Selected Poems 1930-1988
Page 8
Dans les tavernes chanter des chansons tchèques
Te voici à Marseille au milieu des pastèques
Te voici à Coblence à l’hôtel du Géant
Te voici à Rome assis sous un néflier du Japon
Te voici à Amsterdam avec une jeune fille que tu trouves belle et qui est laide
Elle doit se marier avec un étudiant de Leyde
On y loue des chambres en latin Cubicula locanda
Je m’en souviens j’y ai passé trois jours et autant à Gouda
Tu es à Paris chez le juge d’instruction
Comme un criminel on te met en état d’arrestation
Tu as fait de douloureux et de joyeux voyages
Avant de t’apercevoir du mensonge et de l’âge
Tu as souffert de l’amour à vingt et à trente ans
J’ai vécu comme un fou et j’ai perdu mon temps
Tu n’oses plus regarder tes mains et à tous moments je voudrais sangloter
Sur toi sur celle que j’aime sur tout ce qui t’a épouvanté
Tu regardes les yeux pleins de larmes ces pauvres émigrants
Ils croient en Dieu ils prient les femmes allaitent des enfants
Ils emplissent de leur odeur le hall de la gare Saint-Lazare
Ils ont foi dans leur étoile comme les rois-mages
Ils espèrent gagner de l’argent dans l’Argentine
Et revenir dans leur pays après avoir fait fortune
Une famille transporte un édredon rouge comme vous transportez votre cœur
Cet édredon et nos rêves sont aussi irréels
Quelques-uns de ces émigrants restent ici et se logent
Rue des Rosiers ou rue des Écouffes dans des bouges
Je les ai vus souvent le soir ils prennent l’air dans la rue
Et se déplacent rarement comme les pièces aux échecs
Il y a surtout des Juifs leurs femmes portent perruque
Elles restent assises exsangues au fond des boutiques
Tu es debout devant le zinc d’un bar crapuleux
Tu prends un café à deux sous parmi les malheureux
Tu es la nuit dans un grand restaurant
Ces femmes ne sont pas méchantes elles ont des soucis cependant
Toutes même la plus laide a fait souffrir son amant
Elle est la fille d’un sergent de ville de Jersey
Ses mains que je n’avais pas vues sont dures et gercées
J’ai une pitié immense pour les coutures de son ventre
J’humilie maintenant à une pauvre fille au rire horrible ma bouche
Tu es seul le matin va venir
Les laitiers font tinter leurs bidons dans les rues
La nuit s’éloigne ainsi qu’une belle Métive
C’est Ferdine la fausse ou Léa l’attentive
Et tu bois cet alcool brûlant comme ta vie
Ta vie que tu bois comme une eau-de-vie
Tu marches vers Auteuil tu veux aller chez toi à pied
Dormir parmi tes fétiches d’Océanie et de Guinée
Ils sont des Christ d’une autre forme et d’une autre croyance
Ce sont les Christ inférieurs des obscures espérances
Adieu Adieu
Soleil cou coupé
Zone
In the end you are weary of this ancient world
This morning the bridges are bleating Eiffel Tower oh herd
Weary of living in Roman antiquity and Greek
Here even the motor-cars look antique
Religion alone has stayed young religion
Has stayed simple like the hangars at Port Aviation
You alone in Europe Christianity are not ancient
The most modern European is you Pope Pius X
And you whom the windows watch shame restrains
From entering a church this morning and confessing your sins
You read the handbills the catalogues the singing posters
So much for poetry this morning and the prose is in the papers
Special editions full of crimes
Celebrities and other attractions for 25 centimes
This morning I saw a pretty street whose name is gone
Clean and shining clarion of the sun
Where from Monday morning to Saturday evening four times a day
Directors workers and beautiful shorthand typists go their way
And thrice in the morning the siren makes its moan
And a bell bays savagely coming up to noon
The inscriptions on walls and signs
The notices and plates squawk parrot-wise
I love the grace of this industrial street
In Paris between the Avenue des Ternes and the Rue Aumont-Thiéville
There it is the young street and you still but a small child
Your mother always dresses you in blue and white
You are very pious and with René Dalize your oldest crony
Nothing delights you more than church ceremony
It is nine at night the lowered gas burns blue you steal away
From the dormitory and all night in the college chapel pray
Whilst everlastingly the flaming glory of Christ
Wheels in adorable depths of amethyst
It is the fair lily that we all revere
It is the torch burning in the wind its auburn hair
It is the rosepale son of the mother of grief
It is the tree with the world’s prayers ever in leaf
It is of honour and eternity the double beam
It is the six-branched star it is God
Who Friday dies and Sunday rises from the dead
It is Christ who better than airmen wings his flight
Holding the record of the world for height
Pupil Christ of the eye
Twentieth pupil of the centuries it is no novice
And changed into a bird this century soars like Jesus
The devils in the deeps look up and say they see a
Nimitation of Simon Magus in Judea
Craft by name by nature craft they cry
About the pretty flyer the angels fly
Enoch Elijah Apollonius of Tyana hover
With Icarus round the first airworthy ever
For those whom the Eucharist transports they now and then make way
Host-elevating priests ascending endlessly
The aeroplane alights at last with outstretched pinions
Then the sky is filled with swallows in their millions
The rooks come flocking the owls the hawks
Flamingoes from Africa and ibises and storks
The roc bird famed in song and story soars
With Adam’s skull the first head in its claws
The eagle stoops screaming from heaven’s verge
From America comes the little humming-bird
From China the long and supple
One-winged peehees that fly in couples
Behold the dove spirit without alloy
That ocellate peacock and lyre-bird convoy
The phoenix flame-devoured flame-revived
All with its ardent ash an instant hides
Leaving the perilous straits the sirens three
Divinely singing join the company
And eagle phoenix peehees fraternize
One and all with the machine that flies
Now you walk in Paris alone among the crowd
Herds of bellowing buses hemming you about
Anguish of love parching you within
As though you were never to be loved again
If you lived in olden times you would get you to a cloister
You are ashamed when you catch yourself at a paternoster
You are your own mocker and like hellfire your laughter crackles
Golden on your life’s hearth fall the sparks of your laughter
It is a picture in a dark museum hung
And you sometimes go and contemplate it long
It was and would I could forget it was at beauty’s ebb
From the midst of fervent flames Our Lady beheld me at Chartres
The blood of your Sacred Heart flooded me in Montmartre
I am sick with hearing the words of bliss
The love I endure is like a syphilis
And the image that possesses you and never leaves your side
In anguish and insomnia keeps you alive
Now you are on the Riviera among
The lemon-trees that flower all year long
With your friends you go for a sail on the sea
One is from Nice one from Menton and two from La Turbie
The octopuses in the depths fill us with horror
And in the seaweed fishes swim emblems of the Saviour
You are in an inn-garden near Prague
You feel perfectly happy a rose is on the table
And you observe instead of writing your story in prose
The chafer asleep in the heart of the rose
Appalled you see your image in the agates of Saint Vitus
That day you were fit to die with sadness
You look like Lazarus frantic in the daylight
The hands of the clock in the Jewish quarter go to left from right
And you too live slowly backwards
Climbing up to the Hradchin or listening as night falls
To Czech songs being sung in taverns
Here you are in Marseilles among the water-melons
Here you are in Coblenz at the Giant’s Hostelry
Here you are in Rome under a Japanese medlar-tree
Here you are in Amsterdam with an ill-favoured maiden
You find her beautiful she is engaged to a student in Leyden
There they let their rooms in Latin cubicula locanda
I remember I spent three days there and as many in Gouda
You are in Paris with the examining magistrate
They clap you in gaol like a common reprobate
Grievous and joyous voyages you made
Before you knew what falsehood was and age
At twenty you suffered from love and at thirty again
My life was folly and my days in vain
You dare not look at your hands tears haunt my eyes
For you for her I love and all the old miseries
Weeping you watch the wretched emigrants
They believe in God they pray the women suckle their infants
They fill with their smell the station of Saint-Lazare
Like the wise men from the East they have faith in their star
They hope to prosper in the Argentine
And to come home having made their fortune
A family transports a red eiderdown as you your heart
An eiderdown as unreal as our dreams
Some go no further doss in the stews
Of the Rue des Rosiers or the Rue des Écouffes
Often in the streets I have seen them in the gloaming
Taking the air and like chessmen seldom moving
They are mostly Jews the wives wear wigs and in
The depths of shadowy dens bloodless sit on and on
You stand at the bar of a crapulous café
Drinking coffee at two sous a time in the midst of the unhappy
It is night you are in a restaurant it is superior
These women are decent enough they have their troubles however
All even the ugliest one have made their lovers suffer
She is a Jersey police-constable’s daughter
Her hands I had not seen are chapped and hard
The seams of her belly go to my heart
To a poor harlot horribly laughing I humble my mouth
You are alone morning is at hand
In the streets the milkmen rattle their cans
Like a dark beauty night withdraws
Watchful Leah or Ferdine the false
And you drink this alcohol burning like your life
Your life that you drink like spirit of wine
You walk towards Auteuil you want to walk home and sleep
Among your fetishes from Guinea and the South Seas
Christs of another creed another guise
The lowly Christs of dim expectancies
Adieu Adieu
Sun corseless head
SÉBASTIEN CHAMFORT
Huit Maximes
Le sot qui a un moment d’esprit étonne et scandalise comme des chevaux de fiacre qui galopent.
Long after Chamfort
Wit in fools has something shocking
Like cabhorses galloping.
Le théâtre tragique a le grand inconvénient moral de mettre trop d’importance à la vie et à la mort.
The trouble with tragedy is the fuss it makes
About life and death and other tuppenny aches.
Quand on soutient que les gens les moins sensibles sont, à tout prendre, les plus heureux, je me rappelle le proverbe indien: ‘Il vaut mieux être assis que debout, couché qu’assis, mort que tout cela.’
Better on your arse than on your feet,
Flat on your back than either, dead than the lot.
Quand on a été bien tourmenté, bien fatigué par sa propre sensibilité, on s’aperçoit qu’il faut vivre au jour le jour, oublier beaucoup, enfin éponger la vie à mesure qu’elle s’écoule.
Live and clean forget from day to day,
Mop life up as fast as it dribbles away.
La pensée console de tout et remédie à tout. Si quelquefois elle vous fait du mal, demandez-lui le remède du mal qu’elle vous a fait, elle vous le donnera.
Ask of all-healing, all-consoling thought
Salve and solace for the woe it wrought.
L’espérance n’est qu’un charlatan qui nous trompe sans cesse; et, pour moi, le bonheur n’a commencé que lorsque je l’ai eu perdu. Je mettrais volontiers sur la porte du paradis le vers que le Dante a mis sur celle de l’enfer: Lasciate ogni speranza etc.
Hope is a knave befools us evermore,
Which till I lost no happiness was mine.
I strike from hell’s to grave on heaven’s door:
All hope abandon ye who enter in.
Vivre est une maladie dont le sommeil nous soulage toutes les seize heures. C’est un palliatif; la mort est le remède.
sleep till death
healeth
come ease
this life disease
Que le cœur de l’homme est creux et plein d’ordure.
how hollow heart and full
of filth thou art
Tailpiece
who may tell the tale
of the old man?
weigh absence in a scale?
mete want with a span?
the sum assess
of the world’s woes?
nothingness
in words enclose?
APPENDIX
Translations of Beckett’s untranslated French poems
to be there without jaws without teeth
to be there without jaws without teeth / where the pleasure of losing flees / along with that scarcely inferior / of winning / and Roscelin and waiting / adverb oh little gift / void void if not for tatters of songs / mon père m’a donné un mari / or bunching your fingers / waiting for her to moisten / so much that she’ll crave until the elegiac / hobnailed clogs still far from Les Halles / or the rabble’s water groaning in the pipes / or no more sound / waiting for her to moisten since that’s how it is / get the rest over with / and come / to the idiot mouth to the creeping hand / to the basement door to the eye that listens / for the far-off motion of silver scissors
Ascension
through the thin partition / this day when a child / prodigal in its own way / returned to its family / I hear the voice / it is excited it is commenting / on the football world cup // always too young // at the same time through the open window / in brief t
hrough the air / mutely / the swell of the faithful // her blood spurted in abundance / on the sheets on the sweetpea on her bloke / with his revolting fingers he closed the lids / on her large green astonished eyes // she wanders nimble / on my tomb of air
The Fly
between the scene and me / the window / empty besides // belly to the ground / girthed in its black guts / panicked antennae joined wings / hooked legs mouth sucking the void / slicing the azure crashing against the invisible / under my impotent thumb it makes / the sea and the peaceful sky capsize
so it’s no use
so it’s no use / through good times and bad / imprisoned at home imprisoned abroad / as if it were yesterday remember the mammoth / the dinothere the first kisses / the glacial periods bringing nothing new / the great heat of the thirteenth of their era / Kant hunched coldly over smoking Lisbon / to dream in generations of oak and forget one’s father / his eyes whether he wore a moustache / if he was kind what he died of / it won’t stop eating you for want of appetite / through bad times and worse / imprisoned at home imprisoned abroad