Surrealist, Lover, Resistant
Page 31
Let him disappear for good,
person by no shade pursued,
lacking proper plenitude.
Man must have his shadow-nimbus
as accountants need their numbers,
stately homes their lumber-chambers.
“I’m reborn in shining light,
living on this earth that’s yet
More fecund, more fortunate.
Sunlight cannot hold my shade:
When at night I rest my head,
still my shadow guards my bed.
Tired of always trailing round
with my body’s daily round,
always dragging on the ground,
now my shade goes everywhere,
stirs at long last from its lair,
heeds the promptings of desire.
My shade merges with the night,
mixes in with coal and soot,
smokes, because I live in light.
It’s invaded half the world,
with the waves and winds is whirled,
with the streams, the seas that scold.”
Is it skilled in vocables?
It insults him and consoles,
plays for him the finest roles.
“Though your shadow’s pips impress,
that’s a false nose on its face,
and its song is out to grass.”
“At the corner of the way,
shadow waved to you to say:
we shall meet in just a day.
Gone for ever, frisking free
through the nettle-beds! there’ll be,
in your dreams, a dynasty.”
He shall find it when the hour
strikes, when body’s laid on bier:
body-heat shall disappear.
“No, my shadow’s billeted
in its hide-out, in my head:
speech, sight, hearing, all are dead.”
“I’m your shadow of the dawn
and your garden-shade of noon
and your shade when day is done,
your tenebral acolyte
turning, following at night
in the artificial light.”
I am hedged with shadow sombre:
he is umbrage and penumbra,
nothing but a numbered number.
“Flows my blood from vein to vein,
lungs are breathing oxygen:
man of flesh, I feel no pain.
To the living, not the dead,
to the light and not the shade,
see, my shadow strides ahead,
leading, as a shadow should.”
“In the woods a song was sung
long ago, when I was young:
now the echo’s lost its tongue.”
“You dissolve and so do I,
dying with no autopsy:
not one vestige, by and by.”
“I can hear the flag-day band,
songs and shouts of those who toil.
Nothing in my way can stand,
free and living I prevail
Muses disappoint and fail us
if their heart is mute and void.
Not from reverential chalice
is the vintage best enjoyed.
At the heart of life is life.
Singing in the flesh, the blood
sketches out the geography:
body, world and mystery,
earth and star in harmony,
friend, sustaining story told,
pliant never-lonely shade,
we shall sleep where you enfold.”
BACCHUS ET APOLLON
Marchant ensemble, en compagnons
Voici Bacchus et Apollon
Le temps est court, l’espace est long.
Frères ennemis,
Qu’il fasse jour, qu’il fasse nuit,
Une seule ombre vous précède et vous suit.
Pivot d’une horloge indéchiffrable
Votre couple marche sur le sable:
Beaux enfants de la Fable.
Je vous suis à travers les forêts,
Je vous suis à travers les marais
À travers tout ce qui est.
Je vous suis jusqu’à la clairière
Où jaillit l’eau dans la lumière…
Nécessaires à la terre.
Alors vous avez lutté
Et vous voilà ensanglantés,
Le ventre ouvert, les yeux crevés.
Bataille semblable à l’amour
Étreinte féconde du jour
Avec la nuit qui revient toujours.
Que s’enfle votre ventre
De larves et de vers qui entrent
Vers votre cœur et votre centre.
Mettez bas comme des femelles
Après votre lutte fraternelle.
La mort vous donnera des ailes.
Bacchus et Apollon,
Sales geôliers de nos prisons,
Cadavres dont nous périssons,
Couple infâme et semblable à l’homme
Qui n’a jamais connu, en somme,
Qu’un seul aspect des choses qu’il nomme.
Ah! voir se dérouler ensemble
La nuit calme et le jour qui tremble,
Le crépuscule et l’aube et minuit et midi.
Qui sortira de vos entrailles
Sera le bâtard de vos funérailles,
De vos mensonges et de vos épousailles.
Ce sera de nouveau la sirène
Avec son diadème de reine
Et ses chants doux comme la laine.
Chaque matin le soleil se lève
L’ombre se dissout dans l’ombre
L’homme réfléchit l’homme.
BACCHUS AND APOLLO
Bacchus and Apollo stride
here together side by side.
Time is narrow, space is wide.
Night and day, fraternal foes,
jointly-owned, your shadow grows
from your ankles, or your toes.
Treading sand, your pretty couple
powers an indecipherable
timepiece, like twin babes of fable.
I shall track you through the trees,
through the marshy moistnesses,
track you through whatever is.
I shall track you to the glen
where the stream leaps in the sun:
earth has need of them, each one.
There you fought as enemies,
Now you bleed from injuries,
bellies slit and blinded eyes.
Battle like an act of love,
day’s prolific squeezing of
night, who takes no evenings off.
May your swollen belly rot,
worms and grubs invertebrate
breach your centre and your heart.
Sheathe your blades, be womanly,
you whose fight was brotherly,
death shall give you wings to fly.
Vile Apollo, dirty Bacchus,
in their prison-house they lock us,
we the victims, they the carcass:
evil couple, just like man,
never knowing more than one
side of what he comments on.
Simultaneous, what a sight,
trembling day and tranquil night,
dusk, dawn, midnight, noonday light.
Soon she’ll issue from your bowels,
bastard of your funerals,
marriages, and false avowals:
she the siren comes again,
sparkling circlet of a queen,
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songs as soft as lambs-wool skein.
Shadow at the dawn of day
into shadow fades away.
But a man reflects a man.
RESISTANT
Translator’s Note
All the following poems are from the period of the Nazi Occupation. They reflect that Occupation, and the French Resistance to it in which Desnos took an active part. He was in two networks, Agir and Combat. Agir told the British where V-1 rocket sites were being built, among them the ‘Watten Bunker’ (Blockhaus d’Éperlecques): the Allies bombed it and it could never fire.
État de Veille (State of Alert) was published in April 1943, though the first few poems had been written in peacetime. In the same month, he entrusted to publishers two of his three great Occupation sequences, Contrée and Le Bain avec Andromède, as well as Chantefables (for children: it is now available in bilingual text, with English). In 1944 France was liberated and these works were published, but by then, he had been arrested and deported, never to return: he never saw them in print. Calixto only appeared many years later. The nymph Calixto represents Liberation, as does the she-bear in the earlier poem.
There is a legend of Desnos’ captivity: that he managed to save the lives of a few prisoners who were about to be executed, by reading their palms and predicting in detail their lives after the war: and that the guards, confused, returned these victims to the barracks. It is only half true. Desnos on arriving at the charnel-house of Auschwitz in spring 1944 moved among the other exhausted, starving victims, reading their palms and confidently making detailed predictions. He was able to comfort these few unfortunates: to distract them, but not to save them, from their imminent doom. It was the inspired act of a poet, a man of the greatest humanity and compassion. Desnos died at Terezin in June 1945.
de ÉTAT DE VEILLE
HISTOIRE D’UN CHAMEAU
Le chameau qui n’a plus de dents,
Ce soir, n’est pas content.
Il est allé chez le dentiste,
Un homme noir et triste,
Et le dentiste lui a dit
Que ses soins n’étaient pas pour lui.
Tas de salauds, qu’il dit le chameau,
Vous êtes venus parmi mes sables
Avec des airs peu aimables,
Des airs de désert, bien sûr,
Aussi sûrs que les pommes sures.
Vous m’avez mis une selle,
Vous m’avez chevauché surmontés d’une ombrelle,
Et va te faire foutre,
Si j’ai mal aux dents…
Mais puisque tu n’as pas de dents!
Précisément, j’ai mal aux dents de n’en plus avoir.
Alors tu désires un râtelier?
Je voudrais bien voir un chameau porter râtelier!
Un râtelier manger au râtelier!
Le chameau qui n’a plus de dents,
On l’abandonne dans le désert.
Alors il pisse lentement dans le sable qui se creuse en entonnoir
Tandis que la caravane s’éloigne, à travers les dunes creusées en entonnoirs,
À travers les dunes,
Elles-mêmes creusées en entonnoirs.
from STATE OF ALERT
TALE OF A CAMEL
The camel with toothless gums
tonight has a fit of the glums
He’s been and seen
the ungentle dental practitioner’s room
full of doom and gloom
and the dentist hissed
‘I cannot assist’.
The camel says You’re a heap of creeps
you assailed my seas
like a hostile breeze
a breeze of the desert for sure, onshore,
whose fiery power makes apples go sour.
You had me saddled
sunshaded and straddled,
so go to hell!
I’ve a pain in the teeth…
But you’ve lost your teeth!
Exactly, so I’ve a pain in the teeth, from having no teeth.
So do you want dentures?
I’d like to see a camel with dentures!
Dentures for munchers in mangers!
The toothless camel
turned loose in the desert
slowly widdles into the sand that hollows into a crater
the caravan vanishes over the dunes hollowed out into craters,
over the dunes,
themselves hollowed out into craters.
HISTOIRE D’UNE OURSE
Une ourse fit son entrée dans la ville.
Elle marchait pesamment
Et des gouttes d’eau brillaient dans son pelage
Comme des diamants.
Elle marcha méconnue,
Elle marcha par les rues
Dans son manteau poilu.
La foule passait,
Nul ne la regardait
Et même on la bousculait.
Enfin la nuit tomba à genoux
Laissant ruisseler ses cheveux roux
Dans les ruisseaux pleins de boue,
Dans la mer en mal de marée,
Sur les prairies, sur les forêts
Et sur les villes illuminées.
L’ourse disparut aspirée par les nombres
Avec la foule, avec les ombres
Confondues dans les décombres.
Seuls quelques astronomes,
Embusqués sous des dômes,
Virent passer son fantôme.
Qu’on te nomme Grande Ourse
Tandis que tu poursuis ta course
Vers la lumière et vers ses sources,
Que l’on te pare d’étoiles
Et que du fond de leur geôle
Les prisonniers te voient passer devant le soupirail,
Ourse qu’importe, ourse de plume,
Ourse rugissante et bavant l’écume,
Plus étincelante qu’un marteau frappant l’enclume,
Ourse qu’importe la fable
Et ta piste sur le sable
S’effilochant comme un vieux câble.
J’entends des pas lourds dans la nuit,
J’entends des chants, j’entends des cris,
Les cris, les chants de mes amis.
Leurs pas sont lourds
Mais quand naîtra le jour
Naîtra la liberté et l’amour.
Qu’il naisse demain ou dans cent ans
Il sera fait de lumière et de sang
Et renouvellera les quatre éléments.
Plus lourdes que l’ourse dans la cité
Par le monde je sens monter
La grande invasion, la grande marée.
Grande Ourse au ciel tu resplendis
Tandis que j’écoute dans la nuit
Les cris, les chants de mes amis.
TALE OF A BEAR
A bear entered the city.
She trod heavily
And drops of water shone in her pelt
Like diamonds.
She walked unrecognised
She walked through the streets
In her pelt of fur.
The crowd passed by.
No-one gave her a glance.
She was even jostled.
Night had fallen on its knees,
Let its auburn tresses ease
Into streams of muddy ooze,
In the heaving sea-sick sea,
Rolling plain and field and tree,
Cities of electricity.
The bear vanished in the sombre
Crowd, absorbed into the number,
Just another lump of lumber.
Some astronomers, at most,
In their d
ome and at their post,
Traced and tracked her passing ghost.
You deserve your name, because,
Great She-Bear, you set your course