Collected French Translations: Prose

by Ashbery, John

  Hebdomeros and his companions, leaving behind these places where there was nothing further for them to do, entered the suburbs which were to the city what wings are to a stage. It was there, in fact, that all those personages whose actions attracted everyone’s attention so forcibly went to apply makeup, prepare themselves, rehearse their roles like actors waiting for their cue to go on stage and recite with all the art their teachers have instilled into them that which they know by heart, or almost, so as to repeat it on the dusty boards, on those boards which, despite new ideas and the evolution of tastes and customs, still have something dirty and shameful about them. More than once, meditating on many an undeciphered enigma, Hebdomeros had asked himself the question “Why is there always something shameful about the theater?” He never succeeded in giving a satisfactory answer. Now it would happen sometimes that when he was all alone in his room, plunged in his meditations, twilight would slowly fall; his three friends always left him around six o’clock in the evening; they went away lighthearted and singing, their steps quickened by the steep slope that led down to the marketplace. Hebdomeros remained alone up there in that house where, ten years previously, he had rented a small, miserably furnished room. Later, thanks to the money that he had saved up, thrifty in all things, sustained by that will which beneath an appearance of lassitude and weakness had always dominated his life, he had succeeded in renting the entire house and expulsing the former tenants, not to revenge himself for the ill treatment he had on many occasions received at their hands, but to punish them for their unkindness; he considered this a just deed. “Justice before all,” he would say, sitting down at table to consume the modest meal he had prepared for himself; this meal usually consisted of a skinny bird (a kind of undernourished lark) which an octogenarian hunter who was also his next-door neighbor brought him every day. This aged man worshipped the hunt with a fervor bordering on mysticism and obsession. Up at dawn, he would whistle to an old dog who followed him yawning after having first stretched itself almost out of joint. Thus each evening Hebdomeros bought from him a bird which he ate only the following evening, because he liked in leisure moments to paint still lifes of game. He would then place the dead bird on a table with a napkin; sometimes too, he would arrange cotton wool around it, as though it were snow, which made him think of hunting in winter and fine hunting parties at inns, with the hunters sitting near the fireplace where the logs flamed, gaily drinking and puffing on long pipes. When the dinner hour had struck, he would pluck the bird and put it to cook in a small pot with some goat’s-milk butter and a little salt; while it cooked he would turn it, pricking it with a fork and repeating aloud always the same phrase: “It must feel the heat. It must feel the heat.” When someone knocked on his door at the moment he was about to sit down at table, he still had the heart to ask these people to share his meal which, besides the little roasted bird, consisted of a crust of rye bread and a spoonful of blueberry jam; as a beverage he drank barm of fresh beer which he dissolved in a little filtered water with some sugar. On the question of culinary preparations and food in general he professed a morality of his own which earned him the antipathy and often the irritated sarcasms of a large number of his contemporaries. The spectacle of certain restaurants where finicky gourmets go to satisfy the abject concupiscence of their gastrointestinal apparatuses revolted him to the point of disgust and raised a just and saintly anger in his soul. People eating lobster and sucking with bestial voluptuousness on the legs and claws of these hideous armored monsters, having first cracked them open with a nutcracker, made him flee like an Orestes pursued by the Furies. But what troubled him especially was to see, at the beginning of a meal, the oyster fancier swallow this disgusting mollusk with an elaborate ritual of carefully buttered slices of black bread, little glasses of some special white wine, slices of lemon, etc., the whole washed down with theories about the effect that the lemon has on the mollusk, which contracts when it is still alive, or ridiculous tirades about the aroma of oysters which makes you think of the sea, of cliffs lashed by the waves, and other twaddle which only a creature deprived of all modesty and all self-control could find amusing. He also considered very immoral the custom of eating ice cream in cafés, and, in general, that of putting pieces of ice in drinks. Beaten egg white and whipped cream were also for him deleterious and impure substances. He also found most immoral and worthy of the severest repression the exaggerated and instinctive taste, often verging on voracity, that women in particular have for raw vegetables: pickles, cucumbers, artichokes preserved in vinegar, etc. He considered the strawberry and the fig the most immoral of fruits. Having fresh figs heaped with crushed ice served to oneself in the morning for breakfast was for Hebdomeros an act so serious that, according to his code, it would have merited a punishment varying from ten to fifteen years’ imprisonment. Very blamable also according to him was the act of eating strawberries covered with cream; he could never manage to understand how reasonable people could commit deeds so ignoble and how they could have the courage to do them in public, before their fellow men, instead of hiding the shame of their unavowable acts deep within pitch-dark rooms after having first double-locked themselves in, as though for a rape or an act of incest. He attributed all that to human imbecility which he considered immense and eternal as the universe and in which he had an unshakable faith. Unshakable faith! He would have very much liked to have a doctor treat it, this time, that faith* swollen with daily examples; he would have liked to have it medically treated as one treats the hepatic patient with hot cholalogical springs; acquae calidae; amorous and dyspeptic Caesar, surrounded by his legions in the conquered valley. No one ever read the hymn he wrote that evening, neither his most faithful friends nor even that virgin with the ardent gaze and royal bearing to whom it was dedicated; he was afraid of what people might say; he had a horror of those equally indiscreet and uncomprehending milieux. Now the trees which had invaded the rooms and corridors of his dwelling were slowly departing southward; they emigrated by groups, by families, by tribes; they were already far away and with them left the thousand voices of the forest and its haunting odor. An aged and taciturn chambermaid, whom Hebdomeros called the Eumenide, was sweeping up the ruins that still littered the floor, and faced with this new life, faced with this grandiose and global spectacle, he suddenly saw the Oceans. Like the Colossus of Rhodes, like a Colossus of Rhodes infinitely magnified in a dream, his feet at the extremities of his straddling legs touched different regions; between the toes of his left foot, Mexican bandits pursued each other like famished wild beasts around rocks baking in the heat of the dog days, while farther up his right foot trampled immaculate regions: among polar bears and obese elders with ferretlike profiles, wagging their heads at the jagged, notched, sawtoothed glaciers, like the remains of illustrious cathedrals ruined by cannon fire, and where, on the threshold of stinking huts made of sealskins stitched together, Eskimos swaddled in furs politely offered their wives to the excited explorers. Once more the distant rockets climbed silently into the vast somber night; compact groups of philosophers and warriors, veritable polycephalous blocks in delicate, shining colors, were holding mysterious conclaves in the corners of the rooms under the low ceiling, where the molding that joins the walls to the ceiling forms a right angle. “Those heads bode no good,” one of Hebdomeros’s youngest disciples exclaimed suddenly. “So be it,” replied the latter; “I understand or rather I divine your thought; you would have preferred the well-behaved phantoms of the legislated and puritanical society that shuns treatises in which microbes and surgical instruments are mentioned and blanches with fright when boors use expressions like son of the first bed in conversation or discuss the techniques of obstetricians and midwives; you would have preferred the company of those phantoms in a closed veranda, when long silent flashes of lightning, like a rapid and repeated batting of the eyelids, announce the distant approaching storm. In fact the rumble of thunder, at first hollow and scarcely perceptible, soon becomes more serious; gusts of
wind sweep through the garden, swirling the dried leaves and the illustrated newspapers left on the wicker chairs; then the big hot drops begin to fall in the dust of the walks with the noise of a smart tap of the fingers against a piece of heavy, taut material. ‘Shut the windows! Shut the windows!’ screams the mistress of the house, flinging herself madly through the rooms like a Niobe obsessed by the spectacle of her children bristling with darts; then, young man, this inexplicable scene takes place: Strange chickens, plucked of all their feathers, run crazily around the dining room table, like tiny ostriches; funereal violinists hastily replace their instruments in cases resembling coffins for newborn children; portraits stir in their frames and pictures crash to the floor; phantom cooks, the prototypes of assassins, creep stealthily upstairs toward the bedrooms of those distinguished and balding elders who, armed with their ivory-handled canes, are preparing to die with dignity so that their nephews will not have to blush when their names are mentioned. You would have preferred that, imprudent youth,” added Hebdomeros—still addressing his young disciple with a smile full of unstated implications. “But think rather of those beautiful light days on the edge of beaches, think of those Immortals blessing those who love them, helmeted in gold and armored in silver, they are leaving on ships to go and die on that opposite shore, for they know that it is the best way of coming back afterward to their loved ones and living among them without spleen and without remorse; it is true that they come back only as phantoms but, as the proverb says, ‘Better to return as a phantom than not at all’; think of all that and don’t trust appearances, and then you will never be so ill-inspired as to utter the phrase I have just heard.” Toward the rivers with cement banks, toward the decrepit palaces that raise their domes and weathervanes under the continual flight of the clouds, Hebdomeros still bent his steps. This severe place whose solemn door was closed at the moment ought to have saddened him, but the memory of what he had seen there in those moments spent amid a sparse and indifferent audience more than sufficed to console him. He saw, rising slowly out of the chiaroscuro of his memory and little by little growing distinct in his mind, the shapes of those plaster temples and sanctuaries built at the foot of hospitable mountains and cliffs whose narrow passes give a presentiment of near and unknown worlds as well as of those distant horizons, heavy with adventures, which ever since his unhappy childhood Hebdomeros had always loved. A magic word shone in space like the cross of Constantine and was repeated down to the horizon, like an advertisement for toothpaste: Delphoi! Delphoi! A gentle swishing sound as of laurel trees bent by the autumn wind passed through the tepid air and, on the other shore, opposite the sacred spot where the golden columns of the temple of Immortality shone in the rays of a sun nailed to the ceiling so that it could not set, the very sad paintings of vanished epochs appeared on the wall. “It’s to keep the balance,” said the guide, “for too much happiness is a bad thing.” Thus Hebdomeros saw Christ insulted by the mob and then dragged by the legionaries before Pilate; he also saw the Deluge: masses of water unfurling in the plains, and women muscular as Titans clinging to the last rocks while elephants, silhouetted in black against livid bursts of lightning, raised terrified trunks before the storm. But was it really worthwhile evoking all that? Insomnia in the suffocating night and the tiger’s eyes gleaming in the bedroom near the closed mosquito netting. The moonlight was so soft that the mountains looked very near, the divinities of night whispered on the outskirts of the city, there where the last sidewalks are like quays facing the sea of fields and meadows; one could embark there, leave, float on the yellow waves of ripe wheat or the green waves of the tender grass; those who remain at the farthest café, over there, at the end of this quarter of the city which advances like a promontory into the area of the fields, those who remain wave their handkerchiefs and raise their hands in a sign of farewell: Be happy! Lebe wohl! May fortune smile on you! Good luck! But behind the polychrome waves of that sea blossoming with the red poppy and the blue cornflower, the ship disappears slowly as though it were sinking in a very calm sea; the sails, swollen by the breath of springtime, are still visible, then they too disappear and peace settles once again over the countryside, and the birds who had momentarily left off singing at this unexpected sight, resume their joyful chirping. Now the thousand sounds of nature are born anew, like the sound of life halted for a moment by the passing of a funeral procession; the countryside is again full of life and gaiety and it flaunts it without shame and without remorse; before the arms whose doors are wreathed in flowers, peasant men and girls, flushed from the absorption of fermented beverages, dance in a ring around maypoles and with shrill cries toss their beribboned hats into the air. Hebdomeros, his arms folded on his chest, like a severe tribune witnessing an orgy, gazed thoughtfully at these noisy manifestations of innocent joy; he thought: “These men are happy, or at least they seem to be, for actually a great deal remains to be said on that subject; but, happy or unhappy, or merely tranquil, one fact is certain: that is, that the famous demon tempter of the rest of us, men of heart and mind, has never come to sit either at their table or their bedside; he has never followed them when, at daybreak, they go off to work, scythe over shoulder, their eyes following the lark that climbs the sky like the white ball at the top of the jet of water in a shooting gallery; still less does he follow them when at evening they return to their thatched cottages while the crows, in regular couples, after feasting on rotting carrion in the dried-up beds of torrents, regain the neighboring mountains in slow and regular flight, uttering from time to time that gentle cawing that I have ever loved. And we know what that means, that demon who is constantly snickering beside us; you are far from the city, you believe yourself as calm and free as the truant schoolboy; you are sitting on a bench by a deserted road shaded by trees whose dense foliage halts the ardent rays of the sun and forces them to pass through filtered and inoffensive and to sketch on the road the perforated notes of the disk of an aerophone; you believe yourself calm and free and you lose yourself in dreams and memories of the past when suddenly you realize that you are not alone; someone is still sitting on the bench; yes, that gentleman dressed with an outmoded elegance and whose face vaguely recalls certain photographs of Napoleon III and also of Anatole France at the time of Le Lys rouge: That gentleman who looks at you and chuckles in his beard, it is he again, the demon tempter. When you arise a little while from now, long after he has disappeared, you will again be walking along the dusty road and he will emerge from behind a bush, giving a very realistic imitation of a barking dog; if, your patience at an end, you begin to stone him with all your might, he will dash across the fields like a madman, bawling and accusing you to the villagers of the blackest misdeeds, even of raping little girls and setting farms on fire.” This long soliloquy had tired and saddened Hebdomeros a little; the weather was still very fine; on the sunny heights green trees spread out their ranks, mingling the tints of their foliage; the clearings were carpeted with a very fine, very green grass on which children played, uttering joyous cries; modest yet clean, gay and hospitable-looking houses thrust their peaked roofs through the trees; everything basked in the light. And yet, close by, events of an unparalleled solemnity succeeded each other with the fatality that the goddess History, a book open on her thighs, had imposed on their sequence; paunchy ministers squeezed the hands and gazed into the eyes of monarchs whose torsos were covered with a mosaic of decorations and ribbons, while down below in the harbor, armor-plated battleships sounded their cannon and hoisted their flags and banners atop their flagpoles and masts; Mercury, who was flying over the spot at that moment, looked down, and when the cannonade awoke echoes in the valley, he made joyous signs and waved his caduceus in his hand.

  Where to return? To the mines; Hebdomeros mistrusted those unhealthy terrains where fever reigned supreme all year long and where the innkeepers place quinine sulfate on the table for you the way they give you salt and pepper elsewhere. Rather the boredom of a life regulated by the hands of the chrono
meter, but fundamentally logical and not devoid of poetry, full of inner tears; life on that high road flanked with villas from which, every morning, issued the rippling plaint of pianos worried by adolescents practicing their daily exercises. All that would after all have been very normal and Hebdomeros as well as his companions and disciples would not have been in the least sorry to taste a few days of repose in this bored and restful spot, but a curious fact drew their attention and made them realize that all did not happen so normally there as they had at first supposed. In front of each villa was a little garden with wicker benches and chaises longues; in each garden, stretched out on a chaise longue, was a gigantic old man made entirely of stone; Hebdomeros was amazed that the chairs could bear up under such a weight, and he imparted his amazement to his companions, but, on drawing near, they saw that the chairs, which they had thought to be wicker, were made entirely of steel and that the intertwining of steel rods, painted straw color, had been so well calculated that they could have resisted much greater pressures. These old men were alive, yes, they were alive, but only a little; there was a tiny bit of life in the head and in the upper part of the body; sometimes the eyes stirred but the head did not move; one would have thought that, suffering from an eternal stiff neck, they were afraid to make the slightest movement for fear of provoking the pain. Sometimes their cheeks were slightly tinted with pink, and in the evening, when the sun had set behind the wooded mountains close by, they chatted from one garden to another and recounted memories of yesteryear. They evoked the times when they hunted the roebuck and the grouse in forests that were dark and dank even at noon; they told about how many times they had rushed at each other, holding their gun by the barrel and brandishing it like a club or clenching their hunting knives in their fists. The eternal cause of these fights was an animal which had been shot down and which two hunters claimed to have hit. One evening however the great stone elders spoke no more; specialists summoned in haste to examine them ascertained that the little life that stirred in them had vanished; even the tops of their skulls were cold and their eyes were closed; it was decided then to have them removed so that they would no longer encumber needlessly the tiny gardens of the villas; an individual who called himself a sculptor was called in; he was a horribly cross-eyed man with alarming manners; his conversation was full of stupid puns and his breath stank of eau-de-vie from three feet away. He arrived with a suitcase full of mallets of different sizes and immediately set to work; one after another the great stone elders were broken up and their pieces thrown into a valley which soon took on the appearance of a battlefield after a combat. The waves washed up as far as this sad debris; over behind the black cliffs with their profiles of gothic apostles the moon rose; a moon of boreal pallor; it fled against the clouds and Hebdomeros and his companions, like castaways standing on a raft, gazed toward the south; they knew that there from where the storm was blowing, behind that raging sea that tumbled mountains of foam on the shore, was Africa; yes, those scorched cities under an implacable sun, thirst and dysentery, but also cool oases where one no longer wishes for anything, where a strange, sweet wisdom falls from the top of the palm trees with the ripe dates in the chaste hours of early dawn; nevertheless this was not to be considered; Hebdomeros looked at the clouds which, from the south, were fleeing toward the north, where the sky was still clear; soon this part too of the celestial vault was covered with clouds, at first thin and widely spaced, like great black veils which an invisible hand might have trailed across the sky, then thicker, more compact; in a short while the sky was black everywhere. “It is nevertheless toward the north that we must move,” said Hebdomeros to his companions, who approved of this idea. “In fact, my friends,” he resumed, “the north is a little like the west, on the other hand the south is a little like the east; I advise you to be wary of the south and the east for they are deleterious and corrosive countries. To the north lie life and happiness, beauty and light, the joy of work and of rest without remorse; if you have something to say or to reveal, say it or reveal it in the north or in the west, you will have more of a chance than elsewhere of being understood and rewarded for your pains. This does not mean, however, my friends, that you must never go toward the south or the east; a day will come when not only shall we go there but we shall remain there; still, it is by returning from up above that we must proceed there; those are fortified places which must be taken by ruse; frontal attacks end only in failure and in loss of men and materiel; in this vast world the things which are hostile to you are more numerous than those which are favorable to you; be sure then that you have good tactics and good strategy and that you know how to combat them not only with courage, but also with knowledge and intelligence: Courage is not enough. That your friends, your parents, or even people whom you do not know but who know you and who follow with interest and sympathy your acts and deeds may one day be able to say of you: ‘He fell with the brave’—this is not enough; in these words you will see all the regrets of your wild youth, wasted away on easy pleasures up until the moment when maturity, awakening in you the deepest levels of reason, forced you toward discipline and work and pushed you toward those ever fairer and greater conquests which henceforth shall light up your life with the immortal flames of glory. That civil engineers toil in shirtsleeves over trenches and drainage systems in the heat of those canicular days should not be for you a cause of remorse and desire of emulation; if the faucets of your house yield a warm and dubious water; if the flies are relentless around your food and if the sauces and buttermilk curdle in your cupboards, think of the hunting expeditions in polar regions, think of the sea lions sinking their fangs into the wood of the ship’s boats which are pitching alarmingly; think also of the great pine forests on the slopes of tall mountains at the hour when the sun disappears slowly in the clarified air behind the rocky peaks, and by declining opens the door to cool winds which revive plants and flowers and coax the animals out of the burrows and lairs where the heat of noon had banished them. Think also of those blessed cities where the fog and mist spread out their beneficial veils eternally, where the albino children can stare at the sun’s disk at midday, where men are light-skinned and blue-eyed, and where the painters work a long time over portraits and marine scenes which, once they are finished, can be examined with a magnifying glass.” Hebdomeros’s friends and disciples listened to him, leaning on the balustrades or lying on the floor; after the period of homes they now found themselves on these inner rampart walks, protected by thick fortress walls; around them the pillars were sometimes alternated and the ogival arches raised their harmonious curves on all sides. When he had finished his long speech they applauded and then got up to look down at that little harbor where, at daybreak, two frigates flying unknown colors had dropped anchor. Now the sailors were mending the sails, building lifeboats to replace those the storm had destroyed, and salting their meats, while long-haired and jabbering experts were quarreling noisily as they installed scientific instruments on the blocks of the breakwater under construction. The site of this city which Hebdomeros called the most happily situated in the universe, at the mouth of a river which passed through it, fertilized its countryside, and was easily navigable up to the lake, teeming with fish, from which it flowed, filled with awe these perspicacious young men who were prone to indulge in lyric fancies. Meanwhile night had fallen and the setting had changed. As sometimes happens in a dream, all the charm of this gentle panorama faded away little by little to give way to the hideous silhouette of the inhospitable crags looming out of the twilight, which during the day were hidden by the fog and the smoke from the factories. The crater of a volcano began to belch whirlwinds of short yellow and bluish flames; the luxuriant vegetation of the valleys disappeared in the gloom. The lake occupied a basin bordered by sheer cliffs; the local inhabitants maintained that at its center men had tried in vain to sound its bottom; probably it disappeared into the bowels of the Earth; strange rumors circulated; people reputed for their seriousness claimed to have seen mo
nsters of the Tertiary period wandering on its surface in the dead of night. The fact was that no one dared venture into the center of the lake; in addition a line of little buoys painted vermilion marked the edge of the area where the sounding line no longer touched bottom. Hebdomeros was more than ever determined to leave this country where, behind a deceptive appearance of peace and fertility, terrors and strange traps were lurking. As long as the sun shone, everything went well, but once night had come you saw the other side of the coin; yet the inhabitants were by no means uncivilized and even had quite refined tastes, as may be judged from this menu which was served to Hebdomeros and his friends in a restaurant where they had gone to dine: