First Translations (Poetry by Rene Char, trans. Eliot Cardinaux)

René Char (b.1907, d. 1988)

(translations, Eliot Cardinaux)

Here are my first translations, all from the books of René Char, french born poet, 1907-1988. 

I hope you will enjoy them.  His poems are brilliant in their complexity, honesty, and, I think, in shedding light on the humanity of the one himself, who wrote them.   I have tried to present them in English, and as one language parallels another, usually untouching in the outskirts of language itself*, I hope to have found some ground in which the English reader can feel what was expressed in the original, as well as bringing them into English, a language that has its own way of singing.

*(meaning, no two languages have a ground inherently common, and so the translations and the and the originals parallel each other, but are not one, do not always "touch," so to speak.  As language leads the eye and ear, there is a place, I think, in the outmost reaches of it where a ground is to be touched by both languages, and that is poetry.)


  La Rose Violente

Oeil en transe miroir muet
Comme je m’approche je m’éloigne
Bouée au créneau

Tête contre tête tout oublier
Jusqu’au coup d’épaul en plein coeur
La rose violente
Des amants nulls et transcendants.


  The Violent Rose

Eye in a trance, mirror mute,
As I approach I withdraw, 
Bouy on the battlement;

Head against head, all to forget,
'Til the shoulder blow upon the heart:
The violent rose
Of null and transcendent lovers.

From Le Marteau sans mâitre,

         (The Hammer without a master)

Translated 12/19, ’10

Seuil (Threshold)

          When it gave way, the barrage of man, sucked in by the great rift of the abandonment of god, of the divine, words in the distance, words that wished themselves not to be lost, tried to resist the exorbitant push.  There was decided the dynasty of their meaning.
          I have run to the very end of this diluvian night.  Planted in the trembling dawn, my belt full of seasons -my friends, I wait for you.  Already I can make you out behind the horizon's black.  My hearth never tires of wishing your houses well, and my cypress stick laughs, for you, with all its heart.

                        From Fureur et Mystère

                                 (Furor and Mystery)

                        Translated 12/7^th-22^nd, ’10

 

Suzerain (Lord)

We begin our lives always in an admirable dusk.  All that will help rescue us later assembles around our first footfall.

The behavior of men in my childhood was always like a smile of the sky, addressed to the charity of earth.  One treated evil like a prank of evening, the fall of a meteor moved us to tenderness.  I can account for the child I was, prone to love, prone to be hurt, and in all this I had so much luck.  I walked on the mirror of a river filled with coiling snakes, with dances of butterflies.  I played in orchards in which robust old age bore fruit, crouching in the reeds under the care of beings strong as oaks and sensitive as birds.

From Fureur et Mystère

         (Furor and Mystery)

                        Translated 12/19, ’10

Le Martinet

 

    Martinet aux ailes trop larges, qui vire et crie sa joie autour de la maison.  Tel est le coeur.

 

    Il dessèche le tonnerre.  Il sème dans le ciel serein.  S’il touch au sol, il se déchire.

 

    Sa repartie est l’hirondelle.  Il déteste la familière.  Que vaut dentelle de la tour?

 

    Sa pause est au creux le plus somber.  Nul n’est plus à l’étroit que lui.

 

    L’été de la longue clarté, il filera dans les ténèbres, par les persiennes de minuit.

 

    Il n’est pas d’yeux pour le tenir.  Il crie, c’est toute sa presence.  Un mince fusil va l’abattre.  Tel est le coeur.

 

  The Swift

    Swift with wings too wide, who veers and cries his joy all about the house.  Such is the heart.

    He dries up thunder, sows in serene skies.  If he touches ground, it tears him apart.

    His retort is the swallow.  He detests the familiar.  What is lace worth from the highest tower?

    His pause is in the most somber hollow.  No one lives in more narrow space than he.

    Through summers of long brightness, he will spin in the darkness by blinds of midnight.

    No eyes can hold him.  He cries, it’s his only presence.  A slight gun will fell him.  Such is the heart.

                        From Fureur et Mystère

                                 (Furor and Mystery)

                        Translated 12/22, ’10

 

  Madeleine à la veilleuse

  (Madeleine with the vigil-lamp)

                                      Painting by Georges de la Tour

I would wish today that the grass were white to trample the evidence I can see of your suffering: I would not look under your hand, so young, at death’s hard form, without rough-cast.  One discretionary day, others, though less avid than I, will remove your rough linen blouse, will occupy your alcove.  But they will forget as they leave to extinguish the lamp and a little oil will spill out by the dagger of the flame onto the impossible solution.

From Fureur et Mystère

         (Furor and Mystery)

  Le Carreau

Pures pluies, femmes attendues,
La face que vous essuyez,
De verre voué au torments,
Est la face du révolté;
L’autre, la vitre de l’heureux,
Frissonne devant le feu de bois.

Je vous aime mystères jumeaux,
Je touche à chacun de vous;
J’ai mal et je suis leger.


  The Windowpane

Pure rains, awaited women,
The face that you dab,
Of glass wished to torments,
Is the face of the rebel;
The other, window on gladness,
Shivers before the wood fire.

I love you, twin mysteries,
I touch upon each of you;
I hurt and I am light.


           René Char, from Les Matinaux
                                      The Morning Ones
           Translated 12/22, ’10

  Les Cerfs Noirs


Les eaux parlaient à l’oreille du ciel.
Cerfs, vous avez franchi l’espace millénaire,
Des tenèbres du roc aux caresses de l’air.

Le chasseur qui vous pousse, le genie qui vous voit,
Que j’aime leur passion, de mon large rivage!
Et si j’avais leurs yeux, dans l’instant où j’espère?



  The Black Stags 

The waters spoke into the ear of the sky.
Stags, you have leapt millennial space
from the shadows of rock to the air’s supple trace.

Hunter who presses you, spirit who sees you,
That I love their passion, from my widest shore!
And if I had their eyes, in that instant I hope?


                                    From La Parole en archipel
                                              (The Word as archipelago)

                        Translated 12/14, ’10

  Fontis


Le raisin a pour patrie
Les doigts de la vendangeuse.
Mais elle, qui a-t-elle,
Passé l’étroit sentier de la vigne cruelle?

Le rosaire de la grappe;
Au soir le très haut fruit couchant qui saigne
La dernière étincelle.



  A giving-away

The grape has, for its country,

The fingers of the harvest girl,

But she, whom does she have,

With behind her the narrow path of the vine so cruel?

The prayer-garland cluster,

At dusk the one high-setting fruit which bleeds

one last spark.

            From La Parole en archipel
                     (The Word as archipelago)                                       
                     Translated 12/11^th-23^rd, ’10