Collected French Translations: Prose

by Ashbery, John

  “I have returned by tortuous roads,” thought M. Dudron in the dream as he looked at the new landscape, “I have returned by roads where sharp pebbles, briars and thorns were not lacking, alas! I have returned to that study of life which I put aside many years ago. I was interested in mountains and coasts, in outlines that define the shores of seas, in the anatomy of branches that differ from tree to tree, in the colors of the sky which change according to the times of day, the weather and the seasons. I believed that all these aspects posed problems of the most numerous, the most complicated, and the most fascinating kind. And yet, well, you have to think of other things too. So that you aren’t crushed, or, at any rate, disturbed; so that your thoughts remain natural, you mustn’t use too bright a light. Often the demands of life are in direct opposition to those sometimes very numerous ones of the milieu in which you wish to act, work, create, amuse yourself, relax, have fun, and finally live, in a word! One must decoct a very precise and special dosage from the various sources from which one draws one’s inspirations. How well I know the joy of discoveries and the bitterness of disappointments. Yes, I remember clearly that pellucid and distant winter day. An immense lassitude weighed on me; the unimaginably pure horizon glittered like a shard of eternity, and at the harborside the shadows of masts and chimneys stretched a long way, as far as the houses, as far as the offices of the great shipping firms, as far as the stores from which issued an odor of leather, tar, and smoked fish.”

  Thus spoke M. Dudron to himself in a dream, and meanwhile that fear accompanied by the sensation of a slight stomachache which he had felt until now dissipated completely, giving way to a feeling of calm and security. Thus it was without emotion that in his dream he found himself suddenly caught up in a bear hunt, in the depths of a forest: “Be careful,” said a voice close by, “the animal is only wounded, he’s going to throw himself on the hunter!”

  Scarcely had he heard these words when a shot rang out and M. Dudron awoke. He stretched, yawned, looked for his watch, and saw that it was ten o’clock. “It’s the neighbor’s boy again,” M. Dudron exclaimed, “who has wakened me with his shooting at targets in the garden.”

  In thinking of the neighbor’s son, he remembered with sadness that adopted son, that child he had cherished so much and for whom both he and his wife had made so many sacrifices, even in the most difficult times of their lives. They hoped that later on these sacrifices would bear fruit; they hoped that when Bruno (as the child was named) had reached adolescence, they might have guided him toward studies in law or mathematics so as to turn him into a lawyer or an engineer, in sum into an honest man first of all, and then also into a hardworking and serious one. And suddenly, one morning as M. Dudron and his wife entered Bruno’s bedroom to bring him his cocoa, they found the little bed empty and his sailor suit on a chair. A letter, prominently placed on the mantelpiece, explained everything: “I’m leaving,” the letter said, “because someone down there has offered me more; I’m giving you back your sailor suit whose extremely harsh wool has made me suffer cruelly, as though I were wearing around my neck and wrists a necklace and two bracelets made of nettles. I have no further need of these clothes, for with the money given me I have bought a magnificent lounge suit, with a golfing cap and shoes with triple soles reinforced by one of rubber.”

  Someone, meaning it was still him, that immensely rich shipping magnate with the long chin and short, knock-kneed legs, who had seduced him and persuaded him to flee, their Bruno, their child! In a postscriptum to the letter, the prodigal son had added, “a villa has been placed at my disposal.”

  Yes, he had fled, their turtledove. Like a coward, like a traitor he had fled. The years had passed, more or less sad, as all years pass. Now, down in the vast, solemn white city where the dark and intransigent militarized tribunes stood watch in their severe uniforms, Bruno, mature, successful, bent over beneath the huge vaulted dome to hear the sonorous and polyphonic waves that rose ceaselessly from the melodic caverns, from those caverns which housed, in tight and disciplined rows, formidable orchestras led by long-haired and contorted conductors who, grimacing frightfully and with epileptic gestures, urged ever higher the sublimity of great unfinished symphonies.

  M. Dudron reflected thus on the prodigal son, but with neither hatred nor anger. “After all,” he told himself, “it’s every man for himself: That’s the law that rules the world.” At the same time he blamed himself for having more than once missed his chance. He looked at his bedroom that daylight illuminated and thought of his dreams in the night and his adventures of the evening before. “It’s the mysterious life that begins every morning,” he said to himself. He knew that on arising he would have to accede to the total assurance of the clean-shaven, well-shod, and smartly dressed man, who touches the buttoned inside pocket of his jacket where he feels the wallet he knows to be supplied with large banknotes and checks to be cashed, with cards of identity and passports that are perfectly in order, and who, moreover, knows that in the other pockets of his suit is everything necessary, nay indispensable, to the farsighted man, healthy in mind and body, when he leaves his dwelling to hazard himself in that forest, always mysterious and thick with surprises, that a great modern city is, namely: fountain pen, appointment and address book, penknife, small wooden tube containing tincture of iodine, small roll of court plaster, watch and compass, metal box containing at least six pills to combat a possible headache, tobacco pouch duly filled, pipe, matches, piece of rusty iron or coral horn to touch when passing a funeral or an individual reputed to have the evil eye, and, in general, all persons and things likely to cause misfortune.

  Having consulted his watch, M. Dudron perceived that it was high time to get dressed and go out. Go out, yes, but where? All that was now no longer sufficient to calm his mind, which had become bucolic and tolerant due to circumstances beyond his control. As far as excursions in the city went, he knew henceforth how to proceed. He knew those great centers where the mechanized instincts of millions and millions of his fellow creatures converged and where, night and day, a crowd exasperated by the struggle for life pitched and tossed beneath harmonious groups sculpted in marble tarnished by fog and smoke and which, on their cubical pedestals, represented music, dance, thought, and poetry. “To be satisfied with oneself”—thought M. Dudron—“isn’t everything; one must still obtain that series of small victories which assure our position in life and erect around us ramparts indispensable for protecting us from the assaults which our fellow citizens, whoever they may be, launch at us sooner or later. True, there is Nature. Nature!” The sound of this word evoked in M. Dudron’s mind images that were far from reassuring. He saw before him deserted beaches and milky, terribly calm seas. On the horizon a sun, a tragically red and solitary disk, descended slowly amid vapors. “Horizon that smokes,” thought M. Dudron. A monstrous animal with the head of a parrot, a mass as black and huge as a mountain, emerged slowly from the water and dragged itself along the sand among shellfish, some of which stirred a little, then collapsed and stayed motionless. Next, there were black, tranquil lakes surrounded by dark fir trees. Behind, tall mountains raised their summits whose long crevasses were full of snow, like flows of white lava. From the top of a cliff, a cascade tumbled into the lake. Though it was quite far away, the sound it made reached M. Dudron, so motionless was the air and so complete the silence.

  M. Dudron remained thoughtful and undecided. “The fact is,” he said to himself, “all that displeases me as much as the spectacle of agitated and mechanized cities. True, there are also men, humanity: the young seamstresses who work until late at night to provide for the needs of a valetudinary father, of an aged mother, of little brothers who must be clothed and fed, whose schooling must be paid for. In the lamplight they ply their needles while their thought flies down toward the fiancé, toward the lover who will drive them on Sunday to the country where they will gather wild strawberries and drink fresh milk at the tenant farm. Yet sometimes there are also treason and dramas.
The unwed mother, carrying her child in her arms, hiding behind the pillars of the church like a hunted animal and there, close by, through the chords of the organ playing the wedding march and the odor of the incense, he who passes by, in his wedding suit, clean-shaven, with his wife leaning on his arm, his wife, all in white and crowned with orange blossoms, and behind them the inevitable cortège of relatives, friends, and guests.”

  M. Dudron stood up; he slid his feet into his slippers and drew on his dressing gown. His decision was made; it was irrevocable. He sat down at his easel, armed himself with his palette and brushes, and, taking up a picture he had laid out the evening before, began peacefully to paint.

  Paris, May 1939

  Hebdomeros: With Monsieur Dudron’s Adventure and Other Metaphysical Writings (Cambridge, Mass.: Exact Change, 1992).

  PIERRE REVERDY

  (1889–1960)

  HAUNTED HOUSE

  Under the rampart of fire, the reassuring details of the bedroom slowly come into focus.

  Down below is the rather sinister street, mysterious, with or without passersby, very dark in places, and dimly lit at the corner by strips of light filtering through shutters.

  Behind them wealth is being counted, the product of legal plunder. They laugh at how easy larceny is when it’s protected by the law. Emaciated men bite each other beneath the dank sky, clouded with heavy blotches of mold of the rotten seasons. Men glare at each other like dogs with hackles bristling as they pass each other on unsafe roads. Men swarm in the choking fog of emptiness, the haunting featherbed of death. They have nightmares and wake up sweating under the heavy covers. When the weight of remorse crushes the conscience of inept workmen, when blood spurts under clothing that is too light for winter, when penury has reduced man to the level of old corks floating in good-natured eddies of the river, blinding flashes of reason seem, to insensitive eyes that judge coldly, like an unbearable enticement. Revolt has placed its white feet on the sill of the passionate personality. Crater in whose depths boils the lava of feelings—one’s character. Love has closed its ring around the head and the heart. Hate has outlined the man’s back in the night with its needle-sharp stylus. There are tooth marks in the sickly, though firm, flesh of matter. Venomous claws have left suspect swollen traces on the blank screen of the mind. And the man’s back, at the corner of the wooden fence, is inscribed forever in the mystery of hatred and of night.

  Henceforth no heroic thought will ever come to lean at the ship’s rail.

  No lightning flash of illusion will ever again register on the sensitive plate of desire, and whatever thrusts the crippled being into the gulf that separates him from his ultimate destiny will be only an impulse without a cause. The resources of concrete aspirations having been irreparably spoiled, their foundations destroyed, common sense corroded below the waterline and the asperities of fantasy eroded by the perpetual tonguing of the waves, soiled by foam, the squinting gaze of platitude surfaces prudently to consummate the disaster.

  The sordid feet of misfortune will come and swell the ranks of the loathsome gang that sinks deeper into the mud left by these whirlpools of glutinous water. That sinister gang marching complacently toward death. Then if meticulously honed screams begin to rip the night, the sleeping eardrums, the shredded hearts, the wilted souls, the crooked reckonings, the screen of cowardice, the skin of hands without gifts, the veils of palates, the pupils of the eyes, and the dawn of ideas, these troops of shepherds will be rolled like a ball before the storm; along the tracks hewn in the marble of the quays they will be seen running like clouds of smoke caught in the underbrush, transfixed against the parapet of their fragile consciences. And yet it’s the beginning of a new life that has been placed on the shelf of daybreak, this morning. A dawn like whipped cream made all the leaves weep for miles around, sorrow streamed along the living timbers, in secret channels and as far as the sluices of the human heart.

  On a lattice gate as solid as the lack of mutual understanding that will divide us until death, all the eyes that have been emptied, hollowed out, gnawed by innocent or unhealthy curiosity as though by leprosy, reach out to each other through the bars. Along that trajectory all the signs, predictions, precepts, and prophecies that involve the fate of humankind rush, pass, and jostle one another.

  One waits, one hopes that in a little while the black veil that hides from man the meaning of his own life will be ripped away. The restraints that maintain the limits of reason will be relaxed, the grasp of the iron fist will loosen, fluid matter will overflow a little onto the depilated moorland of madness.

  The screw propellers of humankind sometimes trick the hypnotic surveillance of the inner lighthouse to come and beat the ashes of ennui.

  Among the numbered chairs, labeled with infinitely dishonored names, the impalpable atmosphere of stormy meetings in Antiquity enters and silently lies down. For old age persists across the carelessly mortared flagstones where beads of sweat break out; weak indestructible roots still conduct a little sap that touches elbows, nets, and joints with a note of green. The switchblade of life is shut in the churches and under the moss of prayers that snakes along the walls, between the disjointed double doors, under the carelessly clasped hearts of penitents ravaged by the rebellious couch grass of doubt, seeking the way out.

  At what hour will we be forced to bow our foreheads forever? At what hour will someone come to visit the man condemned to the torture of love without an object and of reasons without hope? At what hour will someone come to change the air of this frightful cell? He stretches his arms out toward landscapes shivering behind glass lashed by the rain, rubbed down by the wind, through the grating and the bars of fire that guard the entrance to a land always promised and always refused. The imagination contracts at the brush with reality like an oyster under the drop of lemon juice that wounds it. Where are you going, miserable wanderer in space?

  Poverty hounds you, fatigue hurts you. Stop where you are. Cease to follow in vain this deep highway that cunningly eats away, like scabies, at the greasy epidermis of night. Rest, at last, since your eye perceives the light that filters through curtains of the inn, at the hour when fever diverts its perfidious sparrow hawk toward the world, the hour when forests tremble under the frantic caresses of crystal-fingered delirium.

  If you must finally choose to contemplate flight, close the main gate; dogs are barking in the dangerous courtyard and blood beats under the temples like the shutters against the wall.

  The sensitive and white man consigned to all the offshore winds, to all the caprices of fortune; he who lacks the motor of shame, the perches of friendship, the breeze from the magnetic crowds. As we were coming down between the black satin cliffs, along paths of unangry sand, on the trail of voices fleeing toward oblivion—missing the goal. As we were crossing deep railways, Despair and I, in the ice and the sea, the hoop of ripe fruits on the cup of the world, our pectoral muscles gnawed by pain, our flesh lacerated from the nape to the lower tendons, the ghosts of the embankment, under the rain of iron dust, told us this story.

  When the world had finally renounced forever, in a final burst of sublime heroism, that man without a name, body or face, he went out, unnoticed by the most vigilant reporters, through a basement door of the meanest house in the neighborhood.

  Beyond the threshold one steps immediately into a nightmare. The almost weightless pink-and-green sky is attached to the rusted hooks of the gutter by transparent threads of the thaw. It’s cold on the slopes of the atmosphere; the buttresses have turned into massive blocks of ice that will never become fissured in the sun as in the past. The foundations are nevertheless unshakable, too deeply sunk in the earth for that. But the road, a straight road, terribly straight, straight enough to make rascals shudder, scores the silence, between window glass and diamond. Trusting in our freedom and only in our freedom, we advance, turning back somewhat frightened toward the left, our backs frozen, no matter how we move, by a crushing void of silence, surprised to see such a distin
ct line, a light-colored band, yellowish, clean, well tamped down and washed by the weather, the fine weather. Between the hedges of blood we plunge into the underbrush of shame and anguish, leaving behind paths beaten by the rubber-tired wheels of happiness, into the mazes of suffering.

  What are you doing there, you, skyscraper without hope or life, empty nest, without satisfaction, amid rectilinear forms, cast shadows, streets without atmosphere, drunken sidewalks, abandoned windows, uninhabited water drops, songs without light, heads with no price on them, hearts without matches, portraits without models, drawn and quartered nudes, advantages of integrity, speculations on the stock market of health, poorly ventilated neighborhoods, and finally migraines of overheated poetry, before a jury of robust men covered with feathers, sharpened into penholders in the form of skeletons, men of letters, actually? What are you doing? Needing to get a little air after a copious repast beneath the chandeliers of glowworms, in the groves of civil war, isn’t a sufficient excuse. It’s an imprudent act fatal to stronger temperaments to come and glean, without authorization, the trash strewn over the ground when the foam of revolutionary waves has barely finished bubbling in the sawdust of the sidewalk cafés on the boulevard.