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 Return” moves from the abyss to the heights; in this sense, it’s 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.
