Prose Poems Pierre Reverdy Translated from French by Ron Padgett $15 / 65 pp / paper isbn 978-1-934029-02-2 Black Square Editions/The Brooklyn Rail

Review by Rachel Galvin

 

. . . A very old world was spinning in our heads and we were waiting for the moment when everything would fall.
        But outside, instead of moonlight on a painted backdrop, you found gray weather in which screaming machines maneuvered, dispersing the malaise. In the street, we have rediscovered the crowd and our century. But all these dark or luminous, light and heavy spirits, and the nude man, what era had they descended from that night?

“The Intruder,” Pierre Reverdy

“The Intruder” is one of fifty prose poems Pierre Reverdy wrote in 1915 and assembled into his first book, Poèmes en prose. Reverdy’s prose poems appeared two years after Apollinaire’s Alcools, in the second year of hostilities of World War I, and the heyday of Dada. The poet helped pay for the printing of one hundred copies at the printshop where he worked nights as a proofreader.

Many of the poems in this first, rare edition were dedicated to the painters and poets of Montmartre—his friends Pablo Picasso, Juan Gris, Henri Matisse, Georges Braque, Max Jacob, and others. Most of the painters lived in or frequented the infamous Bateau-Lavoir, where Reverdy settled when he arrived in Paris from Narbonne in 1910. Deeply involved in the Cubist and Surrealist movements, Reverdy established the journal Nord-Sud with Max Jacob and Guillaume Apollinaire. From Louis Aragon to John Ashbery, fellow poets have hailed Reverdy as one of the twentieth century’s greats.

Ron Padgett’s new translation Prose Poems, released recently by Black Square Editions & The Brooklyn Rail, brings Reverdy’s early poems to life with supple, idiomatic phrasing and a remarkably keen ear for the music of the French originals. Padgett has been working on these translations on and off since he lived in Paris in the mid 1960s. When asked in a radio interview why he chose to translate Reverdy, Padgett replied, “I was perplexed as to why I liked something that was so unlike me, so that got me hooked on him.” The collection of poems is quite different from Padgett’s own style, which is discursive (recalling, perhaps, his bravura translation of Blaise Cendrars) and bears the imprint of the overheard (which reminds one of Apollinaire’s penchant for the found phrase). With the new translation of Reverdy, Padgett brings a third path-breaking French poet into American English with characteristic panache.

“On trouvait un temps gris où manœuvraient les machines hurlantes dissipant le malaise. Dans la rue, nous avions retrouvé la foule et notre siècle,” reads “L’Intrus,” the poem quoted above. Padgett’s translation recreates the play of alliteration and assonance: “You found gray weather in which screaming machines maneuvered, dispersing malaise. In the street, we have rediscovered the crowd and our century.” The French requires Padgett to make a few interpretive decisions (the ever-complex third-person pronoun “on” is translated as “you”) and the last verb tense might be more literally translated as “we had rediscovered,” but Padgett’s fluent English version follows Horace’s dictum and renders not word for word, but sense for sense, in order to create translations that stand as a distinctive poems.

Prose Poems is replete with inexplicable processions, summoning voices, and things beyond reach; it is populated by shadows, overheard sounds, and disembodied heads. Rarely rooted in a particular time or place, these are poems of departure, displacement, and alienation. Despite their straightforward titles--“Procession,” “Battle Fronts,” “Battles,” and “Soldiers”--a suite of poems in the collection evoke World War I through abstraction. Reverdy volunteered and spent six months fighting for France, but little is known about his wartime experiences. When years later, in 1946, he was asked by Étoiles to respond to the survey question, “Has the war had an influence on your work?” he replied,

I do not think that a man can write, after the events that we have just lived through, without his work being not only influenced or impregnated, but completely saturated by it—because it seems unimaginable to me that a man would not have been radically transformed by these events, in his way of thinking and feeling the world; but I think that the mark of these events on the works will become more clear-cut and more meaningful with time.

Several of the war poems consider the question of representation. “Battle Fronts” sets in contraposition the tableau of a battle and the absent painter who would witness and record the events taking place:

Who blew the victory? The charge is sounded for those who are dead!
        A trumpet assembles the ragged squadron and the smoke lifts the horses whose hoofs do not touch the ground.
        But he who would have painted them was no longer there.

This suggestive contrast reappears at the end of the next poem, “Battle,” in which the soldier himself is cast as a potential painter-witness.

The ruins rock their cadavers and heads whose desert caps were missing.
      This picture, soldier, when will you finish it? Did I dream I was still there? I had, in any case, a strange job.

That Reverdy chose the “strange job” of writing prose poems at this point in literary history is an important one. An eighteenth-century term first coined to indicate unconventional forms such as novels and translations, the French poème en prose flourished in the nineteenth century under the pens of Charles Baudelaire and Arthur Rimbaud. For Reverdy, striving against the newly receding currents of Symbolism, it offered a way to break with tradition—and helped pave the way for Dada and Surrealism. As Baudelaire famously asked, “Who among us has not, in his ambitious moments, dreamed of the miracle of a poetic prose, musical without meter or rhyme, supple enough and rugged enough to adapt itself to the lyrical impulses of the soul, the undulations of the psyche, the jolts of consciousness?"

A few of Reverdy’s poems make clear their debt to Baudelaire. “Le Vieux saltimbanque,” Baudelaire’s parable of the poet-acrobat, forgotten by the world, is revised in Reverdy’s “Saltimbanques.” Whereas the title literally means “acrobats,” Padgett translates it more figuratively as “Street Circus.” (Mary Ann Caws chooses "Acrobats" and Martin Bell, "Mountebanks.") Here is Padgett's version in its entirety.

Street Circus

In the middle of that crowd there is a child who is dancing, a man lifting weights. His arm with blue tattoos call on the sky to witness their useless strength.
        The child dances, lightly, in tights too big for him, lighter than the balls he’s balancing himself on. And when he passes the hat, no one gives anything. No one gives for fear of making it too heavy. He is so thin.

In both Baudelaire and Reverdy, the poem concentrates its spotlight upon a pathetic figure in the midst of the hurly-burly. Reverdy’s innovative compression and abstraction are visible from the outset: Baudelaire allots half of his prose poem to setting the scene, describing how all was “dust, light, cries, joy, tumult” ("Tout n’était que lumière, poussière, cris, joie, tumulte”), while Reverdy condenses the setting to the brief phrase “in the middle of that crowd” (“au milieu de cet attroupement”). The question of money soon arises: should one give a coin to the pathetic street performer? If so, how? Reverdy leaves the poem with the idea that the charity would weigh down the balancing boy because “he is so thin,” but Baudelaire makes the parable explicit:

I have just seen the image of the old writer who has survived the generation whose brilliant entertainer he was; of the old poet without friends, without family, without children, debased by his wretchedness and the public’s ingratitude, and whose booth the forgetful world no longer wants to enter!

(Translated by Edward Kaplan)

Reverdy’s poor boy may simply be an urchin; but the intertextual figure of Baudelaire’s wobbling, unappreciated, lightweight poet shadows him. The reference thus serves doubly as a tip-of-the-pen to the senior poet and a meta-reflection on the poet and the development of his art. Baudelaire’s poem looks back to an old, wretched, neglected poet figure, while Reverdy’s poem looks forward to an emaciated child trying to keep his balance.

Often the tension of a prose poem lies in its syntax, in the cadence of sequence and pause – and Padgett nimbly fashions American English lines that follow the same rhythm as Reverdy’s French. Listen to these lines from “Cortège,” or “Procession”:

Quand les derniers furent passés et que l’on n’entendit plus rien. . . . Tu les a vus passer et tu restes là. Le chant du coq t’avertit, le chant du coq ou la poussière t’avertissent que tes paupières sont lourdes, tes cils sont gris comme les buissons au bord de la route; il est temps d’aller dormir. Et tu les reverras peut-être tous en rêve.

When the last had gone past and there was nothing more to wait for. . . . You saw them go by and you stay there. The crowing of a rooster warned you, the crowing or the dust warned you that your eyelids are heavy, your lashes are as gray as the bushes along the road. It’s time to go to sleep. And maybe you’ll see it all again in a dream.

Although Padgett chooses to break the penultimate line with a full stop instead of a semi-colon, he constructs a similar mesmerizing rhythm that conveys Reverdy’s mysterious, deracinated landscape and the kinship between one’s lowering lashes and the vegetation that lines the road.

It is true that the last line implies a plural direct object in the French (“tu les reverras”), which Padgett fuses into “it,” generalizing the object of the dream vision and eliding the reference to the earlier part of the poem, “the last had gone past” (“les derniers furent passés”). This is an interpretive move that subtly offers Padgett’s reading of the poem: the procession (of soldiers?), the rooster’s warning (signaling a betrayal?), and the persistence of dust are understood as part of one phenomenon—and a broader reflection on mortality.

Mary Ann Caws, in the translation she did of the poem twenty years ago, renders the final line like this: “And perhaps you will see them all again, dreaming.” Caws’s solution is more literal in that it retains the plural direct object; but it creates a new ambiguity, since the reader cannot be sure who is doing the dreaming. All of this is to say that in translation, that imperfect yet indispensable endeavor, each solution may create its corresponding difficulty—the inevitable result of carrying over a text. With this in mind, one may join Jorge Luis Borges in commending the translator’s “happy and creative infidelity,” and the resultant text’s “glorious hybridization.”

A full accounting of this virtuoso new translation must make note, nonetheless, of a few oversights. The poem “Traits et figures,” for one, which is translated as “Lines and Faces,” strangely omits two lines at the end of the very brief poem. It is a doubly strange omission because one of the dropped phrases is “dans ma tête des lignes, rien que des lignes,” which would have given a rationale for translating “figure” as “face” and not as “figures,” "shapes," or “diagrams,” in a poem replete with geometrical references—for which any of the these might be apt. (Martin Bell renders the title as "Features and Shapes," and Mary Ann Caws, "Strokes and Figures." Both include the missing lines.)