Arthur Rimbaud

 Au Cabaret Vert

         cinq heures du soir

Depuis huit jours, j’avais déchiré mes bottines
Aux cailloux des chemins. J’entrais à Charleroi.
– Au Cabaret-Vert : je demandai des tartines
De beurre et du jambon qui fût à moitié froid.

Bienheureux, j’allongeai les jambes sous la table
Verte : je contemplai les sujets très naïfs
De la tapisserie. – Et ce fut adorable,
Quand la fille aux tétons énormes, aux yeux vifs,

– Celle-là, ce n’est pas un baiser qui l’épeure ! –
Rieuse, m’apporta des tartines de beurre,
Du jambon tiède, dans un plat colorié,

Du jambon rose et blanc parfumé d’une gousse
D’ail, – et m’emplit la chope immense, avec sa mousse
Que dorait un rayon de soleil arriéré.

 [Robert Lowell translation]

For eight days I had been knocking my boots
on the road stones. I was entering Charleroi.
At the Green Cabaret, I called for ham,
half cold, and a large helping of tartines.

Happy, I kicked my shoes off, cooled my feet
under the table, green like the room, and laughed
at the naive Belgian pictures on the wall.
But it was terrific when the house-girl

with her earth-mother tits and come-on eyes—
no Snow Queen having cat-fits at a kiss—
brought me tarts and ham on a colored plate 

She stuck a clove of garlic in the ham,
red frothed by white, and slopped beer in my stein,
foam gilded by a ray of the late sun.

[Ezra Pound translation]

Wearing out my shoes, 8th day
On the bad roads, I got into Charleroi.
Bread, butter, at the Green Cabaret
And the ham half cold.

Got my legs stretched out
And was looking at the simple tapestries,
Very nice when the gal with the big bubs
And lively eyes,

Not one to be scared of a kiss and more,
Brought the butter and bread with a grin
And the luke-warm ham on a colored plate…

Pink ham, white fat and a sprig
Of garlic, and a great chope of foamy beer

Gilt by the sun in that atmosphere.

Anne-Marie Albiach

 

The Hermitage Road (detail)

Parallel life of corporeal horizons already lived—the ties loosen along a trajectory, leaving to silence a dynamic of power or of destruction.

 

The contour of an outline constrains the masked face and the limbs, encloses wrists and wristlets, neck and neck band. Lewdness of earliest hours; light on lifting eyelids, distinct in color. Under the lace cap, silver-tinted hair ‘‘emerges in a flowering of unsuspected seasons.’’

Facing these accomplices in their preferred setting, soft skirts white and trimly belted, she verifies with both hands the precise point of the mask, where feminine and masculine become exacerbated. In the penumbra of the double, they look on with calm, a fragility in their frills of evanescent blue. An uncertain dream issues from her to them, a whiteness meanwhile irradiating our impulses.

How pierce this luminosity, which cancels the most ardent spectator. Two ardors, one white, the other scarlet, separated by the curtain of a distance fashioned as by time’s occlusions.

All that in an immediate memory.

Max Jacob

par Pablo Picasso                                

The beggar woman of naples

When I lived in Naples there was always a beggar woman at the gate of my palace, to whom I would toss some coins before climbing into my carriage. One day, surprised at never being thanked, I looked at the beggar woman. Now, as I looked at her, I saw that what I had taken for a beggar woman was a wooden case painted green which contained some red earth and a few half-rotten bananas …

***

Happy bananas!

Jose (Jose Angel Araguz)

Andre du Bouchet

 

Everything becomes words
earth
pebbles

in my mouth and under my feet

man given back
redeemed
in stones
in coins
of gold

currency of words and steps

what I say makes you laugh

nameless
gold that barters me
alive.

 

Andre du Bouchet

SANG

…sang

tel qu’
est
pour le dire
de surcroît
accouru sourdre
un mot

le mot est là

pas moi.

© 1987, André du Bouchet

André Du Bouchet

                                           portrait by Giacometti (1965)

 Painting

 

     all things look as if

they are waiting, as soon as we see them.                                      is it by their

   proven resemblance

that we will know they are, at the same time that we are,

here.

 

  itself, it is

reality                         —                        other, and resembling nothing, that we

desire.                                         already, in the doorway, it flowers.               in

the halo flush with bloom, which cuts through all

appearance.                                                                                  almost unmoved.

 

the tile.                                                                                                        the vines

  of the façade.                                        in

the branchings, the breakage of the sky.               this is how the given world’s

fatigue, its freshness, cracks and flowers.

 

    it happens

that, once we’ve reached the thing we have desired,

it may slip away into an infinite otherness.                                                        no

illusion if the window returning the color of its light to the

blue we do not see is forever merged with

that blue.                           who, then, will say the name of recognized things?

already, through our waiting, they have flowered.

                                                                                                            (tr. Hoyt Rogers)

 

André Du Bouchet

Dawn without sun

white straightaway.
From the cliff : an immense trampling of clouds suspended above the flow of the Seine. This white chain cracks open above the island like a needle’s eye.
Magical fields, like a beach of cuttlefish and kelp newly abandoned by the sea. Colors still preserved — sharp fishbones, lace of thistles bright as window-panes — awakening of yellow and purple dots before they’ve stirred.
At dawn : everything that’s worn becomes both new and worn. Worn objects — brand-new — not yet tired out by day — like the stones of the path that glow.

Here is the unending spring we’re steeped in as we sleep — that we can glimpse when we’re awakened toward the end of night : we catch sight of night’s mists.

The body of mist spreads underfoot like the trampling of clouds. The sun rises in our chest even before it appears on the room’s horizon; between the black casements, the black knoll standing out against the light, dawn plows us.
The head shoots up in its field, its tethers suddenly cut— it wouldn’t take much for us to crow like roosters.

 

Philippe Soupault

 tomato blossoms

Don't know where to go
Set
plumb
bedded
In advance
Board the wagons
Bring on the brooms
What is there! The colors of the small fish
Or the lousy automobiles
Or the practical safety pins
Or the tall cylinder hats
Or Mr. X.
Or the newspaper kiosks
You just have to know how to use them.

Philippe Soupault

From The Magnetic Fields (with Andre Breton)

PERPETUAL FASHIONS

Crime of teenagers English salt

River of chapped hands

Palace of celebrations and dawns

Red red the song

Sweet sugar become the color green

Sensations gone pale

Courage virgin blotting paper

A fly strikes fear in old men

They discover a brain there are red ants

March

March

Hallelujah

Philippe Soupault

Epitaph for Francis Picabia

Why
did you want us to bury you with your four dogs
a newspaper
and your hat
You asked us to write on your grave
Have a nice trip
They’re going to take you for a fool up there too

                                    Translations by John Lyons

Philippe Soupault

                                Phillipe Soupault and Erna Niemeyer-Richter, Berlin, 1934

SPORT ARTICLES

Courageous like a stamp
he went his way
tapping softly in his hands
to count his steps
his heart red as a boar
beat beat
like a pink green butterfly
Now and then
he planted a little satin flag
When he had walked a lot
he sat down to rest
and fell asleep
But since that day there have been many clouds in the sky
many birds in the trees
and there's been a lot of salt in the sea
There also have been lots of other things

Philippe Soupault, translated by Johannes Beilharz

 

Robert Desnos

                                            portrait by André Breton

 Hour farther witch art in Heaven

Hallowed bee, thine aim.
Thy king done come!
Thy will be done in
ersatz is in Heaven.

Kippers this day-hour,
Delhi bread.
And four kippers, sour trace, pa says.
As we four give them that trace paths against us.
Leader's not in to tempt Asians;
Butter liver (as from Eve)
fill our men.

****

Will the schist brighten the white night of Cork?
We'll be lost in midnight's corridor with calm horror of
the dying sob
Come all you ever-famous lizards climbing plants
digital flesheaters
Come vines
Whistle of revolts
Come giraffes
I invite you to a feast
So grand the light of the glasses will equal the aurora borealis
Womens' nails will be strangled swans
Not far from here a grass is drying by the roadside.

****

I am marked by my loves and for life
Like a wild horse escaped from the gauchos
Who, finding once more the prairies' freedom
Shows the mares his hair burned by branding

While on the deep sea with great virile gestures
The mermaid, singing toward a carbon sky
Amid reefs murderous to vessels,
In the heart of whirlwinds, makes the anemone flower.

Paul Valery

The Imaginary Dancers

 

Delicate as flowers they have come,

Slim figures sculpted out of gold,

Becoming iridescent in a feeble moon…They are here

In melodious flight through the shimmering wood.

Mauves, blues and the nocturnal rose

Weave a way below their surging dance.

What veils of perfume drape their gilded fingertips!

But the smooth blue sky is leafless in this barren grove

While the shallow lake offers little light, laid out

Like some deathly reservoir of age-old dew

Where flowering silence reaches up…They are here again

In melodious flight through the shimmering wood.

Their hands grace the adored chalice;

A glint of moonlight rests on consecrated lips

And under friendly myrtle the drowsy movement

Of their wondrous arms lovingly undoes

Their tawny and caressing hair…But some of them,

Less in thrall to rhythm and distant harps,

Move with secret steps towards the shrouded lake

To drink the lilies’ dew immersed in pure forgetfulness.

                                                                            translated by Ian Britton & Michael Grant

 

Guillaume Apollinaire

 

“Aubade Sung at Laetare a Year Ago”

It’s spring come out Esther you should
Take a walk in the pretty woods
The hens are clucking in the yard
Dawn’s pink folds are shooting skyward
And love is coming to steal your heart

Mars and Venus have come back anew
They give each other mad kisses
An innocent interlude
While beneath the fluttering roses
Lovely pink gods are dancing nude

So come my tenderness is queen
Of this flowering that appears
Nature is beautiful and touching
Pan is whistling in the trees
The wet frogs are singing

                                                translated by Ron Padgett

Robert Desnos

 par Man Ray

Desnos’s Chantefables, each of which focuses on an animal, were immediately popular. One of his friends, hiding from German pursuers in an attic in the Dordogne, remembered hearing children playing outside and reciting La sauterelle from the poet’s newly published book:

Saute, saute, sauterelle
Car c’est aujourd’hui jeudi.
Je sauterai, nous dit-elle,
Du lundi au samedi.

Saute, saute, sauterelle,
À travers tout le quartier.
Sautez donc, mademoiselle,
Puisque c’est votre métier.

Hop, grasshopper, hop away,
Thursday, Friday, Saturday.
I shall hop, we heard her say,
From Monday to the latter day.

Hop, grasshopper, hop away,
All around the quarter,
Hop, that’s your job all day,
Being your mother’s daughter.
(That’s what they taught her.)ⁱ

A poem such as ‘La fourmi’ lends itself to an even more sombre interpretation:

Une fourmi de dix-huit mètres
Avec un chapeau sur la tête,
Ça n’existe pas, ça n’existe pas.
Une fourmi traînant un char
Plein de pingouins et de canards,
Ça n’existe pas, ça n’existe pas.
Une fourmi parlant français,
Parlant latin et javanais,
Ça n’existe pas, ça n’existe pas.
            Eh! Pourquoi pas?

Ant, an eighteen-metre ant,
Hat on head insouciant,
Cannot happen on this planet.
Ant that hauls a pair of trucks
Crammed with penguins and with ducks,
Cannot happen on this planet.
Ant that spouts with fluent ease
Latin, French and Javanese,
Cannot happen on this planet.
            Or can it?

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

Alain Robbe-Grillet

 

from Jealousy

Now the shadow of the southwest column— at the corner of the veranda on the bedroom side— falls across the garden. The sun, still low in the eastern sky, rakes the valley from the side. The rows of banana trees, growing at an angle to the direction of the valley, are everywhere quite distinct in this light.

From the bottom to the upper edge of the highest sectors, on the hillside facing the one the house is built on, it is relatively easy to count the trees; particularly opposite the house, thanks to the recent plantings of the patches located in this area.

The valley has been cleared over the greater part of its width here: there remains, at present, nothing but a border of brush (some thirty yards across at the top of the plateau) which joins the valley by a knoll with neither crest nor rocky fall.

The line of separation between the uncultivated zone and the banana plantation is not entirely straight. It is a zigzag line, with alternately protruding and receding angles, each belonging to a different patch of different age, but of a generally identical orientation.

Just opposite the house, a clump of trees marks the highest point the cultivation reaches in this sector. The patch that ends here is a rectangle. The ground is invisible, or virtually so, between the fronds. Still, the impeccable alignment of the boles shows that they have been planted only recently and that no stems have as yet been cut.