Sunday, October 4, 2020

William Vallières : two Pierre Reverdy translations and an essay

 


HOPE OF RETURN  (Pierre Reverdy, 1916)

 

Hands outstretched to where a good anger groans
Who will have revenge

Even if things go quiet again for a while

Thunder will be remembered

The weak pray

The desperate weep

And I, not defeated but not winning

Half-free half the time and a slave, I nearly perished

Flailing with false joy, I shooed away ennui, that dry thing

Behind the coatrack shifting like a shadow

Pinned to the wall

What clang and clamour was needed!

I was drunk as much as wine

My head was huge

Despair’s especially pugnacious

With it, we go to the bottom of things

Such pits

There’s no use mapping the chasm

It’s right in front of us

I surfaced with rigid arms

Mouth gnarled, bitter

I ran through the streets like mad

To a garden where children were playing

Calm, ferocious, their gestures promising

For later

And instead of dropping to the street

Spent like some old workhorse

I ran effortlessly to the highest floors

It started to snow delicately


 

ESPOIR DE RETOUR  (P. Reverdy, 1916)

 

Les mains levées vers un point où gronde une colère robuste
Qui se vengera

Même si tout retombe au silence pour longtemps

On gardera le souvenir du tonnerre

Le faible prie

Le pauvre crie

Et moi sans être battu ni vainqueur

A moitié libre et esclave j’ai failli mourir

A grands coups de fausse joie j’ai chassé l’Ennui

Il est sec

Derrière le porte-manteau mobile comme une ombre

Cloué au mur

Quel bruit formidable il a fallu

J’étais ivre autant que de vin

Ma tête était gonflée

Le désespoir est singulièrement tenace

Avec lui on va au fond de tout

Quel fond

Le trou sondé n’en vaut pas la peine

On le voit

Je suis remonté les bras raidis

La bouche amère tordue

Dans la rue j’ai couru comme un fou

Jusqu’aux jardins où jouaient des enfants

Calmes et féroces leurs gestes promettaient

Pour plus tard

Enfin au lieu de m’abattre sur la chaussée

Fourbu comme un cheval usé

Je suis monté sans efforts vers les plus hauts étages

Il commençait à neiger doucement


 

BEYOND MEASURE (Pierre Reverdy, 1948) 

 

The world’s my prison
When I’m far from everything I love

You’re not far, barred horizon

Freedom and love in the emptiest sky

On the earth made rough with suffering

A face lights and warms the hard things

That once belonged to death

From this face

From these gestures and this voice

It’s merely me who’s speaking

My heart that beats and is resounding

A screen of fire, soft lampshade

In the night’s four walls

Alluring aura of false solitude

Luminous rays of reflected light

Regrets

The remains of time crackle in the hearth

Another plan torn up

Another deed that didn’t meet the occasion

There’s very little to take

In a man who’s going to die

   

 

OUTRE MESURE (P. Reverdy, 1948)

 

Le monde est ma prison
Si je suis loin de ce que j’aime

Vous n’êtes pas trop loin barreaux de l’horizon

L’amour la liberté dans le ciel trop vide

Sur la terre gercée de douleurs

Un visage éclaire et réchauffe les choses dures

Qui faisaient partie de la mort

A partir de cette figure

De ces gestes de cette voix

Ce n’est que moi-même qui parle

Mon coeur qui résonne et qui bat

Un écran de feu abat-jour tendre

Entre les murs familiers de la nuit

Cercle enchanté des fausses solitudes

Faisceaux de reflets lumineux

Regrets

Tous ces debris du temps crépitent au foyer

Encore un plan qui se déchire

Un acte qui manque à l’appel

Il reste peu de chose à prendre

Dans un homme qui va mourir

  

 

A BRIEF INTRODUCTION TO REVERDY, or: I DREAM OF REVERDY

 

In 1910, when he was 21 years old, Pierre Reverdy moved to Paris. There, he hung out with the cubist crowd. His friends included the likes of Picasso, Juan Gris, and Max Jacob. Like most poets of his generation, he was writing in the shadow of Apollinaire, who was writing in the shadow of Mallarmé. 

          Hope of Return” is one of Reverdy’s earlier poems, from his collection La Lucarne Ovale (1916). “Lucarne” is a small attic window, a window jutting out of a roof. Here, we aren’t too far from Ashbery (a big admirer and sometimes translator of Reverdy) and his convex mirror, except Reverdy is always looking out, beyond his reflection, to the world outside, to that hard thing which well all must reckon: reality, and our place in it. For Reverdy, thinking comes in the form of a struggle. An avid reader of Pascal, Reverdy often entertains the worst, but does so in order to dispel illusions.

          A surrealist and yet not a surrealist — he dissociated himself publicly from the movement — Reverdy doesn’t disclose, but evokes. Things float to the surface, impressions snake, we wade through wafts of images. The Latin expression “nomen est omen” — name is a sign, name is fate — seems particularly fitting in his case: the “rêve” aspect in Reverdy is undeniable. This makes him tricky to read. You must read every line as if it were a brush stroke in a cubist painting. He works in accumulation, in disjunctions and discontinuities, with the occasional line acting like a pivot or hinge between meanings. But more often than not, after two or three lines, everything starts over again. Ultimately, the fragments compound to form a fragile, contingent whole. But this sense of disorientation — exacerbated by the lack of punctuation — is integral to the dream aspect of his poems. They also demand more of the reader: his poems can be read in many different ways, and it’s up to us to make decisions. Reading him is like working with a director who trusts the actors.

          Personally, I prefer his later work, the poetry he wrote after he moved from Paris to Solesmes, in a small house at the foot of a Northern monastery. Le chant des morts, published in 1948, deals with the horrible moral compromises of Vichy France. Active in the resistance, Reverdy grappled with the fact that neighbours and friends, fellow citizens, countrymen, were so willing to serve the regime. The poetry of this period is an unflinching portrait of civilization’s failure, our moral failure. The poem “Beyond Measure” is taken from that collection. But, despite the moral seriousness of his later work, his earlier work (of which “Hope of Return” is a good representative) has an element of spontaneity to it, a spark in the darkness. Hope of Returnmoves from the abyss to the heights; in this sense, its about freedom. And what about the absolute lightness of that final line? I find it gorgeous.

          Reverdy isn’t as well known as Rimbaud, Mallarmé, Valéry, or Breton — in the Francophone world as much as it is in the Anglo world — but his shadow seems to be everywhere. The New York School had a thing for him, and I suspect that, like me, most North Americans first heard of him from Frank O’Hara’s famous line “My heart is in my / pocket. It is Poems by Reverdy.” It’s rewarding to read Reverdy, not only for his outlook, but for his mode of proceeding, how he moves through the poem, how a subjectivity moves through the haze of understanding. I think that’s what makes him appealing to the New York School: the act of poetry as a unique, ongoing formulation. It’s strange to think that “Hope of Return” is 104 years old. Hopefully, my translation has produced some approximation of Reverdy’s voice, although to cleave Reverdy from French is an act of high barbarity. Hopefully, in spirit, in soul, he survives the beats and cadences of English. 

 

 

 

William Vallières is a Montreal poet. His first book of poems, Versus, is out with Véhicule Press. His work has appeared in The Walrus, Best Canadian Poetry 2019, Event, Grain, and Plenitude.