The Penguin Book of French Poetry

by Various

  Fourth Hymn, strophe 6 (extract)

  I was dreaming that I had entered into the body of a hog, that I could not easily get out, and that I was wallowing my hair in the foulest of swamps. Was this as a reward? Object of my desires, I no longer belonged to humanity! For myself, so I understood the interpretation, and I experienced a more than profound joy. And yet, I searched actively to know what virtuous deed I had accomplished to deserve, from the hands of Providence, this distinguished favour. Now that I have reviewed in my memory the different phases of that dreadful prostration against the granite belly, during which the tide, unseen by me, passed twice over that irreducible mixture of dead matter and living flesh, it is perhaps not without value to proclaim that that degradation was probably only a punishment executed on me by divine justice. But who can know his intimate needs or the cause of his pestilential joys! The ses joies pestilentielles! La métamorphose ne parut jamais à mes yeux que comme le haut et magnanime retentissement d’un bonheur parfait, que j’attendais depuis longtemps. Il était enfin venu, le jour où je fus un pourceau! J’essayai mes dents sur l’écorce des arbres; mon groin, je le contemplais avec délice. Il ne restait plus la moindre parcelle de divinité: je sus élever mon âme jusqu’à l’excessive hauteur de cette volupté ineffable. Écoutez-moi donc, et ne rougissez pas, inépuisables caricatures du beau, qui prenez au sérieux le braiement risible de votre âme, souverainement méprisable; et qui ne comprenez pas pourquoi le Tout-puissant, dans un rare moment de bouffonnerie excellente, qui, certainement, ne dépasse pas les grandes lois générates du grotesque, prit, un jour, le mirifique plaisir de faire habiter une planète par des êtres singuliers et microscopiques, qu’on appelle humains, et dont la matière ressemble à celle du corail vermeil. Certes, vous avez raison de rougir, os et graisse, mais écoutez-moi. Je n’invoque pas votre intelligence; vous la feriez rejeter du

  metamorphosis never appeared in my eyes as anything but the lofty and magnanimous reverberation of a perfect happiness that I had long awaited. It had come at last, the day when I was a hog! I tested my teeth on the bark of the trees; I contemplated my snout with delight. There remained not the slightest particle of divinity: I was able to elevate my soul to the exorbitant height of this ineffable voluptuousness. Now listen to me, and do not blush, you inexhaustible caricatures of beauty, who take seriously the ridiculous braying of your superlatively contemptible soul; and you who do not understand why the All-powerful, in a rare moment of exquisite buffoonery that certainly does not surpass the great general laws of the grotesque, indulged himself one day in the admirable pleasure of peopling a planet with odd microscopic beings called humans, whose substance resembles that of rosy coral. True, you have reason to blush, bones and fat, but listen to me. I am not invoking your intelligence; you would make it spit blood by the sang par l’horreur qu’elle vous témoigne: oubliez-là, et soyez conséquents avec vous-mêmes… Là, plus de contrainte. Quand je voulais tuer, je tuais; cela, même, m’arrivait souvent, et personne ne m’en empêchait. Les lois humaines me poursuivaient encore de leur vengeance, quoique je n’attaquasse pas la race que j’avais abandonnée si tranquillement; mais ma conscience ne me faisait aucun reproche. Pendant la journée, je me battais avec mes nouveaux semblables, et le sol était parsemé de nombreuses couches de sang caillé. J’étais le plus fort, et je remportais toutes les victoires. Des blessures cuisantes couvraient mon corps; je faisais semblant de ne pas m’en apercevoir. Les animaux terrestres s’éloignaient de moi, et je restais seul dans ma resplendissante grandeur. Quel ne fut pas mon étonnement, quand, après avoir traversé un fleuve à la nage, pour m’éloigner des contrées que ma rage avait dépeuplées, et gagner d’autres campagnes pour y planter mes coutumes de meurtre et de carnage, j’essayai de marcher sur cette rive

  horror to which it testifies: forget it, and be consistent with yourselves… In this form, no more constraints. When I wanted to kill, I killed; that even happened to me often, and no one stood in my way. Human laws pursued me still with their vengeance, though I did not attack the race which I had abandoned so calmly; but my conscience gave me no reproach. During the day I fought with my new peers, and the soil was spattered with many layers of coagulated blood. I was the strongest, and all victories were mine. Piercing wounds covered my body; I pretended not to notice them. The animals of the earth shunned me, and I remained alone in my resplendent greatness. Imagine my astonishment when, after swimming across a river to journey away from the lands that my fury had depopulated, and to reach other countries to implant there my customs of murder and slaughter, I tried to walk upon that fleurie. Mes pieds étaient paralysés; aucun mouvement ne venait trahir la vérité de cette immobilité forcée. Au milieu d’efforts surnaturels, pour continuer mon chemin, ce fut alors que je me réveillai, et que je sentis que je redevenais homme. La Providence me faisait ainsi comprendre, d’une manière qui n’est pas inexplicable, qu’elle ne voulait pas que, même en rêve, mes projets sublimes s’accomplissent. Revenir à ma forme primitive fut pour moi une douleur si grande, que, pendant les nuits, j’en pleure encore. Mes draps sont constamment mouillés, comme s’ils avaient été passés dans l’eau, et, chaque jour, je les fais changer. Si vous ne le croyez pas, venez me voir; vous contrôlerez, par votre propre expérience, non pas las vraisemblance, mais, en outre, la vérité même de mon assertion. Combien de fois, depuis cette nuit passée à la belle étoile, sur une falaise, ne me suis-je pas mêlé à des troupeaux de pourceaux, pour reprendre, comme un droit, ma métamorphose détruit! Il est temps de quitter ces souvenirs glorieux, qui ne laissent, après leur suite, que la pâle voie lactée des regrets éternels.

  flowering bank. My feet were paralysed, no movement came that might betray the truth of that forced immobility. Amid preternatural efforts to continue on my way, it was then that I awoke, and sensed that I was becoming a man once more. Thus Providence gave me to understand, in an inexplicable way, that it did not wish my sublime projects to be realized even in dreams. The return to my primitive form was so painful to me that I still weep over it at night. My sheets are constantly wet as if they had been steeped in water, and each day I have them changed. If you do not believe it, come to see me; you will verify through your own experience not the verisimilitude but, beyond that, the very truth of my assertion. How many times, since that night passed under the stars, on a clifftop, have I not mingled with herds of hogs, to recapture as a right my destroyed metamorphosis! It is time to abandon these glorious memories, which leave behind after their effect only the pale milky way of eternal yearnings.

  Germain Nouveau

  (1851–1920)

  A friend of Cros, Mallarmé, Verlaine and Rimbaud (he travelled to England with Rimbaud during Verlaine’s imprisonment), Nouveau was an enigmatic and restless poet who used a variety of pseudonyms and took no interest in the publication of his work, at times even opposing it actively.

  Born at Pourrières (Var), he went to Paris in 1872 after brilliant studies at Aix-en-Provence, and made some impact on the literary scene, but left the city and drifted through a succession of provincial teaching jobs. Towards the end of his life he became an ascetic wandering beggar, disowning possessions and living on charity, back in his native region. He received periodic treatment for mental disorders (including mystical delirium) and alcoholic debilitation, and died in his home village.

  His religious conversion had led him to envisage a rather Hugolian multiple hymn to existence called ‘La Doctrine de l’Amour’. He made some progress in its composition, expressing in a mosaic of poems an ecstatic, sensual response to both profane and divine beauty. His work, often based on traditional ballad and madrigal forms, is uneven in quality, but his best pieces have been highly praised by modern poets including Breton, Eluard and Aragon. He blends musical delicacy and verbal inventiveness with irony and Gallic bluntness in a style that can resemble at different times that of Verlaine, of Corbière and of Rimbaud, and the influences may well have been mutual.

  Nouveau’s poetry
was published in a piecemeal way, but there are five identifiable groupings: Premiers Poèmes, Dixains réalistes, La Doctrine de l’Amour, Valentines and Ave Maris Stella. They were gathered finally into a Pléiade edition of his Oeuvres Complétes in 1970 (combined with Lautréamont).

  Poison perdu

  Des nuits du blond et de la brune

  Rien dans la chambre n’est resté;

  Pas une dentelle d’été,

  Pas une cravate commune.

  Rien sur le balcon où le thé

  Se prend aux heures de la lune.

  Ils n’ont laissé de trace aucune,

  Aucun souvenir n’est resté.

  Au bord d’un rideau bleu piquée

  Luit une épingle à tête d’or,

  Comme un gros insecte qui dort.

  Pointe d’un fin poison trempée,

  Je te prends: sois-moi préparée

  Aux heures des désirs de mort.

  Poison lost

  Of the nights of the fair man and the dark-haired woman nothing has remained in the room; not a summer lace, not a commonplace tie.

  Nothing on the balcony where tea is taken in the moonlit hours. They have left not a trace, no memory has remained.

  Caught on the hem of a blue curtain gleams a pin with a golden head, like a great sleeping insect.

  Tip steeped in a refined poison, I’ll take you: be ready for me when death is desired.

  Mendiants

  Pendant qu’hésite encor ton pas sur la prairie,

  Le pays s’est de ciel houleux enveloppé.

  Tu cèdes, l’œil levé vers la nuagerie,

  A ce doux midi blême et plein d’osier coupé.

  Nous avons tant suivi le mur de mousse grise

  Qu’à la fin, à nos flancs qu’une douleur emplit,

  Non moins bon que ton sein, tiède comme l’église,

  Ce fossé s’est ouvert aussi sÛr que le lit.

  Dédoublement sans fin d’un typique fantôme,

  Que l’or de ta prunelle était peuplé de rois!

  Est-ce moi qui riais à travers ce royaume?

  Je tenais la martyre, ayant ses bras en croix.

  Beggars

  While your step still hesitates on the meadow, the land has been shrouded by a turbulent sky. You surrender, eyes raised towards the cloud formations, to this sweet sallow noon full of cut willow.

  We followed so long the wall of grey moss that at last, for our flanks filled with pain, no less kind than your breast, as warm as the church, this ditch opened, as secure as the bed.

  Endless doubling of a symbolical chimera, how the gold of your pupil was thronged with kings! Was that me laughing through that kingdom? I was holding the martyr, her arms forming a cross.

  Le fleuve au loin, le ciel en deuil, l’eau de tes lèvres,

  Immense trilogie amère aux cœurs noyés,

  Un goÛt m’est revenu de nos plus forts genièvres,

  Lorsque ta joue a lui, près des yeux dévoyés!

  Et pourtant, oh! pourtant, des seins de l’innocente

  Et de nos doigts, sonnant, vers notre rêve éclos

  Sur le ventre gentil comme un tambour qui chante,

  Dianes aux désirs, et charger aux sanglots,

  De ton attifement de boucles et de ganses,

  Vieux Bébé, de tes cils essuyés simplement,

  Et de vos piétés, et de vos manigances

  Qui m’auraient bien pu rendre aussi chien que l’amant,

  Il ne devait rester qu’une ironie immonde,

  Une langueur des yeux détournés sans effort.

  Quel bras, impitoyable aux Échappés du monde,

  Te pousse à l’Est, pendant que je me sauve au Nord!

  The distant river, the sky in mourning, the water of your lips, vast bitter trilogy for drowned hearts, a taste came back to me of our strongest junipers, when your cheek shone, close by the errant eyes!

  And yet, oh! yet, of the breasts of the innocent girl and of our fingers, ringing, towards our dream made manifest on the graceful stomach like a singing drum, sounding reveilles to desires and the charge to sobs,

  Of your adornment of buckles and braids, old Baby, of your lashes naïvely wiped dry, and of your pieties, and of your schemings, which could well have made me as doglike as the lover,

  Nothing was to remain but a foul irony, a listlessness in the eyes turned aside without effort. What arm, relentless towards the Fugitives of the world, drives you to the East, while I escape to the North!

  Pourrières

  Un vieux clocher coiffé de fer sur la colline.

  Des fenêtres sans cris, sous des toits sans oiseaux.

  D’un barbaresque Azur la paix du Ciel s’incline.

  Soleil dur! Mort de l’ombre! Et Silence des Eaux.

  Marius! son fantôme à travers les roseaux,

  Par la plaine! Un son lent de l’Horloge féline.

  Quatre enfants sur la place où l’ormeau perd ses os,

  Autour d’un Pauvre, étrange, avec sa mandoline.

  Un banc de pierre chaud comme un pain dans le four,

  Où trois Vieux, dans ce coin de la Gloire du Jour,

  Sentent au rayon vif cuire leur vieillesse.

  Pourrières

  An old steeple topped with iron on the hill. Windows without shouts, under roofs without birds. From a Barbary Blue sky the peace of heaven bows low. Unyielding sun! Death of shadow! And Silence of the Waters.

  Marius!1 his ghost through the reeds, across the plain! A slow tone from the feline Clock. Four children on the market square where the young elm is losing its bones, around a Pauper, a strange man, with his mandolin.

  A warm stone bench like a loaf in the oven, where three Old Men, in this corner of the Halo of the Day,2 feel their old age baking in the ardent ray.

  Babet revient du bois, tenant sa mule en laisse.

  Noir, le Vicaire au loin voit, d’une ombre au ton bleu,

  Le Village au soleil fumer vers le Bon Dieu.

  Babet comes back from the wood, with his mule on a string. Black in the distance, the Curate sees, from a blue-toned shadow, the Village rising in smoke in the sunlight towards the Good Lord.

  Arthur Rimbaud

  (1854–91)

  An uncompromising, anti-social adolescent genius, Rimbaud occupies a unique place in world literature. His poetic development was alarmingly accelerated, and came to an equally startling and definitive end.

  At sixteen he could parody the style of most known poets, and his home town of Charleville became, along with his repressive home and educational background, the first butt of his own iconoclastic talent. Only his literature teacher, Georges Izambard, was exempt. Rimbaud set off in the turbulent summer of 1870 for Paris, on foot. Removal home after his arrest for ‘vagabondage’ was ineffective. He set out again for Douai, Charleroi and Brussels, then eventually back to Paris at the end of February 1871, where a profound personal and artistic crisis coincided with the days of the Commune. The Lettre du Voyant, a key document in the history of poetry, was written from Charleville in May.

  Later that year he became the flea-ridden sensation of the Paris avant-garde, the protégé of Verlaine and the destroyer of his domestic harmony. After a period of depression at Charleville early in 1872 he returned to Paris, before starting the erratic odyssey with Verlaine that ended with the shooting incident in Brussels (see page 224).

  It is known that Rimbaud finished the prose-poem collection Une Saison en Enfer, an artistic whole culminating in his farewell to poetry, in 1873. The problem of dating Les Illuminations has vexed researchers for over a century, and these visionary but disjointed prose-poems may well originate in several different phases of his experience, some perhaps even post-dating Une Saison en Enfer. Verlaine was responsible for their eventual publication as an integrated volume in 1886.

  Rimbaud’s response to the artistic impasse he reached was to abandon literature. He left Europe for a nomadic life of soldiering (and desertion), trading in Cyprus
and Aden, and even illegal arms-trafficking in Abyssinia. He returned to France in 1891 with a gangrenous tumour on his knee, and died shortly afterwards.

  In 1871 Rimbaud had seen in poetry the potential to change life where political revolution had failed, and what had been in him a generalized and anarchic revolt took a more specific and conscious artistic direction. This revolutionary project, involving a total commitment of the poet to experience, is set out in the Lettre du Voyant. In this exuberant, arrogant manifesto he dismisses a great body of poetry, including some of his own, as lacking in Vision (‘Voyance’). The genius of many poets, where it has existed, has been an accidental, unconscious gift. His genius will have conscious control over its creative powers in their journey through ‘Correspondances’, destroying the old rhetoric that enslaved even his predecessor Baudelaire, and searching dynamically for radically original forms of expression. He will pursue self-knowledge to an extreme degree to discover and communicate his deepest impulses, however irrational, discontinuous and disturbing both the process and its expression may be, and even if calculated self-destruction and degradation are to be the price of that knowledge. Penetrating far beyond Baudelaire’s experience, it will be a ‘long, immense and reasoned disordering of all the senses…’ in which the artist becomes ‘the great sick man, the great criminal, the great outcast…’ but most importantly ‘the Supreme Sage… for he arrives at the unknown’. In this ineffable torture, he ‘consumes all the poisons within him, keeping only their quintessences’. Disruption of the normal workings of the mind (through sleep deprivation, alcohol, drugs, solitude, sickness, unorthodox sexual experience…) will be carried out with lucid control, and the personality that emerges out of euphoria and horror will be the prototype of a new human being. Thus the purpose is moral and social as well as aesthetic, and the poet is to be a ‘multiplier of progress’. His language will be new, it will be ‘of the soul, for the soul, encompassing everything, scents, sounds, colours, thought hooking on to thought and pulling’.