Collected French Translations: Prose

by Ashbery, John

  “Here we are!” exclaimed Hebdomeros, stretching out his arms in the classic pose of the temporizing captain who restrains the impetus of his soldiers. They had reached the threshold of a vast and lofty chamber decorated in the style of 1880; completely empty of furniture, this room, through its lighting and general tone, made one think of the gaming rooms of Monte Carlo; in a corner, two gladiators with diver’s masks were practicing without conviction under the bored gaze of a master, an ex-gladiator in retirement with the eye of a vulture and a body covered with scars. “Gladiators! That word contains an enigma,” said Hebdomeros, addressing the youngest of his companions in a lowered voice. And he thought of music halls whose illuminated ceilings evoke Dantean paradise; he thought also of those Roman afternoons, at the end of the spectacle, when the sun is waning and the immense velarium deepens the shade of the arena from which rises an odor of sawdust and blood-soaked sand …

  Roman vision, ancient coolness

  Anxious evening, nautical song.

  Still more padded doors and short, empty corridors, then suddenly: Society! Move in fashionable circles! Lead a fashionable life. The rules of high society. Learn how to live. Notices announcing a family event. P. P. C. (to take leave). E. M. P. (deliver in person). T. S. V. P. (please turn over). In a corner of the salon an enormous grand piano, its lid raised; without standing on tiptoe one could see its complicated entrails and the clear anatomy of its interior; but one could easily imagine the catastrophe that would result if one of those candelabra laden with pink and blue wax candles were to fall into the piano with all its candles lit. What a disaster in the melogenous abyss! Wax running the length of the metal cords, stretched like the bow of Ulysses, and hindering the precise striking of the little felt-clad hammers.

  Beginning pages of Hebdomeros. Unpublished.

  SELECTION TWO FROM HEBDOMEROS

  Then one could return? The carriage would drive swiftly away, drawn by its five trotting horses and closely followed by a cavalry detachment; all day long under the sun and at night on the great black mountain like a stranded whale that huge man, that hero stretched out on the summit would lie awake watching the stars. Where are you, children? Hebdomeros is in love with Louise, the maid in the house across the way; he has put on his new suit; the bells are ringing in the steeples of the parish churches and springtime smiles in the kitchen gardens. Springtime, springtime! Funeral procession, macabre vision. Corpses in dinner jackets laid out in their open coffins are lined up on the beaches of the south; one can catch the haunting smell of lemon which, like garlic and onion, renders dishes indigestible; here are the oranges with the unavowable symbols of their obscene flowers. Where are you going, man whose coat is trimmed with an astrakhan collar? Prototype of the great traveler, ready to defend the sick child threatened by the bandits’ rapacious hands in the train stinking of wet cattle in the August shower? Where are you going, helmeted warrior with shifty eyes? Heart of steel at the windows open on towns that cling like vultures’ nests to the rocks, where the innkeeper, thirsty for lucre, points out for you with a sweep of his red hand the vast panorama of the valley, crossed at its center by the river, sometimes opaque, sometimes gleaming, like the life of man. Must one for all that renounce one’s seat and, when one has paid for a first-class ticket, obstinately remain in second despite the conductor’s gentle insistence? But it is a lake as vast as the sea and which, like the sea, has its dangerous fits of temper; beware of drowning then, and when the motorboats hasten to your rescue you will know, then, what it means to be reborn in that summer afternoon where the sidewalks, bathed by the shower, reflect the lights in the shop windows so faithfully that you would think yourself in Venice; and that charming city built in tiers around the lake? Oh!, but another lake this time, a peaceful lake, a lake nothing ever ruffles, a consoling lake. And when the weather is sultry and the big drops of the beginning storm fall on the water, then it’s by dozens you bring them in at the end of your silk-gut line, the great black fish! You call that “The Massacre of the Innocents”? But at this point Hebdomeros would protest; paying no attention to the passengers who were making fun of him as they crossed the gangway, poking their wives in the ribs and gasping with laughter; he confessed his aversion to biblical scenes which he termed immoral and lascivious; he asserted that the idea of Christ depicted in the form of a lamb concealed a sensuous tendency of a very special kind, and he concluded by pronouncing an exaggerated eulogy of cafés which have red velvet divans and whose ceilings are decorated in the style of 1880.

  “There,” Hebdomeros would say in a voice made slightly hollow by emotion, “you feel yourself safe from the dangers that come from outside; that the rabid enemy sends his élite troops up to the very gates of the city; that comets with deleterious tails appear on the horizon; that pairs of lions vomiting flames stalk the streets in the center of town; that iron-beaked birds infest the trees in the municipal squares; that lightning-swift insects buzz in the fecal matter of cholera patients; all is one and the same to you once you are inside that café. Once inside you are safe, and standing on tiptoe you can look through the fanlight at the enemy ships dropping anchor off the deserted coast and the launches jammed with warriors approaching the shore with great strokes of the oars. Then among these refugees a kind of bond of solidarity forms; the women and children are given shelter in the rear of the shop, behind trunks and cases of canned goods. It is here that all these creatures unfit for dangerous and tiring activities spend their time preparing the rations which consist of preserved caballo meat, biscuits, honey, and coffee which is always drunk very hot and flavored with spices; they also busy themselves with carefully cleaning the firearms and mending shoes and clothing; the youngest go out looking for game, for one must think about provisions for the winter; already the stormy season proclaims itself; continual rains have waterlogged the ground and the paths are slippery; puddles form beneath the grass which is quite tall in places where the daisy and the cornflower put in a timid appearance, just enough to make this bit of road look more cheerful and add a note of poetry to the passing of the zealous schoolboys who work with joy and steadfastness in severe-looking classrooms where all is but promise; the polar bear floundering among blocks of ice or disputing a torn remnant of fish with the walrus, and the ostrich fleeing madly before the Arab horseman; and then the bridges and the castles with their innumerable turrets and the ruins where thousands of crows have made their nests. Hebdomeros thought himself safe in this hut for he had seen no trace of a human being in the surrounding countryside; but he was wary despite these reassuring appearances; he was no man to put his faith in appearances; he remembered how many times in his early youth appearances had deceived him; that was why he remained on his guard and why, at night, he slept with one eye open, keeping his loaded walking stick and automatic pistol within easy reach; often he didn’t even remove his shoes and went to bed half-dressed so as to be able to cope with any disagreeable surprise if need be. But the winter passed without anything extraordinary happening. Already the air was becoming warmer and plants in the meadow were getting green; the goatherds had come down from the neighboring mountains playing gay tunes on their long copper flutes; everywhere spring announced itself; in this Nordic country it arrived suddenly, it surprised you like a stage set appearing behind a rising curtain; an air of symbolism floated over nature; innumerable little waterfalls, fed by the melting snow, skipped down the mountains; angels with enormous wings like those of eagles but woven of feathers that were white and delicate like those of geese were sitting beside the paths, with one hand resting on the great milestones carved with the image of bicephalous Janus, surmounted by a virile sexual organ; the angels looked mournfully at the lovers moving away under the flowering almond trees. Everywhere there were placards with gaudy lettering; toward the east the volcanic and mountainous country was roamed by bands of hunters who, surrounded by their hounds, were ardently hunting down the few survivors of that almost extinct race of pachyderms. High in the sky vul
tures described great circles; sometimes they flew lower, sometimes higher, afraid of some evil envoy from the earth, but never losing sight of the hunters. Their intentions were clear: to wait until a pachyderm had been shot down and dismembered so as to be able to feast on the remains later when the last hunter and the last hound had disappeared behind the rocks. In spite of the presence of the vultures and the bones of animals which glistened white here and there in the grisaille of the rocks, there was nothing particularly savage or desertlike about the land; vast mining installations animated it on every side; the chimneys smoked; the tip trucks were running on tiny rails; bearded engineers, their faces flushed from the heat, were bustling everywhere and taking advantage of their rare moments of leisure by angling for fish or target-shooting at empty bottles. The sole diversion was to go in the evening to the Punch-and-Judy. The idea had occurred to a sculptor with a head like that of an Assyrian king who boasted of having been the pupil of a currently fashionable teacher, and who was much admired in his social circle because he played the flute, which as a matter of fact he did quite badly. These Punch-and-Judys did not happen quite so calmly or ingenuously as one might have supposed; sometimes the puppeteer, a hysterical individual who was subject to epileptic fits, would start to manipulate his cardboard-cutout figures with their Cretan eyes, at the same time uttering such screams that the foremen, waking with a start, would bound out of bed and rush for the sirens. Then the hyenas would abandon the partly disinterred corpses and flee toward the nearby mountains. The drivers who had been dozing in their carts, only half-opening one eye at every bump, would send their whips whistling through the air and set their horses galloping at top speed; seen in the night that way, these swiftly fleeing carts had something apocalyptic about them. Leaving the gigantic station of that metropolis where almost eight million men agitated restlessly from morning to night without rhyme or reason, Hebdomeros proceeded toward the quarter of nocturnal fêtes which, at the very heart of the city, constituted a separate world. It had in fact its boundaries and frontiers, its laws, its statutes, and it would have come as no surprise if zealous customs officials were waiting at its gates to ask you if you had anything to declare. At the edge of this ineffable region the traffic of the great city came to a halt; it was there that the convulsive movement of vehicles and the coming and going of busy pedestrians expired as a wave expires on a beach. Happiness Has Its Rights, that is what one saw in glowing letters over the principal gate constructed in the center of a vast arch of triumph on which women, carved out of the wood and painted in brilliant pastel colors, blew like obstinate tritons into the long bugles of renown. The fortresses which had been built near by, the almshouses for those whom fortune neglects but whom the gratitude and kindness of men does not forget, kept watch alone in the shadows, their solemn domes silent with the deep peace that repose exacts; the dark night was well along; the world slept, sunk in an immense tranquility, and like it, the storm which had agitated Hebdomeros’s heart seemed finally to have subsided. The glory of the past, the vanity of human heroism, and those pyramids which the fear of oblivion incites the administrators of the common weal to command of indifferent hirelings who are thinking of something else as they build, of the fiancée or the wife who awaits them back there, far from the smoke and din, in the peaceful home, close to the window open on the coolness of the garden where thousands of glowworms streak the shadows with phosphorescent lines. Then it is in vain that the processions of kings advance along the regional highways; seen from a distance their solemn aspect looks sadly diminished, alas! Were it not for the flashing of the weapons brandished by the horsemen of the escort one would think them a troop of ragged gypsies going out to beg their bread beneath an implacable sun and the constant menace of mastiffs with mud-caked coats whom the cruel peasants set at their heels. If one believes that love can be born out of pity, then it was a whole promise of unutterable feeling that appeared on the vast horizon of Hebdomeros’s life. Infinite nostalgias and impulses which, in his imagination disturbed by sleepless nights in the trains of the state railway system, took the hieroglyphic shape of an immense greyhound with an inadmissibly long body, passing like a meteor over the many-colored diagrams of cities, over the tame forests where each tree has its name and its history, over those fields whose huge basin is fecundated by more than one seed which the farseeing husbandman drops there at the opportune moment; and Hebdomeros’s pity went out to all of humanity: toward the talkative man and the taciturn, toward the rich man who suffers and toward the indigent, but the profoundest pity of all he felt for the men who eat alone in restaurants, especially when they are sitting near the window in such a way that the passersby, cruel and disrespectful, true phantoms living in another atmosphere, can soil with their immodest gaze the virginal purity, the tender chastity, the infinite tenderness, the ineffable melancholy of this moment they are living, of all moments the most solitary, covering them with a shame so gentle and so poignant that one cannot understand how the entire staff of the place, from the manager to the cashier, with the furniture, the tablecloths, the carafes and all the crockery, down to the saltcellars and the tiniest objects, don’t dissolve in an infinite torrent of tears.

  The great hypostases which accompanied these telluric upheavals were followed by unforgettable spectacles at which Hebdomeros never failed to be present. Millions and millions of warriors were invading the country, moving across the vineyards; one would have thought they were oozing through cracks in the rocks, across those mountains carved in the round, ordnance survey maps of a hypothetical general staff riddled with caves, and which the even light from the ceiling rendered all the more convincing. Myrmidons! Myrmidons!… from echo to echo this cry resounded along the deserted beaches, as during the Tertiary period. Above the peristyle the sky was pure and deep blue; in the offices the barometers were fixed at fair weather, despair of the navigator on his galleon immobilized in the middle of the ocean. At other points of the globe, there where those sinister lakes whose motionless black waters it had never been possible to fathom opened a disquieting eye toward the sky, like the eye of the uranoscopus which the naive fisherman calls so charmingly the vicar-fish, clouds heavy as cliffs and black as night opened out amid the capricious flight and acute angles of the lightning; then the rain in long, close-packed strands, in perpendicular bundles, fell and fell endlessly on the surface of the lake which began to seethe, water into water; dropsical philosophers, demigods become poseurs by dint of wanting to appear simple and open, began to act clever, and after hanging their clothes on the quicklime-spattered branches of a stunted fig tree on the shore, went into the water so as not to get wet, as they said, and sometimes they would wait entire days for these singular storms to break so as to have an opportunity to make this excellent joke. Hebdomeros was revolted, but at the same time he was thinking of something else. “Eloquence of the past,” he said, addressing his friends, “as I gazed on those indiscreet displays, those sumptuous still lifes wherein bananas and pineapples tumble in an avalanche along the flanks of disemboweled roebucks and polychrome pheasants, that overweening conceit of provocative well-being, that gigantic insult, that fantastic slap in the face of want and sobriety, I saw vengeance snickering in the shadows. Then, amid the overturned stools and the shards of bottles, the tablecloths strewn over the floor twisted themselves like elephant traps around the feet of the hurrying waiters laden with dishes, causing veritable disasters; the bustling domestics topple headlong, producing a tremendous breakage accompanied by an inundation of sauces of all colors on which float like derelicts the roasted and shriveled carcasses of chickens.” Hebdomeros could stand no more; he rose like those shadows that rise on the damp walls of cells when a lantern is placed on the floor; he rose and spoke in a solemn voice which nevertheless had something strange about it as though he were not seeing the 2,675 faces of the men come to listen to him, who kept their eyes fixed on him. But at last he once again seized hold of reality and then he evoked September mornings on the sacr
ed heights that dominated the city: At once voices arose: “The Acropolis! The Acropolis!” “No,” he replied with a sly smile, “there is no question, this time, of a crow or of Paulus; and although there is in fact a Pericles, it is not the one of whom you all instinctively think, he whom the relentless plague laid low at the end of a hot summer day and who was the gentle friend of painters, sculptors, architects, and poets; the Pericles I present to you is one-eyed and, to hide this infirmity, wears his helmet pushed down on his head as far as the middle of his nose; but he has style and a certain elegance nevertheless, especially when with a careless gesture he tosses his chlamys over his left shoulder; his long, knock-kneed legs, far from making him look ridiculous, recall, anachronisms apart, those old picadors whom age has banished from the arena but who remain nostalgic for the arena; in his left hand he holds a coin and for a long time contemplates in silence, his head tilted back somewhat, with a fond eye (and no mistake, since he has only one), the profile of a woman engraved on one of its sides.” Among the tambours of the fallen columns, where in the evening, when the square was deserted, huge dysenteric mares came to browse avidly on the tender chamomile which blossoms in the shade of glorious ruins, the faithful, those whom fright, selfishness, and shameful cowardice have not managed to conquer, those who preferred to defy fear and look death in the face rather than undergo the shame of disguising themselves as women, as pregnant peasant girls or nurses, and mingle with that flock of two-legged sheep in order to flee on jammed and overloaded vessels that threaten to sink at each stroke of the oars, were all at their posts. At present they stayed lying on the ground, in idle, magnificent poses, listening to him talk, like pirates listening to their chief tell frightful tales of boarding vessels and of combats in the night. When evening descended, the long beams from the searchlights the rebels had installed on the nearby heights darted in all directions, greatly disturbing that noble society of ascetic warriors and disillusioned men of gentle birth; those fortunate enough to be near a heap of ruins, which the hazards of its fall had arranged so as to form a kind of grotto, were less bothered by the flashing of the reflectors; but the others, whose only resource was to rest their stiff backs against the cold and hard tambour of a column, ran the risk of spending a sleepless night. It sometimes happened that several among them would turn their backs to the sea, for the spectacle of the beach interested them not at all. It was after all their milieu, their world, and these fishermen accustomed to nautical mythology were not in the least impressed by what went on around them, rather they were intrigued by the presence of the great luxury hotels lit from top to bottom and shining like lighthouses on the high, sheer cliffs at whose base the waves came to die noiselessly. The windows were open; the rich guests in evening clothes had stepped out onto the balconies and terraces, attracted by the whispering of all those marine gods stranded down below on the dark beach.