Collected French Translations: Prose

by Ashbery, John

  When the boats raised their sails with the firm intention of following, once and for all, the seagulls who dipped laughing among the silky feathers of the azure sky, he shook his arms and his skeleton, his nervous system vibrated like the cords of a ship, but he remained on shore. His legs collapsed under him and he immediately fell asleep again on the sand.

  Yet when the day finally dawned for him to leave this odious country of memories and ash, it wasn’t toward the sky he departed nor toward the sea, but toward the still unexplored bowels of the Earth. Along these roads, blood irrigates the brambles and the flesh blossoms out in magnificent flowers amid the fiery thorns of the underbrush. All along these trails, bends and turns erupt like the smiles of the loveliest roses of morning self-esteem.

  At the bottom of ravines pocked with chasms rumble the torrents of glory, striated with luminous fish. I was in a very high place. I was on the needlelike summits of the light. There, heads were rolling in the capricious turnstile of happiness. A fortunate dilation made the dimensions of one’s being identical with those of the Universe. Laughter of the belly and the mind prevailed. An innate brightness bathed everything and rendered all flesh transparent. A beneficial fire cauterized misfortune’s deepest and most obstinate wounds. One bathed freely in the running water of diamonds.

  I was very high up but I heard nevertheless an agonizing voice issuing from the deepest abysses of the Earth, a terribly agonizing voice whose furious lament arose from the Earth’s sterile entrails.

  Whence come you, voice of the fox broken in by all the horse-trading of friendship and intrigue, milky voice of poorly understood repopulation, singular voice, voice with two meanings, more suited to great railway catastrophes, inner voice, so hard to identify, voice, sepulchral voice of vaudevilles, why do you come to trouble my portion of eternal bliss?

  The torture arrived on raven’s wings to jar rudely the serenity of this peaceful sojourn. I wanted to leap over the safety of these aerial balustrades to stifle the importunate lamentations of that sinister voice. But it was not granted me to traverse that space. I could neither climb nor go down. For the one crying from the depths of the abysses of Earth was me. The lugubrious voice which mounted toward us from the inextinguishable braziers of hell was my own.

  In mid-ocean, after one of the most frightful maritime disasters of modern times, the position of the shipwrecked survivor whom a narrow spar allows to float just underwater is singularly critical. How will he manage to go and finish the hand of cards begun at a café on one of the smaller boulevards. Perhaps a shark will soon come and shear off his two legs. What will he do? Viewed from above, or simply from a distance, from the bridge of a comfortable battleship or from an even safer position on terra firma, the ocean’s waves are imposing, magnificent to behold; their contemplation raises the immortal soul of man who compares them unfavorably to his perishable casing, but at a considerable distance from the coasts, toward one of those places where, from the height of the crow’s nest, one perceives that the horizon has suddenly taken on a circular form as precise as though traced by a full-scale compass, they become terrifying—huge and terrifying. Such is the opinion of the castaway who even goes so far as to add that he finds them vertiginous. Vertigo is swallowed up by the swipe of an albatross’s or a seagull’s wing between the distance that separates the hollows and the crests of those liquid foothills. The castaway has had about all he can stand; his obvious lack of training begins little by little to aggravate his severe handicap in this endurance test that God has deemed equitable and salutary to send his way. But then too, into what risky adventure did he carelessly plunge? Isn’t the weather nicer in that café in the capital, ornamented with luxurious mirrors which make it seem larger? All those sounds of voices in the mirrors, all those reflections of glory in the clouds of smoke; that gale of words which drags the motions of hand and hair toward the revolving doors. Those magnificent poses, in which no line is wasted; those audacious phrases that go flying around the lamps and whose wings will never be censured; that sweetness of living, of wallowing in money, of demanding of others what one can’t provide oneself, that ease of daydreaming and forgetting, of shouting for no reason, of singing, of inviting a crowd, of talking at night, of sleeping on emptiness, of emptying the mind, of twisting the heart, of losing at poker, of winning at fear, of laughing in the eyes and the wrinkles of one’s best friends, of racing without danger along the tracks of intrepid cities and, above all, that certificate of existence which provides us with the services of our coevals at too modest a price, why did he leave all that for this precarious solitude on the plains of the Ocean? Look at him now, beginning to reflect and rest his elbows on his spar with an anxious air. How will he ever finish that card game?

  At this moment a perpendicular star mounts slowly and noiselessly from the horizon. A rapid glance lets him note quickly what is happening. He won’t have to make an enormous effort to save the situation.

  And in fact, as the perpendicular star climbs ever higher, one can see an unfurling ladder of silvery rays whose lower extremity brushes the crests of the waves.

  The castaway summons his last remaining forces and uses them to place first a hand, then a foot on the first rung of this supple ladder. Now he is climbing slowly like a man exhausted by illness, the starvation of the shipwreck, and the mortifications of avarice. And it’s not a feebly moving spectacle to watch, across the night’s billows, in this muffled solitude far from animals and men alike, far from the sparkling glances and the futile noise of the world, a creature, half-dead with exhaustion, slowly and joylessly mounting the sharp-edged stairs of the path of resurrection.

  The entranceways of this mysterious house are congested with the comings and goings of the men and women who go in and go out. Men who enter and who will never leave, women who leave and will never go back in. The men penetrate it at that time of day that is called dusk, the women escape it at that time of day which ought to be called blond. To say nothing of those who throw themselves, like money, out the windows, or who climb and descend, in perpetual motion, that dizzying stairway which drills the core of the building from top to bottom, as far as infinity. For what we are dealing with here is nothing less than infinity, in this system that has nothing in common with our regime except the close relations between the outer surface of the fabric and its lining.

  In a hallucinatory nightmare, two men whose moral temperament is as unlike as their physical complexion find themselves face to face in one of the innumerable halls which it is absolutely essential not to describe here, and whose general aspect is that of a totally deserted private bar.

  One of them, a great comedian of the bourgeoisie of the twentieth century, is always, prompted by impulsive remorse, on the verge of recounting the tragic details of a crime he once committed.

  Once upon a time he killed, doubtless from fairly base motives, someone he loved too much to suffer the slightest abuse from him. The most indiscreet liberating words teem at his lips. The coils of his conscience alternately distend and contract, twist in painful convulsions, the agonies of grief can be fully decoded in the altered features of his masculine face.

  The other, a braggart of sorts, full of stupid intuitions, grasping at all the words buzzing around his ears, reassembles them as best he can into swarms even noisier than the ice of marshlands at the all too impatiently awaited moment of its breaking up in spring.

  Without realizing it, he ends up attributing to himself all the ideas and acts of his interlocutor. The traits that demarcate them in space are temporarily blurred.

  And so it is that after the complete confession of the first, who has unloaded his galling remorse, it’s the other one, the idiot, who ends up believing himself guilty. He’s boasting naively, he’s radiant, for an hour he’s been talking like an idling engine, for an hour he’s been condemning himself while the discreet men moving along the wall, numbered like the doors that pierce the wall, lay hold of him and drag him off to shelter him from blows of the
too-lively air which was recently crimping the river with its curling iron. It would be wrong to suppose that the transient interest of this anecdote was used to deflect attention from the principal figure in this dramatic action that deploys its stirring phases with the serene amplitude of fatality. When the wheels congeal in the chilly air of morning, one may tell oneself, without excessive fear of falling into the dreaded lair of judicial error, that it’s the wheels of the milk carts climbing the street again, but if snub-nosed vice sticks its blue face through the chink of the partly opened window, the passersby, coming home late and made to feel unwelcome in this neighborhood totally transformed by the epidemic, complain about not finding their shoes. After committing his crime, the assassin hung the customary sign on the removable metal handle of the shop door: Closed on account of death. He went off without leaving the least fingerprint or the least suspicion. And besides, that same day there was such an uproar in the avenues decked with bunting, in the gold nuggets of the dust and the invectives of the women peddling fruit and vegetables, and the glass laughter of the wicker-clad bottle women displayed in the market stalls, that at first no one noticed what had happened in the house set back from the street where no one ever went in. But certainly there was here sufficient incentive to cause the psychologist searching for pleasant lakes in the sands of the unconscious, constantly sifted by the sieves of light, to fall into a chasm of reflections. Taking no notice of the heaviness of this style, borrowed momentarily from a department foreign to the matters under discussion here, let the reader take heed instead of the depths in which swim the passions of the characters in this book. While one may find elsewhere minute research on all the tics, all the words trampled and suppressed in wagons of hay spoiled by the rain, here nothing but that which is truly impenetrable concerns us. Psychology is moving ahead at full speed and psychoanalysis is making excellent progress. But what still greater charm lies in the overthrow of the method of investigation we have adopted from the beginning. One believes, without due reflection, that it is enough to look at a man in order to see him, that it is enough to listen to him in order to hear him, and that the moment he says yes, he is very naively thinking no. We didn’t stay long in this pathway of error under the flowering hawthorn bushes. There are better ways, certainly, to know men and to learn what is happening in their souls—we have only not to look at them. So it was that the office boy at the clandestine newspaper of this obscure city, after changing his jacket, found a large acacia thorn under his left armpit and, in the inside pocket, a key. The drawer he had found was full of multicolored papers, notices, censored letters, of which he took possession. Then he disappeared for a while, hiding in a stable at the other end of the village. But illness forced him out to take the air and he wandered at night among the trees of the courtyard. Yet his health only worsened. By the time he decided to seek the help of some doctor or lawyer or professional center at the university, it was too late. The malady had done its work. Besides which, the doctor recognized him by his enormous white beard. And as it was snowing that evening, the doctor, prudent, blew on it. And the wind carried him away.

  It’s certainly not the moment, you’ll agree, to betray the secret of that closed society that lives lavishly in the so superbly illuminated apartments of that frivolous house that our eyes can make out in the vista. Luxury, on bronzed wings, risks its flight in the trees of the wood where fields join each other, shoulder to shoulder. Among the branches the lamp keeps watch, a signal for the heroes of contraband who meet there in the evening to taste the fruits of anxiety, juicy as the carob. But thanks to them I emerged at last from my period of despair. I cured my head, bathed my spirit. I maintained a little light behind my eyes and I can look straight ahead without sliding into the immense void where roils the wind that drags us away. Everything has become flat and glowing and a beautiful blue color in the atmosphere. Even I can see myself in the mirror conveniently placed in the air. Immortal man, man of dust. I am no longer afraid to touch the earth, nor to see it end abruptly ahead of me, and I can walk without fear of meeting that immutable wall.

  Always that wall, that immense wall that has been placed before me so as to harm me.

  Scarcely deadened by work I was obliged, once evening arrived, to scrub away the fulgurating inscription that rendered intolerable the idea of death that each one of us carries like a too-hard pillow against his temple. Loitering with velvet tread on the damp sidewalks, when evening prowls in the wet streets of poor districts like a rag for mopping the pavement, the gangs have set to work. And all the flattened caps, all the spit curls of weathervanes in the night, on joyful roofs, the unfolded slopes that don’t count in articulating cities of rotted teeth. It’s with this accoutrement and during these dangerous tasks that the worth of men affirms itself under the crushing commands of their cruel destiny.

  Heavy crates, too well nailed together, arrive on steamships whose duty it is to stir up the Ocean.

  But what are we supposed to do with those contraband arms against our enemies, touchy as earwigs?

  Nocturnal dog-days leaning toward the occident, don’t wait for the hail of more or less somber bullets, more or less crackled, striped with revelatory tumefactions—this bruised and so well beloved flesh, rebellious, harassed by fatigue under the lamps of livid streets, of sordid neighborhoods, of nights of orgy when I drag you nauseated along the ground, don’t expect me to follow the walls to escape the heat of rays put back into their cases, nor that the fear of the clearly outlined shadow will push me to look at the silvered column which trembles according to the whims of the temperature. In the morning, I am with the disintegrating ranks of revolt; disorganized, overwhelmed, overloaded, in the open sea, weighed down with the flotsam that riddles the abyss that separates me from dry land.

  Every evening I stroll with a man chained to a wall, to an idée fixe. We go betwixt and betwixt against the wall. Sometimes we turn, but without ever going far from each other, in a sort of calm whirlpool that stops the movement of the stars.

  And as long as I remain in contact with that man, I too am chained to the wall—what could we have to say to each other in that jail, since nothing can supplant that idée fixe, since no other hypothesis can come to supplant the Roman cement of that wall, wall that’s so smooth, so hard, so thick, so high, so calm. That wall so patina’d and polished by the rubbing of so many centuries—that horrible wall. But the attacks of saltpeter. But the threats of refined tortures that rip out confessions from the innocent? All that struggle against ghost ships refloated by conspiracies. Yet we have nothing to do with it, or with anybody. Once the door is boarded up, the windows aimed at the beach, we must await the return of the tides toward the stretchers of the cliffs.

  An insect, not born yesterday, begins courageously climbing the trunk of a sapling. Once arrived at the top, he summons his last strength to shout—the sea! the sea!—like a sailor in the clouds, in the crow’s nest, and the others on the ground listen to him, gaping. When he climbs down they all embrace each other, cheering him on and setting out for that at last discovered distant beach.

  No sooner do they arrive than they all rise up in rebellion and scatter in different directions; and boredom activates in alarming fashion the movements of the compass needles of mortality. Each one thinks of his precious apartment in the city that the moths are now devouring—for the intensity of men’s desires is not in direct proportion to the pleasure felt when they are satisfied.

  And when sinister events from the past begin to well up violently from the crust of goodwill and resignation under which it had been decided to bury them, piercing it everywhere, you should see those bubbles bursting, those features spurting, that heart leaping in its gilded cage. As for the head, it quite simply loses its shape. As the powers of darkness are infinitely superior to those of light, if one looks a little higher than the level of mediocrity where we are all more or less obliged to crawl, it is incontestable that tornadoes of misfortune have an infinitely more efficacious grip
on the propeller blades of our mechanism than the intermittent and always belated cascades of success and happiness. The happiness of man is devoid of chlorophyll no doubt because its specific condition is to evolve in the darkest and dankest caves of the heart. Hence it would be singularly unjust and regrettable if one were to condemn an author, with his multiparous entrails, for the superhuman efforts he has been able to make to sustain with sangfroid a dignified attitude before the endless reproaches made to him by his style, and who, confronted by so many insults and offenses, finds himself in the position of a penguin that has been buckled into a straitjacket.

  As the icebergs drift majestically across the sky, always in the direction of the hands of the watch, the passengers, ashamed of their trip being cut short for reasons that are still far from clear, set about throwing their baggage overboard.

  That lighthouse which stands so cruelly rigid in the night, that telescope so proud of having brought back a star as a prisoner from the ashes of twilight, that siphon of light, in a word, which causes the Ocean to boil in the night, attracts the attention of this band in distress on the quicksands of infinity.