Collected French Translations: Prose

by Ashbery, John

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  At the twenty-first attempt, immediately struck by the words “cube” and “mesmerize,”11 perfectly framed in the two holes of the stencil, Armand Vage abstained from further meditative reading: A cube would mesmerize him. Having raised a remarkably cubical mossy stone at the edge of a stream that flowed through his sister’s garden, he discovered a substantial hoard, which, having no family, he bequeathed to his regiment, where his death, which followed soon after, was for a time commemorated annually by a ceremony, the very same which the new colonel at the post, indignant at its having fallen into disuse, revived.

  Sixth Document

  In 1877,12 revolution broke out in Belotina. The fleeing king was replaced by an extremely red oligarchy, named, since its members were seven and reciprocally responsible, the Pleiade of Solidary Tribunes. A sort of egalitarian patriotism was the order of the day, and, in a spirit of emulation, the Star of Civism was created, which anyone who had distinguished himself in appropriate fashion might receive in the form of a scar made on the right temple with a branding iron. A war erupted which, ill-starred, led to the siege of the capital. From adversity was born a tempering of ideals—followed by a total reaction. The reds kept their peace, the churches were filled to overflowing—and the pleiade was ousted in favor of a dictator, Ferlo, branded with the Star of Civism, who, heroic defender, was killed in a sortie at the height of his popularity at the very moment the urgency of creating an obsidional coinage began to be felt. Despite a treacherous allusion to the word “twaddle” (employed by him during the red period to characterize the religious preparations for Advent), his profile was used as effigy, underscored with the venerated date of his death, and framed by two weeping women, that on the right being given the features of his mistress, Digette Ralet.

  A new dictator risen from the masses, Matthias Noc, delighted all the newspapers with his manifesto—notably The Cudgel, a specialist in the scurvy genre, which did not fail to play him a minor dirty trick in the form of a lampoon with three subjects in the purposely chosen ultrastrict form of triolets which, by their marmoreal quality alone, twitted the still-vulgar speech of the ex-plebian. The first related a quarrel that, provoked in a brothel by a disputed throw of the dice, had caused Noc to spout insults in argot; next came a proof of superstition—no small matter in the mood of religious reaction then rampant—furnished by the constant wearing under his shirt of a slender chain-necklace from which depended a locket containing a four-leaf clover; the final anecdote concerned a habit of obsequious fawning acquired when he had worked as a youth in a shooting gallery, vis-à-vis the former king, whom he had showered with outrageous compliments regarding a tricky miniature target hit by the still-inexperienced king, on which figured, symbol of speed, a sledge drawn by high-spirited steeds, the heart of the iemskik13 figuring as bull’s-eye, as in a hijacking plotted by brigands.

  As these triolets merely gibed at him without attacking his rectitude, Noc thought them over, like a wise man eager to mend his ways. He got rid of the clover, learned to mistrust his natural pliability—and, so as to become more polished, had recourse to the counsels of Lord de Buc, a patrician highly versed in the art of good manners thanks to his illustrious origins, honorifically indicated by the title The Lovely Turncoat applied to Mary Magdalen, his ancestress, in one of the special prayers at Candlemas. In her first youth the Magdalen had been the ray of sunlight (in his phrase) of a rich elderly admirer closeted by his infirmities, Ségenal, whom she cuckolded with the handsome Buc, founder of the line. One evening, instead of greeting her with his customary tender metaphor, Ségenal asked her for an alibi, believing he had spied her, from his aged, nearsighted invalid’s cushions, involved in a gallant pastoral escapade with Buc—and received merely a cynical confession leading to a parting of the ways.

  And Noc soon polished his uncouth deportment thanks to his relations with Lord de Buc—whose coat-of-arms made allusion to the Ségenal incident—and flaunted his new learning by intentionally leaving a map lying about that he himself had expertly drawn, representing a prehistoric Asia with a bizarre, scientifically exact shape.

  Knowing that in order to stay the course he must above all attend to the morale of the besieged population, Noc hired the comic singer Furdet to amuse the crowd gratis each evening.

  A specialist in the daredevil genre, the aptly chosen Furdet boasted of knowing by heart a whole cartload of patter songs on various subjects:

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  Godable, forced by penury to emigrate, bids a final farewell to his mistress Krune. Seeing her fearing for him the dangers of the sea voyage, he reassures her with a legend told of his ship, “equipped with masts so perfectly conditioned for dealing with tempests that their builder is believed to be a relative of Lucifer.” There follows a racy mutual oath: At appointed days and hours, each, thinking of the other and gazing at the Coma Berenices in the heavens, will commit a voluptuous solitary sin. Arriving at his destination deep in the tropics, Godable, unable to find a position, becomes the lover of a priestess of Ros, a deity much revered since the power of bringing cool weather is attributed to her—and heaps perjury on perjury.

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  As soon as he becomes master of Syracuse, Marcellus, in order to establish himself as absolute ruler controlling all lives, organizes his impartial massacres. His physician Parnolo, a Neapolitan charlatan, concocts for him a certain drug, lethal in tiny doses, which each day dispatches ten passersby of both sexes stopped at random. So as to reinforce the impartial aspect, Marcellus spares whoever divines the last (and most difficult) in a series of graded riddles—and bestows on him, as an eternal shield against a new beginning of the ordeal, a cockade on which is painted, thanks to a chauvinist whim of Parnolo’s, the incomparable Bay of Naples. For a pretty woman, there are no riddles: Marcellus grants her the cockade solely in exchange for her favors. One day a comic-heroic scene breaks out. Two twin sisters, Guria and Forine, gray-haired virgins deeply devoted to each other, make up part of the ten. After Guria, who has just emerged victorious, Forine enters the interrogation room … and falls silent halfway through; having recrossed the sill, and forgetting her age, she offers herself, terrified, to the rescuing embraces of Marcellus—who, laughing uncontrollably, designates her to the poisoner. Magnificent, Guria then discards her cockade—and drinks with her sister.

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  In the course of a chaconne danced before Louis XV enthroned in a seat of honor on a dais, the Marquise de Pranier gives vent to a fit of sulks that signifies a breach with her lover, the fashionable poet Sance. The latter resigns himself—but swears that a scandal will avenge him. He knows himself replaced by the Baron d’Etulle—whom he has never seen—and, having posted himself, cunningly armed, in the latter’s path disguised as a beggar, profits from the momentary distraction of the charitable pocket-explorer to interrupt, by stabbing him, a good-natured fragmentary sermon concerning the laziness of certain sturdy young men capable of working for a living. A love criminal soon released, Sance continues to write brilliantly. Later on, as a declining hack repelled by the word “unharness,” he is sent a book whose plot, as a professional, he appreciates—the work of an author keenly athirst for logic, still too young to attract a public. Stirred by the scruple-smothering prospect of a prolongation of heyday, he executes a clever plagiarism—which he camouflages by making his setting the bottom of a lake and his characters water sprites. And from its fame success is born—whose cynical illegitimacy is discovered by the marquise, who, with all her forces, trumpets it like the old grudge-bearer she is.

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  King Dinoh, whose finances are in shambles, goes, after the obligatory payment of heavy alms, to consult in her temple the goddess Biuse, whose statue speaks—thanks, according to spiteful tongues, to an invisible flesh-and-blood female accomplice and a lucky acoustical phenomenon. Kneeling before the statue on a downy cushion, the monarch summons the goddess with a silver note struck with a hammer on a bell—and at once hears tell—a
long with precise auxiliary indications of its location—of an island where the discovery of a treasure, buried at the foot of a large cliff whose shape from a distance suggests the fleur de lys, will enable him to multiply his riches a hundredfold. Dinoh sets sail, searches in vain for the island, returns incensed—and goes to resume, in surly tones, his conversation with the goddess, who, forewarned, accuses his crew of ineptitude, which doesn’t prevent her collection of ex-votos from being enriched soon afterward by the addition of a large marble plaque inscribed with a ferocious diatribe.

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  Clossida, split by two factions, has just installed a democratic government in place of its reigning prince, Iknar II, at the same moment that two books triumph: Kolour’s The Hundred Lessons of Analysis of the Kabbalah and Plassas’s Sensual Pleasure in Plants—read one day on a park bench by two idlers whose characters, retrograde in one, scientific in the other, cause them to quarrel. A small group of blind people clasping one another’s hands passes by, guided by a single pair of good eyes as they leave an asylum founded by the fallen ruler, a circumstance which leads them to side with the reader of Koulour and to inflict on his antagonist, whom they call “Good-for-nothing egalitarian,” a sound trouncing with their fists. Their hero—noblesse oblige—intervenes effectively, and the other, whose outing has cost him a drubbing, regains his home.

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  Marfo, a philosopher with independent doctrines, lives as an ascetic in the forest of Nède, pitying the lot—abject in his view since necessarily tinged with a servility summoning suppression—of any member of a society. With him lives a she-wolf, adopted when young, whom he calls his Egeria, admiring the fact that, while recognizing him, she has kept all the fierce instincts of her race. One autumn evening, while he drinks in with emotion the poetic spectacle offered by the yellow leafless forest, his gaze is suddenly struck by a flaw in the décor: a beehive, detestable emblem of discipline.

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  Harmony seems to reign in the court of the Russian nobleman Tisof, even while his “right-hand man” Uvrou, a meritorious aide issued from humble origins, is envied, behind smooth-spoken appearances, by a former companion in misery, Diar, who however owes him everything. Bribed by Diar, the pamphleteer Pressy produces a book wherein, in short paragraphs followed by an asterisk, he accuses Uvrou of fishing in troubled waters behind an appearance of disinterest. Diar sends the book to Tisof with a brief message in a counterfeit hand pointing out that the number of asterisks exceeds a thousand, and containing the description, with venomous comparisons, of a certain outergarment full of holes that Uvrou, now immensely rich, wore in his youth. But the nobleman, in disgust, throws book and message into the fire.

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  One morning in November 1683, the Comte de Lédu, a man of spirit, awakens at dawn full of sad thoughts; of a choleric nature, he had the night before offered an affront to one of the principal statesmen of the moment, resulting in the order to leave at once for his country estate. Then he seizes on an idea which had long slumbered in his mind: to enter the Nicolas Flamel14 Academy—a great name well chosen as a banner, whose members enjoy special favor which might reestablish him. That same day he succeeds in obtaining a delay and, knowing that any application for candidature must be accompanied by an unpublished work, eagerly gets down to business. Purposely choosing a subject designed to enhance him in terms of heraldic antiquity, he sings the exploits of the Iberian Arco, from whom he is descended on his mother’s side. Before each expedition, Arco always used to consult the witch Daca—who one day made herself his Cassandra in recounting him a fatal dream wherein he played the leading role. And Arco was killed during the first engagement.… Now, each reader on the committee is captivated from the exordium onward. So Lédu enters the Flamel Academy, receives its badge—a tiny king of hearts in diamonds and rubies, reminder of the favorite pastime of the alchemist, whom the invention of playing cards had enraptured—and returns to grace.

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  In the days of Louis XV, during a harsh winter, the Marquis de Grante, a member of parliament who has in the third estate an impudent foe, Pierre Ligot, always ready to pick a quarrel with him, goes in search of the charlatan Ruetti, a renowned maker of talismans, of whose shrewdness he has heard praises sung. Ruetti decides to try out a method of getting rid of the pest which he believes certain. He goes to look for two traps in the nearby forest: two incomplete rings of ice smeared with suet, each housing a doubly pointed spring designed to expand, lethally perforative, in the quarry’s warm stomach. He carves the name of Pierre Ligot on a wooden statuette that he places in his garden at the center of one of the traps while hanging the other just above. According to him, Pierre Ligot cannot survive the symbolic placing of his image between two engines of death. But the destructive thaw arrives without causing suffering to Pierre Ligot.

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  Rogelle, a young and beautiful queen with absolute power, is afflicted with an unbridled sadism which sows terror around her. She owns a dossier wherein in the form of lists figure the names of the most expert among those she euphemistically calls “cajolers.” The writer and traveler Bertol, who, in addition to his creative talent, has a pretty voice and sings accompanying himself on a sort of guitar, loves her silently from afar. To attract her attention and to give himself a chance to have her, he composes during an expedition, without denying himself the direst deceptions, an ultrasmutty book which causes a scandal. After reading it, the queen has him summoned on the pretext of hearing him sing. During the recital she ceaselessly directs pairs of winks in his direction. This very parity is a clear invitation, to which, after terminating on an old-fashioned chord, he responds ecstatically.

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  The pious Mélanie Rustier, always austerely dressed in iron gray, has a son, Périnot, who leads a hard life at sea, enrolled in the crew of Captain Mourck. Ambitious and eager to school himself so as to advance, he asks the ship’s Aesculapius to lend him books—which include works on astronomy, a science at that time highly regarded in naval circles. One day he reads in Tycho Brahe the passage concerning the god Plutus, who, having heard tell of the existence of a rich gold mine on the moon, betakes himself there to exploit it—but, extremely ill-received with the cry of “Out!” by the Selenites, eager to keep their prize, returns, soundly pummeled by them. Henceforth, Périnot’s mind is split: At times he is normal; at others, laughing and crazed, he imagines himself dipping both hands in the gold mine on the moon. In despair, Mélanie Rustier believes him possessed and does everything possible to have him exorcised.

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  In a country bordering on the Black Sea reigns Keran, nicknamed King “In a Minute” because of numerous fine promises that he always shrinks from fulfilling. At his court glitters the beautiful Discrine, who, though virtuous, lives on a grand scale with no visible resources. Keran, titillated, would like her for his favorite, but the slyboots refuses, holding out for a marriage proposal. Near the capital there is an Eden where, in a cave, an emblematic statue of Pomona in ripe maturity occupies a place of honor, coiffed with a golden rose and clad in an actual red tunic. The cave is sealed by a stone disk that rolls naturally, accessible to the frailest. Deeply revered, the statue, oracular at certain times fixed in advance, replies to questions as though with an echo. Keran, who is considering marrying Discrine, goes disguised as a sage on one of the appointed days to consult Pomona, who replies with only these words: “Spy’s Stitchery.” From then on, Keran has Discrine put under surveillance and discovers her to be a spy who, esteeming her eventual royalty in a minute too problematical to abstain from running with the hare and hunting with the hounds, exchanges with a certain Pritane, a female spy in the service of a neighboring king, papers for which the red tunic, ceaselessly stitched and restitched, serves as repository. One day Keran confounds Discrine by showing her a complete project for a surprise war taken from the hiding place, as well as a treaty that takes victory for granted, one of whose clauses favors her personally—and conte
nts himself with exiling her.

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  Penniless, Maciton bursts with a natural comic verve which he uses to make a living as jester to King Baoge; but in reality he is a scholar and an innovator who has founded a philosophical system with enthusiastic disciples, set forth in a folio entitled God = Zero. Baoge has an unacknowledged mistress: Kercia de Nize, who, posing as a strict and pious woman, detests the unbeliever Maciton and seeks to have him disgraced. One day, due to a beginning pregnancy, Baoge hastily marries off Kercia to the Baron de Fô in order to save appearances. One year later at a masked ball, Maciton, disguised as Harlequin, loudly congratulates Kercia for having been able to remain white as snow by having more or less the three proper trimesters between her marriage and her childbed. But Kercia has recognized him by his voice and tells all to Baoge, who, annoyed and with a view to a general muzzling of the population, seizes on Maciton’s militant impiety as a pretext to banish him from his territory. Transplanted, Maciton solicits the post of jester with King Nopal—and obtains it by publishing a wildly comic theorem, impossible to read without guffawing at every line.

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  The young Scandinavian writer Frug seeks his way in vain and, feeling himself full of potential, chafes at being a nonentity. Now he reads in an abridged version of Sédoual’s Universal Method a phrase simultaneously calculated to summon the Spirits of Vesper so as to consult them and to banish the slightest cloud from the sky, absolutely clear weather being a condition necessary to their celestial descent. One almost perfect day, a rare event in his misty homeland, he pronounces the phrase in a loud voice. By chance, the last clouds dissipate after a few hours. Hallucinating, he thinks he sees around him the Spirits of Vesper, who counsel him to marry the Beautiful with the Trivial. After meditating a long time on their suggestion, he at last discovers the path so long desired and, bard of the people, writes his masterwork, in which vulgarities in no way diminish the splendor of the style.