows and dancing inimitable jigs in the black air, while their feet are food for wolves. A few straggling thorn-bushes and holly trees stand bristling to right and left in their abhorrent foliage, against a murky tangle like the background of a sketch. And then, around three ghastly barefoot prisoners, a body of towering halberdiers on the march, and their straight shafts like harrow rods gleam at an angle against the lances of the downpour.

  Soleils couchants

  Une aube affaiblie

  Verse par les champs

  La mélancolie

  Des soleils couchants.

  La mélancolie

  Berce de doux chants

  Mon coeur qui s’oublie

  Aux soleils couchants.

  Et d’étranges rêves,

  Comme des soleils

  Couchants sur les grèves,

  Fantômes vermeils,

  Défilent sans trêves,

  Défilent, pareils

  A des grands soleils

  Couchants sur les grèves.

  Setting Suns

  A diluted dawn sheds over the fields the melancholy of setting suns. Melancholy with sweet songs cradles my heart in oblivion amid setting suns. And strange dreams, like suns setting on shores, vermilion spectres, a ceaseless procession, pass by, like great suns setting on shores.

  Clair de lune

  Votre âme est un paysage choisi

  Que vont charmant masques et bergamasques

  Jouant du luth et dansant et quasi

  Tristes sous leurs déguisements fantasques.

  Tout en chantant sur le mode mineur

  L’amour vainqueur et la vie opportune,

  Ils n’ont pas l’air de croire à leur bonheur

  Et leur chanson se mêle au clair de lune,

  Au calme clair de lune triste et beau,

  Qui fait rêver les oiseaux dans les arbres

  Et sangloter d’extase les jets d’eau,

  Les grands jets d’eau sveltes parmi les marbres.

  Moonlight

  Your soul is a select landscape bewitched by masques and bergamasques playing the lute as they go and dancing and almost sad beneath their fanciful disguises.

  Singing as they go in the minor key of conquering love and the favours of life, they don’t seem quite to believe in their happiness and their song mingles with the moonlight,

  With the clear moonlight, sad and beautiful, that sets the birds dreaming in the trees and the fountains sobbing in ecstasy, the tall slender fountains amid the marble statues.

  En sourdine

  Calmes dans le demi-jour

  Que les branches hautes font,

  Pénétrons bien notre amour

  De ce silence profond.

  Fondons nos âmes, nos coeurs

  Et nos sens extasiés,

  Parmi les vagues langueurs

  Des pins et des arbousiers.

  Ferme tes yeux à demi,

  Croise tes bras sur ton sein.

  Et de ton coeur endormi

  Chasse à jamais tout dessein.

  Laissons-nous persuader

  Au souffle berceur et doux

  Qui vient à tes pieds rider

  Les ondes de gazon roux.

  Muted

  Tranquil in the half-light cast by the high branches, let us imbue our love with this deep silence.

  Let us merge our souls, our hearts and our enraptured senses, amid the hazy listlessness of the pines and the arbutus trees.

  Half close your eyes, cross your arms on your breast, and from your dormant heart chase out for ever all purpose.

  Let us offer no resistance to the gentle rocking breeze that comes and ruffles at your feet the waves of
russet grass.

  Et quand, solennel, le soir

  Des chênes noirs tombera,

  Voix de notre désespoir,

  Le rossignol chantera.

  And when night falls, solemnly, from the black oak trees, the voice of our despair, the nightingale will sing.

  Colloque sentimental

  Dans le vieux parc solitaire et glacé,

  Deux formes ont tout à l’heure passé.

  Leurs yeux sont morts et leurs lèvres sont molles,

  Et l’on entend à peine leurs paroles.

  Dans le vieux parc solitaire et glacé,

  Deux spectres ont évoqué le passé.

  – Te souvient-il de notre extase ancienne?

  – Pourquoi voulez-vous donc qu’il m’en souvienne?

  Sentimental Dialogue

  In the lonely, frozen old park, two figures passed by just now.

  Their eyes are dead and their lips are limp, and their words can hardly be heard.

  In the lonely, frozen old park, two spectres evoked the past.

  – Do you remember our old rapture?

  – Why on earth should I remember that?

  – Ton coeur bat-il toujours à mon seul nom?

  Toujours vois-tu mon âme en rêve? – Non.

  – Ah! les beaux jours de bonheur indicible

  Où nous joignions nos bouches! – C’est possible.