Translator's Introduction

Robert Desnos (both s's are sounded) was born in Paris on 4 July 1900, the son of a licensed poultry and game dealer at the Halles Market. Much of his poetry, beside its other merits, shows enormous talent in rhyme and metre, alliteration and wordplay. Early on he worked as a journalist and also joined the Surrealists, whose leader, Breton, in 1924 proclaimed him their 'prophet', mainly for composing two hundred elaborate and witty spoonerisms while asleep, or hypnotised, on behalf of Duchamp's alter ego, Rrose Sélavy. Already a journalist, he wrote a surrealist novel, Liberty or Love. Siramour and Les Nuits Blanches were inspired by Lucie Badoud (Youki Foujita), his long-term love. He moved on into radio, with Fantômas, and wrote poems for children, and musical or cinematic lyrics. He joined the Popular Front and the war-time Resistance, writing some of his strongest and most beautiful poetry in this period, until he was arrested. He died of typhus, a victim of the death-camps, on 8 June 1945, never having seen this work in print.

Some of the poems had been published or quoted as early as 1942. 'It's an odd experience for me,' Desnos wrote to Paul Eluard that year. 'I'm feeling my way forward, but the images, words and rhymes come to me like the details of a key to open a lock. Everything must be useful and essential for the poem to work, everything must be there to finish it and nothing else. I wonder why they come out so easily as sonnets. I believe more and more that automatic writing and speech are only the elementary stages of poetic initiation ... I dream of poems which could not be other than they are: for which a different outcome could not be imagined. Something as implacable as the resolution of an equation.'

The title Contrée denotes both the various places visited in each poem (because it can mean something like Back Country) and the effect of 'countering', more or less by stealth, an enemy whose defeat is proclaimed: 'I have wished your death and there is nothing that can delay it.' The allusions multiply. Here is denunciation: 'on a yellow poster the word in black letters, plague;' the voice declaring 'the beautiful season is near;' and the poet's anticipatory epitaph, his refusal to give in: 'I lived intact, but I was prey.' Classic in form, and drawing on mythology, the poems were able to pass the censor; and their philosophy of human destiny puts into a wider context various topical allusions which those in the know could understand.

Grateful acknowledgements are due to Éditions Gallimard and to M. Jacques Fraenkel.

Introduction to Contrée by Marie-Claire Dumas

When he was arrested on 22 February 1944, Desnos had completed several collections and given them to various publishers: some appeared in 1944, others in 1945. Contrée (in print from 31 May 1944) appeared a month after Desnos had left the Royallieu camp at Compiègne [for Auschwitz; from there he was marched to Buchenwald, Flossenburg, and Flöha, where he worked as a slave labourer making aircraft parts; he died at Terezin]; so the poet never saw the collection in print.

Contrée was published by Robert J. Godet with a lithograph by Picasso, at a time when Desnos often talked to Picasso, and was writing about him. Dedicated to Youki, the book comprises twenty-five poems, ten of which had already been published or quoted, the earliest in autumn 1942. In them, Desnos puts the sonnet and other set forms to ever more stringent tests. 'It's an odd experience for me,' he wrote to Paul Eluard on 8 October 1942. 'I'm feeling my way forward, but the images, words and rhymes come to me like the details of a key to open a lock. Everything must be useful and essential for the poem to work, everything must be there to finish it and nothing else. I wonder why they come out so easily as sonnets. I believe more and more that automatic writing and speech are only the elementary stages of poetic initiation ... I dream of poems which could not be other than they are: for which a different outcome could not be imagined. Something as implacable as the resolution of an equation.'

The title Contrée denotes both the various places visited in each poem [because it can mean something like Back Country] and the effect of 'countering', more or less by stealth, an enemy whose defeat is proclaimed: 'I have wished your death and there is nothing that can delay it.' The allusions multiply. Here is denunciation: 'on a yellow poster the word in black letters, plague;' the voice declaring 'the beautiful season is near;' and the poet's anticipatory epitaph, his refusal to give in: 'I lived intact, but I was prey.' Classic in form, and drawing on mythology, the poems were able to pass the censor; and their philosophy of human destiny puts into a wider context various topical allusions which those in the know could understand.

THE WATERFALL

The flesh is opened. For the blood to rise,
While lips suppress the murmurs and the cries,
A finger bids time stop, pre-occupies
The witness who records it with his eyes.

Silence? And yet we know the passwords well.
We strayed from our camp-fires, we sentinels:
Drifting from shady corners we can smell
Salt surf aromas, honeysuckle smells.

Dawn bursts on far-off depths; a sunbeam limns
Upon the waves, at last, a sketch that leads
Back the returning archer and his hymns:
A rainbow, with its quiver full of reeds.

THE RIVER

I trudged the ford, that sings to suit its mood,
Strewn underfoot with stars and bits of rock.
I headed for the greensward and the wood
Where the wind shivered in its flimsy frock.

I swam, I got across, clothed better in
That water than in my own flesh and skin.
A night has passed. Now, sky has married dawn.

And see, my eyes and limbs are faltering,
It's bright, I'm thirsty, looking for the spring
Whose song regales the middle of a lawn.

THE SLOPE

The child is being murdered. Rending cries;
Barking, no use. A doom is on this dell.
Nothing is real but this hot iron smell
That lulls us, gets us drunk, and reds our eyes.

Dawn may return and sunlight may refresh;
But all in vain: the barking and the yells
Pierce the thick night, the cinders and the ash
That fill our hearts and burn inside our skulls.

THE ROAD

Heavily one hand he raises
To the meadow of his hair,
He delineates caresses,
Clamps the nervous fingers there.
Then his other parts all rush
Helter-skelter to the moon
And the sun gilds with its brush
The big beast of the lagoon.

Is it Hercules? Or Atlas?
Striding on across the plain
Falls full-length, no cry of pain,
Winded in the solar plexus.
Blotting out the countryside
He obliterates the place,
Not a single mountainside,
Not a pathway, not a trace.

Less real than mirror-images
The man who would be disappears,
Dictator of the centuries,
The winds, the nights, the days, the years.

THE CEMETERY

I pluck from them spring's first and earliest leaves,
But other leaves shall grow thick on the fortunate rotting
Of this corpse that may have ten thousand years to live.

But other leaves shall grow thick on the fortunate rotting
But other leaves shall grow black
From the pens of those with adventures to tell in writing.

But other leaves shall grow black
With an ink more liquid than blood and the water of fountains:
Neglected testaments, words lost across the mountains.

With an ink more liquid than blood and the water of fountains
Can I protect my memory from forgetting
As a cuttlefish spends its blood and breath, retreating?

Can I protect my memory from forgetting?

THE CLEARING

Or else, on leaving for a fatal feast,
The Commandant consigned it to be wrecked,
As a small stone, across the tide-line tossed,
Meets its own bull's-eye that the waves reflect.

But I should hear, beside the pond, at least,
The fanfare Don Giovanni blows, inviting...
Yes, now I hear it, on the echoes riding.
Beneath my feet I feel the ground emoting.

THE CAVE

Eurydice walked here, you see her trail,
These are her footprints, but the traces fail,
The phrase breaks off, the vow achieves release,
The horseman jibs at the cheval-de-frise.

These other steps diverge, which Orpheus made,
It's bright, and the eclipse has had its hour,
Giving us back our haunted house of shade.

Where thorns and roses weave a bramble-bower,
The mænad sleeps in the forbidden glade.
A cloud above is like an open flower.

THE MEMORY

Yes, my heart already loved
Voices very far removed.
Shadows of black night had daubed
The big statue's pale eyes, carved
At the crossroads where I roved.

In the street the breeze blew fair
From Passy or Pépinière:
I was passing, I know where,
And I chanced to find you bare,
Blot of white on soft night air.

Fallen leaf of seasons past,
Phantom and nocturnal ghost,
Pennants proud for daybreak hoist,
With what future were you faced,
In our capital hard-pressed?

Paris, pressed to live and flame,
Stolid, fired up all the same
By the nights that quickly came,
Like the night you had no shame,
Propped against your window-frame.

THE PROPHECY

From a Paris square a fountain so clear shall spring
That from daybreak onward the bathers will tiptoe forth.
St Opportune and her laundresses will be godmothers
And its waters shall run south, coming out of the north.

A great red chestnut-tree is in bloom in the square
Where the fountain will run, in the future.
Perhaps in my later years
I shall hear its murmur;

So sweet is this clear fountain's melody
That already it bathes my eyes and heart with its waters.
It will be the Seine's most beautiful tributary,
The surest token of spring-times to come, their birds and their flowers.

THE DESTINY

Listen. That day from the hills of Bicêtre a great big cloud
Climbed up behind the Val-de-Grâce and its Dome.
A child had just been born and it cried aloud,
In the Rue Saint-Jacques, in a low-built home.

From now on nothing can save you from shame and pain
For my wish had the taste of things that materialise.
Already imperceptible physical signs, in your heart and your brain,
Warn you it's time you were saying your goodbyes.

It would be pointless for you to weep in repentance
Pointless to have an attitude fine and noble,
Because your only future is non-existence
And your name will not live in the sayings of the people.

The cloud passed the Val-de-Grâce and Saint-Sulpice,
Was reflected for long in the Seine before resolving
Into a storm. I watched from a tall white building,
There were great caged birds, its thunder was their release.

THE HARVEST

Lovely roses passed away,
Lovely roses, scented flowers,
Trembling since the break of day,
Now disclosed to midnight hours,
Your prolonged and rapid doom
Measures up to our decades
Though you reach the sitting-room
Even as your colour fades.

They were frail, our deities,
They were little nobodies,
Living in a little street,
Managing to make ends meet.
Greater is our own fortune,
Darker is our destiny.
We do not desire the moon,
We are not afraid to die.

Trussed by our five senses, this
Universe is shrunk in size.
Goodbye, dream and loveliness!
You shall be my sacrifice
To a world not limitless.

THE SIESTA

Here in my mouth again I find that taste,
Long-vanished names, kisses of tender greeting:
Don't know my name, or if my heart is beating
In the sure present or the ashen past.

Volcanoes, burst from memory's depths, and boil!
Drown me in lava, for my mind is slack.
Burn the old screeds, turn permanently black
The mirror that is bitten by the foil.

THE CITY

The fate of one who drifts and dreams along,
Strays into dream and joins the phantom throng,
Purloins their coat, supplanting them in lands
Where matter yields to warm caressing hands.

This whole world issues from his bony crown.
He coops it, cloaks it, tricks it and constrains,
He has to halt, give way to passing trains
Of creatures born in bodies tumbling down.

Suns mourning, yearning; nauseous memory;
Wellsprings resurgent, echoing fogs' refrain:
You are mere scum and scouring. I would fain
Be born each day beneath a brand-new sky.

THE HOUSE

Driving it back, their curious canvases
Hanging the far horizon's wires with suns,
More glow-worms too than gather on the lawn,
Or in the sheltering darkness of the barn.

As it comes down, its foot chinks on the stair
Like crystal glassware on the cellar floor.
It's near the hallway, it will soon be there.

Night's funnel is beyond the open door.
Listening, I sense it walk, and leave, and fly
Into peninsulas of broken sky.

THE COUNTRYSIDE

I dreamed of loving. Still I love, but now
Love's not that storm whose lightning kindled high
Towers, unhorsed, unhinged, and fleetingly
Would set the parting of the ways aglow.

Love is the flint my footstep sparks at night,
The word no lexicon can render right,
Foam of the sea, the cloud across the sky.

Old age makes all things fixed and luminous:
Knots are unravelled, streets anonymous;
Set in our ways, the countryside and I.

THE SUMMER NIGHT

You move towards the wood, whose boundaries
Open a path that's loud with distant cries.
Fires of midsummer in the vale die back;
The night, so short, has soon strayed off the track.

Fine-bosomed girl, no light shines in your gaze.
I've seen your sisters. You are not the first
To run through fields and gardens and be lost.

You scrambled through the hedge and, as you passed,
The bramble-bushes scratched your thigh and face;
New songs were heard; the sky turned pale at last.

THE PLAGUE

I see the sky through the glass. I see the sky where the
stars run on the rooftops. It's the great
Bear or Betelgeuse, it's Venus the white-bellied, it's
Diana unfastening her tunic near a fountain of light.

Never did moons or suns run so far from the
earth, never was the night air so dense and so
heavy. I lean on my door which resists...

It opens at last, it swings and knocks against the
wall. And while the footstep moves away I decipher
on a yellow poster the word in black letters, "Plague".

THE NYMPH ALCESTIS

It's dark; the starting signal bids you run;
You don't suspect that night must soon disperse,
Give way, when birds are singing, and the sun
Spreads gold along the peaks with open purse.

I know that dawn and morning will resume.
I've seen them, you will see them, I know well:
Their rhythmic dance excites my heart to swell.

But, nymph, your sister's born in noonday light:
How shall I tell her of the coming gloom,
Return of dusk, of silence, and of night?

THE VOICE

I'm listening. It's only a human voice
Coming across the din of life and of battles,
The crash of thunder and the babble of talk.

What about you? Don't you hear it?
It says "The pain will be short-lived"
It says "The beautiful season is near".

Don't you hear it?

THE VINTAGE

The escort climbs the street of sepulture.
Below the bluffs, the soldiers rot in heaps;
The earth, blood-sodden, sweats and froths and weeps,
Drowning the victors in a rich manure.

Wine, in your casks, unscathed! Your colours will
Transmute our lips until we lie at last
Beneath the earth, at one with palace bells

That chimed with the cicada's canticles,
Stilled now, like flutes and cymbals long since past.
Today the thunder and the wind are still.

THE EQUINOX

The martyred Bishop Denis liquefies,
Bleeds with your red grapes, Argenteuil, Suresnes.
Chariots haul queens and heroes on a chain.
Each temple crumbles to its roots and dies,

And yet just now a midnight rainbow shone,
Spanning the valley, to entice the moon.
Day broke; thick vapours hid the world away.

Can it be truly called a day, this day
That drags love, life and Paris in the mire?
Yes: in the fog, a spark flares into fire.

THE BEACH

It's time to go and conquer. Bacchus girds.
Meetings depress him; like a brook that mutters,
Space skewers him. Night's over. Is it day?
Put out the party bonfires, anyway.

A country of fresh streams and trackless wood
Lets a man feel his veins, his coursing blood.
He knows this land and people, knows their sound,
Well-versed in the aromas of the ground.

On the beach, he who gave the secret sign
Lies with a dagger sticking in his spine.
Along the mole his voice, still waterborne,
Repeats the word from which his grief was born.

That word is Corinth, copiously said,
And the earth groans with lassitude and dread.

THE ASYLUM

May I stay free and healthy in my thinking
Like an unfailing sextant in a storm,
Take refuge in my heart, my hand, my home,
And gaze on man and beast with eye unblinking.

Virtue, mere word, you've set me free to pass:
You've opened up the view, torn down the drapes,
Bent to my prayers the hoped-for Val-de-Grâce,

Where the sage wakens and the hero sleeps.
Grant that the city soon enjoys their presence:
The wise man's dream, the warrior's vital essence.

THE AWAKENING

It's late. Get up. The bath-tap's on, and splashing.
This body that the night has soiled needs washing.
This body starved of victory needs feeding.
This body needs a thorough soak, then clothing.

When we have scrubbed these hands of inky stains,
When we have brushed these teeth that hold decaying
Words, like boats rotting on their anchor-chains,
Words of a song, a true or secret saying.

It's late. Get up. The clarion in the street
Summons you: "This is real life. This is it."
The table's laid, and you are hungry: eat.
The horse is being bridled: fix the bit.

Think, though, of those who neither see nor hear,
Having been murdered as the day dawned clear.

THE EPITAPH

I've lived today, and nonetheless been free.
I watched the river and the earth and sky
Turn round me, and they kept their harmony;
Honey and birds, a seasonal supply.

How did you use these gifts, you there alive?
Would you want back the days I spent in toil?
Was it for others that you tilled the soil
To harvest? Did you make my city thrive?

Don't fear me, you who live: I'm dead and gone:
Not soul nor body, nothing lingers on.

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