Collected French Translations: Prose

by Ashbery, John

  The world is peopled by intrepid talkers and blasphemers; they harm themselves alone. The real damage, the true torture is for me only in the spectacle of a false authority which imposes itself. I am vexed only with those who, through their credit, their position, or the authority of a word irregularly acquired, open naive souls to the first joys of goodness and beauty. I blame also those who beneath the vaults of our temples vent an unhealthy clamor about goodness; those who martyrize genius; those, finally, who in their conscience falsify and pervert the natural meaning of the truth. These are the real culprits. This is the evil to be exorcised.

  The positivists do not love modern beauty. They are cut off from its music, unless it be lively, dramatic music.

  I have known some who were noble-hearted, simple, and touching in their good nature. They have kindness, quietude, something which resembles the feeling of duty accomplished. They have a part of the truth, but they do not have the truth.

  The law which directs us toward what we do not have is a fecund and necessary one; we love what completes us. Art, morality, and justice proceed toward nobler ends. The error is to search for the poet’s set form of words. Nature is too diverse in her infinite activity for it to be possible for us to penetrate her action and understand its procedures. The heart—love in its shrewd docility—is still the best and the only guide; perhaps it is only through the heart that truth reveals itself; it has the tact, the certainty, the affirmation.

  If a vague and perpetual regret mingles with all the hours of your life, if it persists, obstinately forcing its way into your thoughts, your actions, your leisures, then your will is only a lost force, your duty is not fully accomplished.

  We behave proudly in the very first moment of intimacy with the things of the mind; those who have seen the ostentation and the external trappings of beauty, everything that has no inner beauty, love these more than her. They speak emphatically, they enter the church to be adored by it. This preoccupation with their person is a sign of their inferiority.

  What remains, and what must be known of the great centuries, are the masterpieces. They are its complete, single, and real expression. At other times, what is essential and characteristic in the works of the human spirit is better written down in the secondary, inferior documents, and nearer to the people, that true artisan of all things.

  Every conduct which lets others believe something other than our thought is a lie. Every act whose motive is concealed is a lie. Even silence in certain circumstances can give rise to misunderstanding. Where then is loyalty, sincerity?

  The common error of worldly folk is to believe that the world ends with them. A single misplaced word, a gesture, clothing suffice to hide one. They see only the skin of the people.

  * * *

  “The heart has its reasons,” it has them, pursues them, deliberates in us according to infinitely mysterious secret laws, so that on the occasion of a meeting, a chance meeting with a woman, it takes possession of the whole person, is a domination and invasion, an obscure moment of weakness, in which one can no longer make out very clearly what conduct is; in which the notion of good and evil no longer exists, or is no longer necessary, because what belongs to the heart in that divine moment is something of eternity.

  * * *

  1876, May. —Without belonging or wanting to belong to any sect or school, especially where art is concerned, one cannot deny a loyalty of mind which must applaud the beautiful wherever it is found, and which imposes on the one who understands it the desire to communicate and explain it.

  I am not intransigeant; I shall never acclaim a school which, though good faith is evident, nevertheless limits itself to pure reality, without taking the past into account. To see and to see well will always be the first precept of the art of painting—that is a truth which has always been true. But it is important also to know the nature of the eye that looks, to seek the cause of the feelings experienced by the artist and communicated to the dilettante, and indeed to determine whether there are any; to see, in a word, whether the gift he has offered is of the right sort and sound in fabric. And it is only after this work of analysis and criticism has been completed that it is important to set the finished work in its place in the temple to beauty which we build in our minds.

  In the crowd, we take away with us the obstinacy of our fate.

  * * *

  Common sense is the talent for good judgment, even without culture, and in a commonplace order of truth. This talent is of supreme use to men who have to do only with the realities of the immediate, the nearest life. It is indispensable to those who create art; also, its absence can sterilize the precious gifts of the finest intellects.

  And yet, one may totally and absurdly lack all practical sense and still have genius. So be it!

  But the painter always has an eye, an eye that sees.

  1876—Photography, used solely for reproducing drawings or bas-reliefs, seems in its proper role in relation to art, which it seconds and aids without leading it astray.

  Imagine museums reproduced in this way. The mind balks at calculating the importance which painting would suddenly assume if placed on the same level as literary power (power of multiplication), with its new security assured in time.

  * * *

  I am repelled by those who pronounce the word “nature” with greedy mouths, and nothing in their hearts.

  I see those who, at the summit of their years and talent, have only their manner, an impotent set of theories, a sterile idiosyncrasy, baseness, vain desire to appear clever. They neglect the studies of Corot, which are masterpieces of awkwardness: There the eye and the mind have absolute control; the hand is slave to observation. Corot is the ingenious and sincere imitator of the practice of the art of painting as we find it in the studies of the old masters. Landscape made in this way interests me and attracts me like a delectation. And to think that industry is taking over the studio model: The shops sell photographic life studies, all kinds of nudes, limbs and so on: a truly deadly result. They are as hideous to see as a plaster cast made from life.

  The same cynicism prevails for landscape: trees, forests, streams, plains, skies, clouds. One could go no further toward falsifying the view, corrupting students, destroying the seeds of art in young minds.

  Rembrandt, despite his masculine energy, kept the sensibility which leads into the paths of the heart. He ransacked its innermost recesses.

  Engraving is a completely different agent from faithful photography. It does not render inferior the work which it retraces or re-creates; it is not superior to it; its aim is different; it is something else.

  Every document of emotion and passion, of sensibility or even of thought left on marble, on canvas, or in a book, is sacred. This is our true patrimony, the most precious one. And with what nobility it clothes us, poor and precarious creators that we are: The least chronicle, the most precise date of a simple human event—will they ever say what the marvels of a cathedral proclaim, or the tiniest shard of stone from its walls! Touched by mankind, it is impregnated with the spirit of the times. Each era has left a spiritual era in this way. It is through art that the moral and thinking life of humanity can be recaptured and reexperienced.

  If it were given us to be able to collect and suddenly call into being the immense chain of materials on which man has left the stamp of his sorrow or the joy of his passion, all palpitating with life, what a sublime reading it would be!

  If I had to speak of Michelangelo on the occasion of his centenary, I would have spoken of his soul. I would have said that what it is vital to see in a great man is, more than anything, nature, the force of soul which animates him. When the soul is powerful, the work is too. Michelangelo passed long periods of time without producing. It was then that he wrote his sonnets. His life is beautiful.

  There is in Amsterdam a picture which is still in the house where Rembrandt saw it and placed it. The nail from which it hangs is still the same one that the master drove into the wall, in the place an
d the light that he chose. In France we are incapable of thus conserving works of art, so long and in the same place.

  Music is a nocturnal art, the art of the dream; it reigns in winter, in the hour when the soul confines itself.

  Music fashions our soul in our youth, and we remain faithful, later on, to the first emotions; music renews them like a kind of resurrection.

  Redon’s journal, 1867–1915; À Soi-même: Notes sur la vie, l’art et les artistes (Paris: Henri Fleury, 1922). Art and Literature 6 (Autumn 1965).

  ALFRED JARRY

  (1873–1907)

  FEAR VISITS LOVE

  FEAR: Your clock has three hands. Why?

  LOVE: It’s the custom here.

  FEAR: Oh dear, why those three hands? I’m so upset …

  LOVE: Nothing could be more simple, more natural. Calm yourself. The first marks the hour, the second draws along the minutes, and the third, always motionless, eternalizes my indifference.

  FEAR: You’re joking. I can’t believe that you would dare to presume … No, you wouldn’t dare …

  LOVE: To lock and load my heart?

  FEAR: I don’t understand a word of what you’re saying.

  LOVE: And when I stop talking?

  FEAR: Oh! I understand much better.

  LOVE: That’s precisely the explanation.

  FEAR: What explanation?

  LOVE: The one I don’t wish to give you.

  FEAR: I ought to have suspected before I came here that everything would be singular …

  LOVE: Except for the plurality of my existence. Not content with being double, I am often triple.

  FEAR: On my way to your house I crossed a boulevard, deserted as far as infinity, and I walked along beside a great wall, a wall so high and so long that I could barely see a few treetops over it, like clowns’ pompoms. I am sure that behind that wall is a cemetery.

  LOVE: There is always a cemetery behind a wall.

  FEAR: You shouldn’t joke about things you don’t know about.

  LOVE: I am not in the habit of joking about things which are known to be in the public interest. The only thing I find very funny is fear. When you tremble I feel like laughing.

  FEAR: You’re not very lovable.

  LOVE: I am loved. That’s enough for me.

  FEAR: In this very high, very long wall, I finally found an extremely narrow little door, apparently without a lock.

  LOVE: I consider that my door should be sexless. It’s more chaste.

  FEAR: However, by groping in the dark I finally managed to open it.

  LOVE: Excellent … breach, Madame. In the night all doors are gray, open …

  FEAR: I entered a blackness, a dark alley which flowed like a torrent at the bottom of a gorge, and I lifted up my head to seek God.

  LOVE: Another breach, since you don’t believe in God.

  FEAR: It’s true, I don’t believe … But when I’m afraid, it comforts me …

  LOVE: Absurd. Absurd. Absolute. Absolute.

  FEAR: I arrived home by way of the absurd or the absolute, which doesn’t matter since I arrived. But I’m beginning to feel like a wanderer in a bad dream. Your house doesn’t exist, and you yourself are a figment of my imagination.

  LOVE: Nothing here is imaginary. You may touch what belongs to me. You may touch it, on condition that you don’t take it with you, for, in all probability, it doesn’t belong to you.

  FEAR: I sought God, yes, and very high up, in the sky or the ceiling of that alley which flowed like the torrent in a gorge, I found something like transparent water. So there were two torrents to cross, one with my feet, the other with my head. And the inexplicable wall, that high cemetery wall continued, forming an angle …

  LOVE: The angle of eternity.

  FEAR: You don’t seem to be aware of what goes on in your house. So listen seriously to me.

  LOVE: I pay very little attention to the details1 of my door.

  FEAR: You’re wrong. It’s frightening.

  LOVE: Then go on wasting your time. My own is fixed from now on by the third hand of the clock.

  FEAR: Over my head the limpidity of the water diminished, and at my feet the mud increased. I walked in slime with a stale odor of musk. In the night witches come and empty their slop pails under the windows of young men. Witches whose bloody hands crush muskrat brains for soap. Vile porridge. Suddenly the water of the sky flowed away between two rooftops and disappeared, taking the stars with it, all the stars. There was no more freedom, my feet took root in the ground. You know of course that freedom ends when the stars fall?

  LOVE: … Starfall.2 Of course.

  FEAR: I stood before another door, even more hermetically shut than the first. Two steps, of which the first was missing …

  LOVE: Of which the first … And what held up the second, Madame?

  FEAR: Nothing. You knew there had been a first step because there was a gap. Yet the second led you to a threshold! Perhaps the hole of the first step was a cellar window, an air shaft …

  LOVE: The shaft,3 if I understand correctly.

  FEAR: At first I didn’t believe that. You only believe the things that give you pleasure. After an hour and a half I placed my toe on the second step and felt it was firm.

  LOVE: Nothing is firm except the things held up by emptiness. The globe, for instance.

  FEAR: I climbed the chimerical staircase which one never comes down again.

  LOVE: You climbed the ladder of the spheres like an astrologer’s compasses. It’s not new, but you did it without realizing it, because it’s a little too logical for you.

  FEAR: I climbed … like an astrologer’s compasses? You’re not going to tell me my legs are skinny, I hope! Let me get on with the story.

  LOVE: Uh … do go on, Madame. As for me, I’m going to rest a bit until you’ve finished, as I’m very lazy. Good night.

  FEAR: It was in your corridor of misfortune that I had a foretaste of death! Once the hermetically sealed door was open (this one had no lock, only a copper knocker, and it opened as though it were melting under the repeated blows), I entered, contracting my lips and nostrils so as not to breathe the air of an accursed house. A dog went in with me. I don’t know what dog. He was more frightened than his master (I was his master since he had followed me blindly this far), he clung to my skirts, he licked my hands and wet them with the anguish of his tongue which was almost cold. I had an urge to kill him or hug him affectionately so that he wouldn’t leave me. He was a good dog, he didn’t growl, at the same time he sniffed the doubtful things in that house. He should have growled. The cry of an animal would certainly have brought me back to my natural feelings. And one can only give in to one’s supernatural feelings, since they are outside one. I was well aware that the fidelity of a dog can’t counterbalance the sweetness of the wings of the unknown, which are membranous. Don’t tell me that there are human eyes in the darkness, and that infinity is a pupil; don’t tell me that the network of human nerves ends in eyes which are black birds, that network which is a tree splattering the night with its electric tendrils, and whose dead mirror would be a fragment of fulgurite. I am, at present, in a country where the dogs tremble without daring to bark. At the end of the corridor gyrates a pale staircase. The steps balk at the light. It must be a staircase that bites. It’s going to snap shut under my feet, grab my feet. I won’t climb it. And I climb! The dog deserts me, I realize that he is backing away from the mortuary teeth of the staircase. I turn as I climb, but it’s not me that turns, it’s the pale spiral. It has the slow and vertiginous movement of a huge ship rolled by the sea. At each step my heart leaves me and I find my heart again as soon as I have my back to it. I must be moving around my heart. There is some sort of gas lamp in the center of the well of the pale staircase. It makes that light I don’t see. Another door. Oh, this one is pretty. It’s completely transparent, a pale, pinkish violet amethyst. It’s perhaps a simple stained-glass window. It’s sealed with lead, like a coffin. Behind it the bodies of repti
les are slithering in soft laziness. Two white snakes. When they lean against the glass there is a swelling which breaks into bubbles of lilac air. These white snakes have suckers. They have feet. Long sinewy feet. This glass distorts the objects behind it, and the new door—which opens—reveals two arms, just arms …

  LOVE: Mine.

  FEAR: Here I am in an amazing room.

  LOVE: Quite so. There is only one bed.

  FEAR: And it’s not yours.

  LOVE: At any rate it’s the one I sleep in when you are here.

  FEAR: It’s carved out of yew.

  LOVE: The turtledoves coo at their ease in the branches of the yew.

  FEAR: But the roots of the yew pierce the bellies of the dead.

  LOVE: In that case yews are called cypresses. You go too far!

  FEAR: My goodness, how you insist on the honorary titles of trees! I suppose you never get carried away.

  LOVE: It is certain that I don’t know you.

  FEAR: Do you know yourself?

  LOVE: With pleasure. I admit it … according to the temple of Apollo, at Delphi.

  FEAR: We shouldn’t speak lightly in this room, it’s so dark you can hear the spiders spinning in its brain.

  LOVE: Since you began to talk seriously they have spun all the canvas for the sails of the boat that is carrying me far from you.

  FEAR: It has two windows, this room, two windows facing north …

  LOVE: Only in the evening …

  FEAR: Daylight never penetrates here, does it?

  LOVE: Yes, it does, when I change my shirt.

  FEAR: And what is that screen of mirrors?

  LOVE: It’s the cage I keep the daylight in … I mean …