|
|
Jennie Feldman as both poet and scholar provides an
introduction that is informed and personal, having worked closely with Réda on the translations. She outlines
their working relationship and draws attention to key features of his work:
a desire to create 'le swing' (he has
an interest in jazz); his classical roots reflected in the alexandrine; his
leading role in the shift from surrealism into experimental and political
poetry, and on to the 'new lyricism' of the 1980s; and finally his adherence
to the French tradition of flânerie:
'aimless, reflective strolling favoured by many city-dwelling writers and
thinkers'. She also bemoans the fact that such a renowned poet with over
thirty books to his name is till now little known in Britain. Few will argue
with her once they have got down to the poems. This selection draws on his
first three books Amen, Récitatif
and La Tourne .
One is immediately struck by Jennie Feldman's skill as a translator. Consider
Amen's opening powerful
socio-historical poem, 'Les Rebelles':
Commes les
fous ils ont mordu la terre ˆ pleines dents,
Saisi l'herbe
noire et coupante ˆ poignées,
Jeté leur
front contre le front des monuments
Qui méditent
chez nous la mort et la justice.
Comme ˆ des
fous nous leur avons lié les mains et les chevilles,
Bržlé la
langue et brisé les os sur les escaliers de justice,
Puis nous
avons tassé la terre odorante et molle sur leurs fronts sanglants.
Like madmen
they bit hard into the earth,
Grabbed the
sharp black grass in fistfuls,
Dashed their
heads one-to-one against monuments
That in these
parts ponder death and justice.
Like madmen
we bound them, hands and ankles,
Burned their
tongues and broke their bones on the steps of justice,
Then we piled
earth soft and fragrant on their bleeding brows.
Note the way she avoids the Latinate French/English equivalents (and thus the
risk of translation that reads like translation) and opts for monosyllabic
Anglo Saxon words along with carefully placed assonance and alliteration.
This enables a strong beat to reinforce the harsh subject matter. Indeed, it
is the sheer versatility of her sound effects that stands out. In 'Homer's
Sorrow' the rich 'sh' alliteration and the onomatopoeia of 'clashing' provides sounds very
different from the original but is
faithful to the content:
Cette ombre
sur le vain éclat de nos débris d'amphores,
Et parmi ce
fracas de boucliers sur les galets
Rendre ma
voix ˆ l'•ambe d'écume, aux cris d'oiseaux
Qui déchirent
la belle hécatombe de mots que fut Homre
This shadow
on the hollow show of our ruined amphorae,
And in this
clashing of shields on shingle
Give my voice
to the foam's iambics, to the cries of birds
Tearing apart
the fine hecatomb of words that was Homer.
More frequently, however, Réda creates a meditative, world-weary mood and
here Feldman is equally up to the task. She slows down the pace with long
vowel sounds or use of the present continuous. She consistently creates
poetry in English that also manages to be faithful. Translators who avoid the exact rhyme and metre of the
original are often accused of 'chopping up prose'. I defy anyone to suggest
that here. Feldman is a translator one can take lessons from.
Apart from occasional observations on history, social background, or the
classics, such as 'Homer's Sorrow' above, or 'October Morning' (describing
the ship the Aurora's role in the Russian Revolution), these three
collections are dominated by poetry of mood--clear evidence of flânerie.
Focusing on late summer or autumn Réda provides a plaintive Keatsian
melancholy as he explores subtle shifts in the natural world and the
individual's place within it.
Silence and solitude have a significant role to play. Consider in
'Voice in the Interval' how he homes in on silence with a finely tuned ear:
Perhaps we
should speak even more softly,
So that
silence can take refuge in our voices;
Saying no
more that the grass as it grows
In 'the Lost Bracelet' an apparently insignificant search is endowed with a
weighty sense of the here and now: 'As time, halted by the day's grandeur,
forgets us, / And the blood pulses in your naked wrist'. There is a
cumulatively restorative effect to be gained in this relaxed, city strolling,
such as in 'Rue Rousselet' where observing the interaction between sky and
street leads to a certain pleasurable wistfulness:
Where sky
leans over uncertain, waiting for a shadow;
--Slant
against the road's fleeting loveliness,
Already its
slipping slantwise through out hearts.'
Then there is the wonderfully precise detail in 'Puddles':
Barely a
millimetre's water under the trees, but it catches
Convulsions
in a sky that eases and deepens
...
Oh answer,
innocently fathomless sky, mouth of wisdom,
Open up
immeasurably wide before
Some little
breeze disturbs forever the space held in thin water.
Inevitably such Flânerie leads
to many of the poems being populated by passers-by. Some of the poems edge
into narrative or start to explore man as a social animal. 'Hotel Continental'
considers the fact that 'no man is an island' by way of a wonderful extended
metaphor of solitude like a lover. Note the superb
concrete image that concludes the poem with its interplay of the metaphorical
and the literal:
A slamming
door with its eviction sign.
Here I am with
one more stair to go,
Where
consolation comes from a waiting chair
And the
basin's hollow murmur;
Where even
solitude takes her hand away from mine
And leaves
me, like that day after you'd gone,
When standing
in the rain I saw a circle of time
Impossible to
reckon, and inside it
The little
park gate clashing iron on iron.
Increasingly this 'pleasant strolling' becomes an encounter with all the lost
faces of one's past, such as in 'Fragment of Summers' with its wonderful
concluding image:
--And I saw
dead people, women, gardens
Pass through
me as I rose towards the deep-blue choir
Between the
episcopal walls of Langres or Autun,
Towards
gardens that boiled with birds and roots
Sunken in
light, like eyes--and even then
Under the
heat's awesome lashes, were they not
Yours that
opened in me like water beneath swans?
These real and imagined passers-by inspire Réda to some great one(and
two)-liners: 'A shadow to be
dealt with tactfully, like / The stranger who stops and wants a light, no
word said'; 'a few words leave the lips / Of a passer-by and are lost in the
torrent roaring below', or 'A passer-by among others, then: nobody (unless
it's / That blind-man's cane probing the depths of each memory)', until
finally all these fragments converge: 'And so it's time to bring them
together, all of them / All those I've lost in the dark corners of my life'.
All these references combine to heighten the poetry's with a poignancy
reminiscent of Proust's regret
for lost time.
Having worked through the collection Réda leaves you with the feeling that he
regards the world around him with a magical mix of pessimism and awe. This I
think is encapsulated in his poem 'Amen'--the closest he comes to a poetic
manifesto:
Where I kneel
there is no faith or pride, nor hope,
But as
through the eye that the moon opens under the night,
A return to
the intangible land of origins,
Ash kissing
ash as a calm wind gives its blessing.
All in all, this is superb poetry superbly translated.
© Belinda Cooke 2006
|