Robert Desnos: Surrealist, Lover, Resistant reviewed by Ruth Sharman
Robert Desnos reviewed by Ruth Sharman
Robert Desnos: Surrealist, Lover, Resistant translated by Timothy Adès. £12.99. Arc Publications. 978-1906570699
Poet and award-winning literary translator Timothy Adès, recipient of the John Dryden Prize and the Premio Valle-Inclán, enjoys a challenge. That much is clear from his lively reworkings of Shakespeare’s love sonnets in versions that omit the most common letter in the English language (Loving by Will: His 154 Sunbursts Now at Last in Plain Inglish!). And Robert Desnos provides ample opportunity for Adès to exercise his verbal muscle. The ‘most exciting French poet of the last century’, Desnos was a prominent member of the Surrealist movement – heralded as its prophet by André Breton – and actively involved in the French Resistance during World War II. While Surrealism freed Desnos from the habitual constraints of logic and reason, he was also – like Adès himself – a gifted wordsmith, capable of manipulating with ease the traditional skills of rhyme, metre, alliteration and wordplay.
Robert Desnos: Surrealist, Lover, Resistant is a selection, in bilingual facing text, of some 300 poems reflecting Desnos’s poetic life from his youthful pieces written in 1915 to his final poem written at the transit camp in Compiègne after his arrest in April 1944. The three main sections of the book represent his full-blown Surrealist period, his love poems to the unattainable nightclub singer Yvonne George and later to the woman who would become his wife, Youki Foujita, source of what Desnos described as “the only joys I have known”, and his response to the war in Europe and the Nazi occupation of France. Short pages of notes provide helpful background material and some moving insights into Desnos’s life. We learn, for example, that in Auschwitz, in spring 1944, Desnos read the palms of other prisoners, confidently making detailed predictions, comforting and distracting them – if not actually able to save them – from what lay in store.
Desnos was an exponent of automatic writing and later in his career gathered a huge following by interpreting radio listeners’ dreams for them on air. His first book (Rrose Sélavy) is a collection of surrealistic aphorisms written while under hypnosis (some making more obvious sense than others) and offers rich pickings for a poet/translator who loves above all the sounds that words make: ‘Bemused apple-peels of abbeys, your boo-hoos bamboozle bees’; ‘The human brood is a phantom squad with a squirt of blood’; ‘Mysterious are the hysterias of foundered mortals under nettles’ … Adès’s response to Desnos’s rhymes and wordplay is to reach deep into his own language reserves to find equivalents that inject a new energy of their own – that ‘squirt’ of blood for ‘de sang un peu’, the ‘foundered mortals’ for the mere dead (‘mortes’).
In L’Aumonyme (which Adès wittily renders as Arms and the Pun, himself punning on the title of George Bernard Shaw’s comedy), we read:
CATS up on castles,
high hopers,
sup pear suppers of agonies
night
nuisance
heart-hurt
We may well wonder what Desnos is driving at here, but how neatly Adès has avoided a literal (rather dreary) translation in the first two lines, transposing the words but not the sense to produce a more dynamic rendering than ‘high on the castles of hope’, while extracting an alliterative pun out of ‘Croquent des poires d’angoisse’ (literally ‘Chomp pears of anguish’) in the third.
Where logical meanings are thin on the ground, a great deal depends on sound. Adès gives us a useful insight into his working method in “Elegant Canticle of Salomé Salomon” by providing both a literal (barely more intelligible) version and a reworked version that captures the alliterative, rhyming, pun-laden madness of the original. Here are the two versions of the poem’s first four lines set alongside one another:
My pain dies but my hands mime My members’ mess maimed, my mitts may mime
Knots nerves not rings. No north Nerves knots not nicknacks. Nor, north, gnaw
Even/same love soft breasts? bites My mellow marrow’s amorous mammaries?
Naked breast nun nor Ninus. No naked knocker nun nor Ninny no.
It may be unsurprising that few other translators have attempted to tackle Desnos’s Surrealist offerings. His love poems, in a completely different style and register, have been more widely translated into English. While Adès is perhaps happiest wrangling with knotty issues of rhyme and metre, he does justice to the touching simplicity of these poems, whose effects depend on colloquial directness, lyrical repetition and occasionally surprising imagery:
It’s Sunday marked by nightingale-song in fresh green
woods the boredom of little girls at a fretting canary’s
cage, while slowly in the lonely street the sun moves its
thin line across the hot pavement
We shall pass other lines
Never never another but you
And me alone alone alone like withered ivy in suburban
gardens alone as glass
And you never another but you
(‘Never Another But You’)
Adès tells us that he had been curious to see how the youthful author of Rrose Sélavy developed as the times changed and Desnos himself, writing to Paul Eluard in 1942, gives us some pointers. Automatic writing, he believes increasingly, is only an “elementary” stage of poetic initiation; every aspect of a poem should lock into place to make it ‘as implacable as the resolution of an equation’. Drawing on mythology and using traditional forms, Desnos’s three great Occupation sequences were able to pass the censor by embedding topical allusions into the wider context of human destiny. Many are sonnets. Here are the last six lines of ‘The Vintage’, masterfully translated to capture the sense of a world being swept away:
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.
Robert Desnos is a writer who deserves to be better known in the English-speaking world. He produced an astonishing body of work in a variety of media, from poetry to prose, journalism and radio plays, from the highly personal to the socially committed, the whimsical to the deeply serious. In this rich and varied selection, Timothy Adès seeks to redress the balance and, in doing so, reminds us just how much we can do with language in terms of extending, experimenting, exploring, playing…
Ruth Sharman lives in Bath, where she works as a freelance editor and French translator. Her poems have appeared in various anthologies including Staple First Editions. Her Birth of the Owl Butterflies, her first full-length collection, was published by Picador. The title poem won second prize in the Arvon International Poetry Competition and also appears on one of the International Baccalaureate’s English exam papers. Her second collection, Scarlet Tiger, was the winner of Templar Poetry’s Straid Collection Award for 2016.