Robert Desnos

 

I Have Dreamed You So Much

I have dreamed you so much
that you are no longer real.
Is there still time to reach your living body
and to kiss your mouth, cradle
of the voice I love best?

I have dreamed you so much
that my arms, used to holding
your shadow across my chest,
might no longer reach around
the shape of your body,
and that, before the haunting
that’s ruled me days and years,
I’d surely become a shadow too.

O calculations of the heart.

I have dreamed you so much
that it might be too late to wake.
I sleep standing, my body exposed
to all manifestations of life and love for you,
the only things that count for me today.
But I can less touch your face, your lips,
than the first lips, the first face to come my way.

I have dreamed you so much,
walked, talked, slept with your ghost so much,
that there may be nothing left to do
than to become a ghost among ghosts
and a shadow a hundred times more shadow
than the one who wanders
around the sundial of your life.

                                            tr. Paul Winfield

Robert Desnos

    par Man Ray

THE SPACES OF SLEEP

          In the night of course are the seven wonders of the world and grandeur and tragedy and enchantment. 
          Forests with legendary creatures hidden in thickets blindly smack against it. 
          There is you. 
          In the night the footsteps of the walker and the murderer and the policeman and the light of the streetlamp and the ragman’s lantern. 
          There is you. 
          In the night trains pass and boats and the mirage of lands where it’s daylight. The last breaths of twilight and the first shudders of dawn. 
          There is you. 
          A piano melody, a snatch of conversation. 
          A door slams. A clock. 
          And not only beings and things and physical noises. 
          But also me pursuing myself or endlessly passing me by. 
          There is the sacrificial you, the you I wait for. 
          Often strange shapes are born at the instant of sleep and disappear. 
          When I shut my eyes, phosphorescent florescences appear and fade and revive like fleshy fireworks. 
          Unknown lands I cross in the company of creatures. 
          Probably there is you, O lovely and cautious spy. 
          And the tangible spirit of immensity. 
          And the perfumes of the sky and stars and the crowing of the cock 2,000 years ago and the cry of the peacock in flaming parks and kisses. 
          Hands clutching ominously in a pallid light and axles grinding on jellyfish roads. 
          Probably there is you that I don’t recognize, that on the contrary I do recognize. 
          But who, present in my dreams, are opposed to suggesting yourself without appearing there. 
          You who remain beyond reach in reality and in dreams. 
          You who belong to me by my will to possess you in illusion but who bring your face near mine only if my eyes are closed both to dream and to reality. 
          You in defiance of a fluent rhetoric where the wave dies on the shore, where the crow flies in ruined factories, where the forest decays crackling under a sun of lead. 
          You who are at the origin of my dreams and who make my spirit teem with metamorphoses and who leave me holding your glove when I kiss your hand. 
          In the night there are the stars and the shadowy movement of the sea, of the rivers, the forests, the cities, the grass, the lungs of millions and millions of beings. 
          In the night there are the wonders of the world. 
          In the night there are no guardian angels, but there is sleep. 
          In the night there is you. 
          And in the day.

In 1922 Rene Crevel told his friend and mentor Andre Breton about a visit he had made to a Spiritualist seance. It was the time of  the mouvement flou, the increasingly nihilistic Dada had negated itself out of existence and Surrealism was yet to come into being. Breton was intrigued and arranged an event with his friends. The results were startling; and this was the beginning of the Period of the Sleeping Fits. Crevel and Robert Desnos were particularly  susceptible to  falling into the trance state and answering questions that was put to them by the group, sometimes with unnerving effect. Each day they would spend longer in a trance, Desnos even had the ability to write while asleep. Both Crevel and Desnos began to rapidly lose weight and Desnos became convinced that he was possessed by Rrose Selavy, Marcel Duchamp’s female alter ego, even though he had never met Duchamp. Events began to spiral out of control and the experiment with trance states was abandoned completely when Crevel led a group suicide attempt.

Desnos loved to sleep (most photographs show him asleep) and his poetry vividly evokes that universal yet nebulous state Above is his 1926 poem Sleep Spaces, translation by Mary Ann Caws.

Robert Desnos

                                                                                        Man Ray. Les Mains de Robert Desnos (1923)

I’VE DREAMED OF YOU SO MUCH

           I’ve dreamed of you so much you’re losing your reality. 
          Is there still time to reach that living body and kiss on that mouth the birth of the voice that’s dear to me? 
          I’ve dreamed of you so much that my arms, used to crossing on my chest as I hug your shadow, couldn’t fold themselves around the shape of your body, maybe. 
          And faced with the actual appearance of what’s haunted me and ruled me for days and years, I would probably turn into a shadow. 
          O what a sentimental pair of scales. 
          I’ve dreamed of you so much there’s probably no more time for me to wake up. I sleep standing up, my body exposed to all the appearances of life and love and you, the only thing that counts for me today. I’d probably reach for the first lips and face that came along, than your face and your lips. 
          I’ve dreamed of you so much, walked so much, talked, slept with your phantom that maybe there’s nothing left for me to do but be a phantom among the phantoms and a hundred times more shadow than the shadow that strolls and will go on strolling cheerfully over the sundial of your life.

                                        translation by Carmen Lobo?

Robert Desnos

 

                                                                                          Man Ray e Robert Desnoes  (1928)       

BUT I WAS NOT UNDERSTOOD

What corolla have you hidden your thumbs in?
Muzzle and handcuff love
you keep me from counting the days.
But the nights, there isn’t one you don’t speckle.

A tidal wave is washing the houses.
Right now they’re blue.
Mountain ridges where memory is cut in two;
each side going limp
spattering my eyes with orange.

God’s name is a well-polished copper plate
on the gate of heaven,

but wipe your hands before praying.

                                                tr. William Kulik

Wang Wei

 

Fine Apricot Lodge

Fine apricot cut for roofbeam 

Fragrant cogongrass tie for eaves 
Not know ridgepole in cloud 
Go make people among rain   

Fine apricot was cut for the roofbeam, 
Fragrant cogongrass tied for the eaves. 
I know not when the cloud from this house 
Will go to make rain among the people.

                            tr. Mark Alexander

Wang Wei

 

Meditation

        Thin cloud. Light rain.
        Far cell. Closed to noon.
        Sit. Look. Green moss
        Becomes one with your clothes.

Wang Wei

 

fromWheel-Rim River

 

 

1 Elder-Cliff Cove

 

At the mouth of Elder-Cliff, a rebuilt house

among old trees, broken remnants of willow.

 

Those to come: who will they be, their grief

over someone's long-ago life here empty.

 

 

5 Deer Park

 

No one seen. Among empty mountains,

hints of driftng voice, faint, no more.

 

Entering these deep woods, late sunlight

flares on green moss again, and rises.

 

 

6 Magnolia Park

 

Autumn mountains gathering last light,

one bird follows another in flight away.

 

Shifting kingfisher-greens flash radiant

scatters. Evening mists: nowhere they are.

 

 

 

13 Golden-Rain Rapids

 

Wind buffets and blows autumn rain.

Water cascading thin across rocks,

 

waves lash at each other. An egret

startles up, white, then settles back.

 

 

15 White-Rock Shallows

 

White-Rock Shallows open and clear

green reeds past prime for harvest:

 

families come down east and west,

rinse thin silk radiant in moonlight.

 

 

18 Magnolia Slope

 

Lotus blossoms adrift out across treetops

flaunt crimson calyces among mountains.

 

At home beside this stream, quiet, no one

here. Scattered. Scattered o