The Penguin Book of French Poetry Read online

  In Praise of Jade

  If the Sage,1 having little esteem for alabaster, venerates the pure unctuous Jade, it is not because alabaster is common and the other rare: Know rather that Jade is good,

  For it is soft to the touch – but unyielding. For it is discreet: its veins are slender, compact and firm.

  For it is just since it has angles and does not wound. For it is urbane when, hanging from the belt, it bows and touches the earth.

  For it is musical: its voice rises, prolonged until the rapid fall. For it is sincere, its radiance is not veiled by its flaws nor its flaws by its radiance.

  Comme la vertu, dans le Sage, n’a besoin d’aucune parure, le Jade seul peut décemment se présenter seul.

  Son éloge est donc l’éloge même de la vertu.

  Just as virtue in the Sage needs no adornment, only Jade can decently present itself alone.…

  Its praise is thus the very praise of virtue.

  Nom caché

  Le véritable Nom n’est pas celui qui dore les portiques, illustre les actes; ni que le peuple mâche de dépit;

  Le véritable Nom n’est point lu dans le Palais même, ni aux jardins ni aux grottes, mais demeure caché par les eaux sous la voÛte de l’aqueduc où je m’abreuve.

  Seulement dans la très grande sécheresse, quand l’hiver crépite sans flux, quand les sources, basses à l’extrême, s’encoquillent dans leurs glaces,

  Hidden Name

  The true Name is not the one that gilds porticos, gives lustre to deeds; nor the one that the people chew with resentment;

  The true Name is not read in the Palace itself, nor in the gardens nor the grottoes, but remains hidden by the waters beneath the vault of the aqueduct where I quench my thirst.

  Only in the great drought, when winter crackles without flowing, when the springs at their lowest ebb spiral into icy shell-shapes,

  Quand le vide est au cœur du souterrain et dans le souterrain du coeur, – où le sang même ne roule plus, – sous la voÛte alors accessible se peut recueillir le Nom.

  Mais fondent les eaux dures, déborde la vie, vienne le torrent dévastateur plutôt que la Connaissance!

  When the void is at the heart of the cavern and in the cavern of the heart, – when blood itself no longer circulates, – beneath the vault, accessible now, can the Name be recorded.

  But let the hard waters melt, let life overflow, let the devastating torrent come rather than Knowledge!

  Cubism, cosmopolitanism and modernism

  In the years between the turn of the century and the First World War, what Apollinaire called a ‘new spirit’ animated the literary avant-garde in Paris, as poets turned away from the artificiality of Symbolism and opened their perception to all the multiple stimuli of modern city life and the excitement of travel. The mobility and speed of both physical existence and sensory response were increasing, and with them came a growing awareness of discontinuity in perception, and an accelerated breakdown of traditional modes of thought and expression.

  The process begun by Rimbaud and Laforgue reached a feverish level of experimentation in this fascinating period. Groups came and went, manifestos proliferated, ephemeral magazines fired ideas at one another, and café debate was more intense than ever. Barriers between an forms were dissolved, and, in a particularly stimulating interaction of poetry and painting, there was a meeting of minds between a group of writers based in the Rue Ravignan and the artists Picasso, Braque and Gris. The ‘Cubist’ tendency in poetry becomes evident above all in the work of Pierre Reverdy, but it seems useful at this point to consider together five poets of the period: Fargue, Jacob, Apollinaire, Cendrars and Reverdy. There is great diversity in their poetry and they should certainly not be classified as a ‘school’, but they do express collectively the ‘new spirit’, and there are broad similarities in their perception and experience.

  Two other poets for whom there is no room in this collection should be mentioned:

  Valéry Larbaud (1881–1957) was a highly cultured and wealthy man who turned his back on his privileged background to become a compulsive and Whitmanesque traveller, responsive to the pleasure of speed and full of sensitivity in his self-exploration en route. In his imagination he travelled even further, recording the adventures of a globe-trotting American millionaire in his free verse volume Poésies d’A. O. Barnabooth; but his writing is perhaps pale by comparison with the blazing force of Cendrars.

  André Salmon (1881–1969) was a campaigner for Cubism and a well-known figure in Parisian artistic life. His poetry discovers the extraordinary in the commonplace, and beauty in the Paris underworld. Apollinaire’s ‘Poème lu au mariage d’André Salmon’ suggests that he and Salmon are ‘pèlerins de la perdition’, adventurers risking their entire identity in their radical plunge into experience. Salmon published Féeries 1907, Le Calumet 1910, Le Livre et la bouteille 1919, Prikaz 1919, L’Age de l’humanité 1921, Peindre 1922.

  Lèon-Paul Fargue

  (1876–1947)

  Though a widely travelled man, Fargue is an essentially Parisian poet, born in that city and constantly alive through his senses to its spirit. ‘Le Piéton de Paris’, the title of one of his books, aptly describes the man himself. After early contacts with the Symbolists, he became intensely involved in the ferment of new aesthetic ideas in the years preceding the 1914–18 war, and his verse and prose-poems struck a genuinely modernist note, while also preserving a more traditional lyricism and musical intimacy. Fargue championed the causes of Van Gogh, Bonnard and the Ballets Russes, and exchanged ideas with Joyce, Stravinsky, Satie and Picasso.

  His closest artistic affinities are probably with Apollinaire and Cendrars, for he seeks to be a vibrant and mobile perceiver of the intensity of modern city life. His creative existence is a pattern of absorption and imaginative response: ‘Strive to be sensitive, infinitely receptive, always in a state of osmosis.’ The city becomes a magical yet melancholy symphony of impressions, a dreamlike world made concrete through language.

  Claudel described him as ‘a born poet’. Yet there is also deep insecurity and anxiety in Fargue’s writing, a sense of tragedy not fully concealed by his wit and verbal inventiveness, and induced at least partly by the death of his father in 1909 as well as by disappointments in relationships.

  Major volumes: Poémes 1905 and 1912, Pour la Musique 1914, Espaces 1928, Sous la Lampe 1929, Haute Solitude 1941.

  Sur le trottoir tout gras…

  Sur le trottoir tout gras de bouges aux carreaux brouillés, des filles qui semblent de garde contre un terrible mur de réclames se signent lorsqu’il fait des éclairs. Quelqu’un d’invisible siffle et se hâte…

  La bande éclatante d’un bar à musique éclaire des spectres qui attendent…

  L’ennui s’endort dans ses palais qui soufflent leur haleine chaude…

  Des pensées incomprises, des amours pauvres et des idylles depuis longtemps en marche frôlent les boutiques fermées et sombres…

  Du côté des remparts souffre une seule lumière…

  Une ruelle délaissée dans les terrains vagues reste obscure

  Où l’amour blessé chante et se traîne

  Et regarde de toutes ses forces l’image déchirée du soir…

  On the pavement…

  On the pavement swilling with brothels, their windows opaque, whores apparently on guard before an appalling wall of advertisements cross themselves when the lightning flashes. Someone invisible whistles and hurries on… The blaring strip of light of a music tavern illumines waiting phantoms… Apathy falls asleep in its palaces that exhale their hot breath… Uncomprehended thoughts, paltry loves and idylls long since on the move brush past the closed and darkened shops… Over by the city wall a solitary light suffers… A forsaken alleyway in waste ground remains obscure Where wounded love sings and drags itself along And gazes with all its strength at the ragged image of the evening…

  Sous des hangars, de puissants moteurs font de grands gestes sur les murs. Des
hommes obscurs allument leur fête derrière la baie vitrée qui tremble…

  Une branche de canal fuit sous les lampes. Les arcs voltaïques y bercent par instants de grêles escaliers d’argent… L’arche d’un pont semble monter comme une trombe… L’écluse embouche, par ses hautes portes grinçantes et criblées de blessures, les longs clairons de l’eau stridente. Elle tord et cambre au vent sa crinière…

  J’aime entendre encore longtemps sa grande chanson crevée et fraîche…

  Inside sheds, powerful engines gesture vividly on the walls. Indistinct men light the spark of their festivity behind the quivering glazed hatch… A canal arm recedes under the lanterns. Voltaic arcs intermittently cradle slender silver staircases… The arch of a bridge seems to rise like a waterspout… The sluice gate trumpets through its tall grating wound-riddled doors the long clarion calls of the shrill water. It twists and arches its mane in the wind… I love to go on hearing its great prolonged song, exhausted and fresh…

  La rampe s’allume…

  La rampe s’allume. Un clavier s’éclaire au bord des vagues. Les noctiluques font la chaîne. On entend bouillir et filtrer le lent bruissement des bêtes du sable…

  Une barque chargée arrive dans l’ombre où les chapes vitrées des méduses montent obliquement et affleurent comme les premiers rêves de la nuit chaude…

  De singuliers passants surgissent comme des vagues de fond, presque sur place, avec une douceur obscure. Des formes lentes s’arrachent du sol et déplacent de l’air, comme des plantes aux larges palmes. Les fantômes d’une heure de faiblesse défilent sur cette berge où viennent finir la musique et la pensée qui arrivent du fond des âges. Devant la villa, dans le jardin noir autrefois si clair, un pas bien connu réveille les roses mortes…

  The Footlights1 blaze…

  The footlights blaze. A keyboard is lit up at the edge of the waves. The noctilucae2 dance hand in hand. The slow murmuring of the sand creatures is audible as it simmers and seeps…

  A laden boat arrives in the shadows where the vitreous copes of the jellyfish rise at an angle and level out at the surface like the first dreams in the warm night…

  Strange passing figures surge up like tidal waves, almost on the spot, with a mysterious gentleness. Slow-moving shapes uproot themselves from the ground and displace air, like broad-palmed plants. The ghosts of an hour of weakness pass in procession on this bank where the journey of music and thought from the depths of the ages comes to its end. In front of the villa, in the dark garden that was once so bright, a familiar step awakens the dead roses…

  Un vieil espoir, qui ne veut pas cesser de se débattre à la lumière… Des souvenirs, tels qu’on n’eÛt pas osé les arracher à leurs retraites, nous hèlent d’une voix pénétrante… Ils font de grands signes. Ils crient, comme ces oiseaux doux et blancs aux grêles pieds d’or qui fuyaient l’écume un jour que nous passions sur la grève. Ils crient les longs remords. Ils crient la longue odeur saline et brÛlée jusqu’à la courbe…

  Le vent s’élève. La mer clame et flambe noir, et mêle ses routes. Le phare qui tourne à pleins poings son verre de sang dans les étoiles traverse un bras de mer pour toucher ma tête et la vitre. Et je souffre contre l’auberge isolée au bord d’un champ sombre…

  An old hope, which will not cease to struggle in the light… Memories, of such a kind that one would not have dared to tear them from their lairs, hail us with piercing voices… They beckon expansively. They cry out, like those gentle white birds with slender golden feet that flew before the foam one day as we moved along the shore. They cry out prolonged remorse. They cry out the long, burnt and salty smell as far as the curve…

  The wind is rising. The sea clamours and flames black, and mingles its currents. The lighthouse, its clenched fists spinning its glass of blood among the stars, crosses an arm of the sea to touch my head and the glass pane. And I am suffering against the remote inn at the edge of a dark field…

  La Gare

  Gare de la douleur j’ai fait toutes tes routes.

  Je ne peux plus aller, je ne peux plus partir.

  J’ai traîné sous tes ciels, j’ai crié sous tes voÛtes.

  Je me tends vers le jour où j’en verrai sortir

  Le masque sans regard qui roule à ma rencontre

  Sur le crassier livide où je rampe vers lui,

  Quand le convoi des jours qui brÛle ses décombres

  Crachera son repas d’ombres pour d’autres ombres

  Dans l’étable de fer où rumine la nuit.

  Ville de fiel, orgues brumeuses sous l’abside

  Où les jouets divins s’entrouvrent pour nous voir,

  Je n’entends plus gronder dans ton gouffre l’espoir

  Que me soufflaient tes choeurs, que me traçaient tes signes,

  A l’heure où les maisons s’allument pour le soir.

  The Railway Station

  Station of suffering I have travelled all your tracks. I can go no longer, I can no longer leave. I have lingered beneath your skies, cried out beneath your vaulted roofs. I strain towards the day when I will see the eyeless mask rolling out to meet me over the livid slagheap where I crawl towards it, when the train of days that burns its rubbish will spit out its meal of shadows for other shadows in the iron cattleshed where night chews the cud. City of gall, misty organs beneath the apse where the divine fishplates part to see us, I hear no longer the rumbling in your chasm of the hope that your choirs breathed on me, that your signs marked out for me, at the hour when the houses light their lamps for the evening.

  Ruche du miel amer où les hommes essaiment,

  Port crevé de strideurs, noir de remorqueurs,

  Dont la huée enfonce sa clef dans le cœur

  Haïssable et hagard des ludions qui s’aiment,

  Torpilleur de la chair contre les vieux mirages

  Dont la salve défait et refait les visages,

  Sombre école du soir où la classe rapporte

  L’erreur de s’embrasser, l’erreur de se quitter,

  Il y a bien longtemps que je sais écouter

  Ton écluse qui souffre à deux pas de ma porte.

  Hive of bitter honey where men swarm, port bursting with grating sounds, black with tugboats; their hooting drives its key into the loathsome, haggard heart of the Cartesian divers in their element, torpedo-boat of flesh against the old looming delusions whose salvo unmakes and remakes faces, sombre night-school where the class sneaks on the error of kissing, the error of parting, for a good while now I have known how to listen to your sluice-gate in pain a few yards from my door.

  Je suis venu chez toi du temps de ma jeunesse.

  Je me souviens du cœur, je me souviens du jour

  Où j’ai quitté sans bruit pour surprendre l’amour

  Mes parents qui lisaient, la lampe, la tendresse,

  Et ce vieux logement que je verrai toujours.

  Sur l’atlas enfumé, sur la courbe vitreuse,

  J’ai guidé mon fanal au milieu de mes frères.

  Les ombres commençaient le halage nocturne.

  Le mètre, le ruban filaient dans leur poterne

  Les hommes s’enroulaient autour d’un dévidoir.

  La boutique, l’enclume à l’oreille cassée,

  La forge qui respire une dernière prise,

  La terrasse qui sent le sable et la liqueur

  Rougissaient par degrés sur le livre d’images

  Et gagnaient lentement leur place dans l’église.

  Un tramway secouait en frôlant les feuillages

  Son harnais de sommeil dans les flaques des rues.

  L’hippocampe roulait sa barque et sa lanterne

  Sur les pièges du fer et sur les clefs perdues.

  Il y avait un mur assommé de traverses

  Avec un bec de gaz tout taché de rousseur

  I came to you in the time of my youth. I remember the heart, I remember the day when to take love by surprise, without a sound, I left my reading parents, the lamp, the affection,
and that old dwelling that I shall always see. Over the smoke-darkened map, over the curved glass panel, I guided my ship’s lantern among my brothers. The shadows were beginning the nocturnal towage. The rule and the tape marched off into their vaulted passageway Men were winding themselves around a spool. The workshop, the anvil with the broken car, the forge breathing in a final pinch, the terrace smelling of sand and the liquor were reddening by degrees on the picture-book and slowly reaching their place in the church. A tramcar shook as it brushed against the leaves its harness of sleep into the street puddles. The seahorse sailed his boat and his lantern over the iron traps and the lost keys. There was a wall assaulted by crossbeams with a speckled gas-burner where the tree insects crackled sadly beneath the vacant gaze of the hot flickering light. The smell of a gloomy district where oils are blended sent its crows clumsily into the heavens. A lamp guttered in the evening study. A courtyard rustled in its honey cake. A glass pane knocked like a little exercise book against the blackboard where the hand of the old schoolmaster gently set and removed the stars. The women pounced like spiders when a passer-by stepped on the hem of their web. The great anxious depths were clotting with plunging pistons sought by the future mask as it seeks me. The secret foreboding that goes hunting on man sculled a little closer on my lowered head.

  Où fusaient tristement les insectes des arbres

  Sous le regard absent des éclairs de chaleur.

  L’odeur d’un quartier sombre où se fondent les graisses

  Envoyait gauchement ses corbeaux sur le ciel.

  Une lampe filait dans l’étude du soir.