Robert Desnos' Landscape

 

Landscape

A version 

I dreamt of loving. The dream remains, but love

is no longer those lilacs and roses whose breath

filled the broad woods, where the sail of a flame

lay at the end of each arrow-straight path.

 

I dreamt of loving. The dream remains, but love

is no longer that storm whose white nerve sparked

the castle towers, or left the mind unrhymed,

or flared an instant, just where the road forked.

 

It is the star struck under my heel in the night.

It is the word no book on earth defines.

It is the foam on the wave, the cloud in the sky.

 

As they age, all things grow rigid and bright.

The streets fall nameless, and the knots untie.

Now with this landscape, I fix: I shine.

 

-Robert Desnos (tr. Don Paterson)

 

Bit of a random pick this evening. I like it, I think, but I'm also still thinking about it. Your thoughts?

 

Robert Desnos (1900-1945) was a French poet. He was associated with the Surrealists as a young man, but broke with André Breton over Breton's support of Communism. During the war he was a member of the French Resistance, and was captured in 1944, with his ultimate destination Theriesenstadt. He survived the war, but had contracted typhoid as a prisoner, and only survived it by a month, dying in June of 1945. This is from the last book of poetry published during his life, Contrée of 1944.

 

Don Paterson is a contemporary Scottish poet. This translation (or version) first appeared in Poetry in the April 2006 issue.

 

Random? Well, I'm rereading Roberto Bolaño's The Savage Detectives. There's a lot of young people talking about poetry in it...

"One night, a girl whose name was Marguerite and whom I wanted  to sleep with started to read a poem by Robert Desnos. I didn't know who the fuck Robert Desnos was, but other people at my table did, and anyway, the poem was good, it got to you." [271]

I was a bit like the speaker in that passage, and I didn't know who Robert Desnos was...but now I know a bit more. We don't ever learn which poem of Desnos, but there doesn't seem to be much Desnos in English on the web anyway.

 

The French, if it's helpful:

 

Le Paysage  

J'avais rêvé d'aimer. J'aime encor mais l'amour

Ce n'est plus ce bouquet de lilas et de roses

Chargeant de leurs parfums la forét où repose

Une flamme à l'issue de sentiers sans détour.

 

J'avais rêvé d'aimer. J'aime encor mais l'amour

Ce n'est plus cet orage où l'éclair superpose

Ses bûchers aux châteaux, déroute, décompose,

Illumine en fuyant l'adieu au carrefour.

 

C'est silex en feu sous mons pas dans la nuit,

Le mot qu'aucun lexique au monde n'a traduit

L'écume sur la mer, dans le ciel ce nuage.

 

À vieillir tout devient rigide et lumineux,

Des boulevards sans nom et des cordes sans nœuds.

Je me sens me roidir avec le paysage.

 

-Robert Desnos