The Penguin Book of French Poetry Read online

  Et je redoute l’hiver parce que c’est la saison du confort!

  Autumn. Our ship raised up in the motionless mists turns towards the port of wretchedness, the vast city, its sky stained with fire and mud. Ah! the rotten rags, the rain-soaked bread, the drunkenness, the thousand loves that have crucified me! Will she never then have done, this ghoul queen of millions of souls and dead bodies which will be judged! I see myself once more, my skin eaten by mud and plague, my hair and armpits full of worms and still larger worms in my heart, lying stretched out among strangers without age, without feeling… I could have died there… Dreadful evocation! I loathe poverty.

  And I fear winter because it is the season of comfort!

  – Quelquefois je vois au ciel des plages sans fin couvertes de blanches nations en joie. Un grand vaisseau d’or, au-dessus de moi, agite ses pavillons multicolores sous les brises du matin. J’ai créé toutes les fêtes, tous les triomphes, tous les drames. J’ai essayé d’inventer de nouvelles flaurs, de nouveaux astres, de nouvelles chairs, de nouvelles langues. J’ai cru acquérir des pouvoirs surnaturels. Eh bien! je dois enterrer mon imagination et mes souvenirs! Une belle gloire d’artiste et de conteur emportée!

  Moi! moi qui me suis dit mage ou ange, dispensé de toute morale, je suis rendu au sol, avec un devoir à chercher, et la réalité rugueuse à étreindre! Paysan!

  Suis-je trompé? la charité serait-elle soeur de la mort, pour moi?

  Enfin, je demanderai pardon pour m’être nourri de mensonge. Et allons.

  – Sometimes I see in the sky beaches without end covered with white nations in joyfulness. Above me a grèat golden vessel waves its multicoloured pennants in the morning breezes. I created all festivals, all triumphs, all dramas. I tried to invent new flowers, new stars, new flesh, new tongues. I thought I was acquiring supernatural powers. Well! I must bury my imagination and my memories! An artist and storyteller’s fine fame swept away!

  I! I who called myself mage or angel, exempt from all morality, I am returned to the earth, with a task to discover, and wrinkled reality to embrace! Peasant!

  Am I deceived? could charity be, for me, the sister of death?

  To round things off, I shall ask pardon for having fed on lies. And let’s go.

  Mais pas une main amie! et où puiser le secours?

  ∗

  Oui, l’heure nouvelle est au moins très-sévère.

  Car je puis dire que la victoire m’est acquise: les grincements de dents, les sifflements de feu, les soupirs empestés se modèrent. Tous les souvenirs immondes s’effacent. Mes derniers regrets détalent, – des jalousies pour les mendiants, les brigands, les amis de la mort, les arriérés de toutes sortes. – Damnés, si je me vengeais!

  Il faut être absolument moderne.

  Point de cantiques: tenir le pas gagné. Dure nuit! le sang séché fume sur ma face, et je n’ai rien derrière moi, que cet horrible arbrisseau!… Le combat spirituel est aussi brutal que la bataille d’hommes; mais la vision de la justice est le plaisir de Dieu seul.

  But no friendly hand! and where shall I draw succour?

  ∗

  Yes, the new hour is to say the least very rigorous.

  For I can say that victory is mine: the gnashing of teeth, the hissing of flame, the pestilent sighings diminish. All the foul memories are fading away. My last regrets take to their heels, – envy of beggars, brigands, the friends of death, all kinds of stunted creatures. – Damned souls, if I took my revenge!

  One must be absolutely modern.

  No canticles: keep the foothold gained. A harsh night! the dried blood smokes on my face, and I have nothing behind me but that horrible bush!… Spiritual combat is as brutal as the battle of men; but the vision of justice is God’s pleasure alone.

  Cependant c’est la veille. Recevons tous les influx de vigueur et de tendresse réelle. Et à l’aurore, armés d’une ardente patience, nous entrerons aux splendides villes.

  Que parlais-je de main amie! Un bel avantage, c’est que je puis rire des vieilles amours mensongères, et frapper de honte ces couples menteurs, – j’ai vu l’enfer des femmes là-bas; – et il me sera loisible de posséder la vérité dans une âme et un corps.

  And yet this is the eve. Let us receive every influx of vigour and of real tenderness. And at dawn, armed with a passionate patience, we shall enter the glorious cities.

  Why talk of a friendly hand! A great advantage is that I can laugh at old illusory loves, and strike shame into those deceitful couples, – I saw the hell of women down in that place; – and it will be lawful for me now to possess truth in one soul and one body.

  Jules Laforgue

  (1860–87)

  It is only recently that Laforgue’s importance in the evolution of poetry, not only within France but beyond its borders, has been fully appreciated. He is one of the originators of modern free verse, a strong influence on T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound among many other poets, especially in the United States, and a man whose ironic temperament and conscious literary iconoclasm (from an established base of technical expertise that distinguishes him from the anarchic Corbière) make him a bridge between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Potentially a very great modern poet, Laforgue died of tuberculosis at the age of 27, after an accelerated artistic development which almost rivals that of Rimbaud, and without seeing his revolutionary Derniers Vers published in book form.

  He was born (like Lautréamont and Supervielle) in Montevideo, Uruguay, but lived from 1876 in France and for a time in Germany, where he worked as French Reader to the Empress Augusta. He studied art, and formed an important friendship with Gustave Kahn, a minor Symbolist poet whose influential theories on free verse have more weight than his practical output. Reading widely in philosophy and drawn especially to Schopenhauer, Laforgue developed a Nihilist view of life and art, strongly coloured too by Hartmann’s theories of the Unconscious. The replacement of ethics by aesthetics appealed to a young poet already rootless, alienated, cynical about contemporary values, and highly sensitive both to his own insecurities and to his perception of ‘normal’ life as deterministic and sterile. The new knowledge of psychology and neurology expanded his interest in the Unconscious and its relationship with sensory perception, and he located Art’s future role in that area, while striking a superior attitude of Decadent ‘ennui’ towards the vulgarity and materialism of society.

  His work nevertheless contains strange dualities: taut emotion and destructive irony; lyricism and detachment; a jaundiced view of love and sex, yet a longing for success in both; a nausea induced by the bourgeoisie yet also the artistic exile’s nostalgia for order. Most importantly, his immobilizing nineteenth-century sensitivity to the banality of external life is overridden by a dynamic twentieth-century urge to live through active exploration of his inner responses.

  His first important volume, Les Complaintes, published in 1885 after his repudiation of his earlier work, is intermittently brilliant. In each ‘lament’ he projects his own state of mind ironically into another voice or voices, sometimes identified and sometimes not. But the poet’s voice is powerfully present too; Laforgue could never have been a Symbolist, for the Ego is too urgently active and too articulate to disappear within the marble block or melt into the music. Transposed into images of striking originality, Nihilist ideas abound in Les Complaintes: behaviour is biologically determined; personality is multiple and infinitely complex; morality is a fraud and religion a fantasy; only Art has reality and permanence; only the study of our sensations is of interest; language must disintegrate and re-form to express the fractured yet vibrant experience of mind and senses. Laforgue orchestrates clashing registers of language and exploits latent verbal ambiguities with wit and virtuosity in this volume, in Alexandrine and octosyllabic verse that is highly flexible and in fact straining at its metrical seams, but still precariously intact.

  After this his second volume, L’Imitation de Notre-Dame la Lune (1886), is perhaps surprisingly polished and even precious, cle
anly articulated within metrical forms of exquisite and musical regularity. While the characteristics of style and tone exemplified in Les Complaintes are strongly present here too, it is almost as if Laforgue wanted to demonstrate his complete mastery of established technique, in this volume that concentrates thematically on the Pierrot clown figure, before his radical change of course towards modern ‘vers libres’ in his Derniers Vers, published in 1890.

  This move was stimulated by Laforgue’s own translation of Walt Whitman which introduced the American poet to French readers, and by the encouragement of Kahn. ‘L’Hiver qui vient’, which opens this final volume, is probably the first genuine and successful free verse poem of any length in the French language, and the first of twelve such revolutionary works composed by Laforgue in the last full year of his life. These poems frequently rhyme, but in a semi-anarchic way; and the rhymes are part of a liberated, semi-unconscious pattern of verbal association in which recurring motifs provide landmarks. Metre and rhythm now follow very freely the impulse behind the expression, and each line has an ‘inner law’ dictated by what Rémy de Gourmont was to call its ‘emotive idea’. The number of syllables in the line corresponds flexibly to an inhalation and exhalation, as Claudel would later conceive it, of image, feeling and idea. The stanza is now the sentence, or vice versa, its natural dynamics indicated by punctuation, syntactic shape on the page, ‘points de suspension’ and blank spaces.

  The whole is a taut equilibrium of élan and control, anarchy and form. Rich in associative resonance, it has a psychological rather than rhetorical unity that can be perceived only intuitively, and poetry is now conceived, in Laforgue’s own words, as ‘the visible tips of disconnected dreams’. Laforgue’s last volume establishes him as one of the originators of modernism, for here we can see Baudelaire’s dream of poetry as a ‘suggestive magic containing both object and subject’ starting to become a reality.

  Complainte des Pianos qu’on entend dans les quartiers aisés

  Menez l’âme que les Lettres ont bien nourrie,

  Les pianos, les pianos, dans les quartiers aisés!

  Premiers soirs, sans pardessus, chaste flânerie,

  Aux complaintes des nerfs incompris ou brisés.

  Ces enfants, à quoi rêvent-elles,

  Dans les ennuis des ritournelles?

  – “Préaux des soirs,

  Christs des dortoirs!

  “Tu t’en vas et tu nous laisses,

  Tu nous laiss’s et tu t’en vas,

  Défaire et refaire ses tresses,

  Broder d’éternels canevas.”

  Lament of the Pianos heard in the Prosperous Districts

  Conduct the soul well versed in Literature, pianos, pianos in the prosperous districts! First coatless evenings, chaste strolling, to the laments of misunderstood or fractured nerves.

  What do they dream of, those girls, in the tedium of ritornellos?

  – ‘Evening schoolyards, Christs in the dormitories!

  You go away and leave us, you leave us and you go away, to unbind our tresses and bind them once more, to embroider everlasting canvases.’

  Jolie ou vague? triste ou sage? encore pure?

  O jours, tout m’est égal? ou, monde, moi je veux?

  Et si vierge, du moins, de la bonne blessure

  Sachant quels gras couchants ont les plus blancs aveux?

  Mon Dieu, à quoi donc rêvent-elles?

  A des Roland, à des dentelles?

  – “Coeurs en prison,

  Lentes saisons!

  “Tu t’en vas et tu nous quittes,

  Tu nous quitt’s et tu t’en vas!

  Couvents gris, choeurs de Sulamites,

  Sur nos seins nuls croisons nos bras.”

  Fatales clés de l’être un beau jour apparues;

  Psitt! aux hérédités en ponctuels ferments,

  Dans le bal incessant de nos étranges rues;

  Ah! pensionnats, théâtres, journaux, romans!

  Pretty or nondescript? sad or wise? still pure? O days, is it all the same to me? or, world, what I want is…? And if virgin, at least, of the good wound knowing what plump sunsets have the whitest confessions?

  My God, what then do they dream of? Of Rolands, of lace?

  ‘Hearts imprisoned, slow seasons!

  You go away and leave us, you leave us and you go away! Grey convents, choirs of Shulamites, let us fold our arms across our non-existent breasts.’

  Fatal keys of being who appeared one fine day; psst! over here! to heredities in seasonal ferment, in the unceasing ball of our strange streets; ah! boarding schools, theatres, newspapers, novels!

  Allez, stériles ritournelles,

  La vie est vraie et criminelle.

  – “Rideaux tirés,

  Peut-on entrer?

  “Tu t’en vas et tu nous laisses,

  Tu nous laiss’s et tu t’en vas,

  La source des frais rosiers baisse,

  Vraiment! Et lui qui ne vient pas…”

  Il viendra! Vous serez les pauvres coeurs en faute,

  Fiancés au remords comme aux essais sans fond,

  Et les suffisants coeurs cossus, n’ayant d’autre hôte

  Qu’un train-train pavoisé d’estime et de chiffons.

  Mourir? peut-être brodent-elles,

  Pour un oncle à dot, des bretelles?

  – “Jamais! Jamais!

  Si tu savais!

  Come on, sterile ritornellos, life is real and criminal.

  ‘Drawn curtains, may one enter?

  You go away and leave us, you leave us and you go away, the spring amid fresh rose trees runs dry, truly! And he who does not come…’

  He will come! You’ll be the wretched souls at fault, betrothed to remorse as to bottomless tests, and the bumptious affluent souls, having no other inhabitant but a daily round decked out with prestige and ribbons.

  To die? perhaps they are embroidering braces for an endowed uncle?

  ‘Never! Never! If only you knew!

  “Tu t’en vas et tu nous quittes,

  Tu nous quitt’s et tu t’en vas,

  Mais tu nous reviendras bien vite

  Guérir mon beau mal, n’est-ce pas?”

  Et c’est vrai! l’Idéal les fait divaguer toutes,

  Vigne bohême, même en ces quartiers aisés.

  La vie est là; le pur flacon des vives gouttes

  Sera, comme il convient, d’eau propre baptisé.

  Aussi, bientôt, se joueront-elles

  De plus exactes ritournelles.

  “– Seul oreiller!

  Mur familier!

  “Tu t’en vas et tu nous laisses,

  Tu nous laiss’s et tu t’en vas,

  Que ne suis-je morte à la messe!

  O mois, ô linges, ô repas!”

  You go away and leave us, you leave us and you go away, but you’ll come back quickly, won’t you, to cure my sweet suffering?’

  And it’s true! The Ideal sets all their minds wandering, that bohemian vine, even in these prosperous districts. Life is there; the pure flask with its living drops will be baptized, according to the form, in clean water.

  And so, before long, they’ll make child’s play of more rigorous ritornellos.

  ‘Solo pillow! Familiar wall!

  You go away and leave us, you leave us and you go away, would to God I’d died at mass! O months, O laundry, O meals!’

  Complainte des Nostalgies préhistoriques

  La nuit bruine sur les villes.

  Mal repu des gains machinals,

  On dîne; et gonflé d’idéal,

  Chacun sirote son idylle,

  Ou furtive, ou facile.

  Echos des grands soirs primitifs!

  Couchants aux flambantes usines,

  Rude paix des sols en gésine,

  Cri jailli là-bas d’un massif,

  Violuptés à vif!

  Dégringolant une vallée,

  Heurter, dans des coquelicots,

  Une enfant bestia
le et brÛlée,

  Qui suce, en blaguant les échos,

  De juteux abricots.

  Lament of Atavistic Hankerings

  Darkness drizzles on the cities. Unsatiated by mechanical wages, we dine; and puffed up with an ideal, each of us sips at his idyll, be it furtive or facile.

  Echoes of great primitive evenings! Sunsets over the flaming factories, rough peace of ground lying fallow,1 a cry bursts out from the shrubs over there, vibrant voluptuous violations!

  Tumbling down a valley, stumbling amid the poppies against a bestial scorched child; she sucks, bantering with the echoes, at juice-filled apricots.

  Livrer aux langueurs des soirées

  Sa toison où du cristal luit,

  Pourlécher ses lèvres sucrées,

  Nous barbouiller le corps de fruits

  Et lutter comme essui!

  Un moment, béer, sans rien dire,

  Inquiets d’une étoile là-haut;

  Puis, sans but, bien gentils satyres,

  Nous prendre aux premiers sanglots

  Fraternels des crapauds.

  Et, nous délèvrant de l’extase,