{"id":9157,"date":"2018-02-05T15:41:58","date_gmt":"2018-02-05T14:41:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=9157"},"modified":"2018-02-05T15:42:54","modified_gmt":"2018-02-05T14:42:54","slug":"robert-desnos-surrealist-lover-resistant-reviewed-by-edmund-prestwich","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=9157","title":{"rendered":"Robert Desnos, Surrealist, Lover, Resistant<\/em>, reviewed by Edmund Prestwich"},"content":{"rendered":"

Robert Desnos, Surrealist, Lover, Resistant<\/em>, translated and introduced by Timothy Ad\u0450s (Arc Publications, 2018) \u00a319.99 pbk<\/strong><\/p>\n

Others will review this sumptuous volume in the light of a knowledge of Desnos\u2019s poetry. I can only comment on how it strikes someone almost completely new to his writing. <\/p>\n

What you want from a translation will partly depend on how well you know the language of the original. If you know it really well, you won\u2019t read the translation as an aid to basic understanding but almost purely as a poetic work in its own right, with an added interest in the translator\u2019s \u201creading\u201d of the original. If you only know it as well as I know French, the most valuable translation may be the kind that Penguin puts in prose at the foot of the page, something that helps basic lexical understanding, and leaves other elements of poetic expression, like patterns of sound, syntax and rhythm, to your reading of the original text. However, if you don\u2019t know the original language well enough to form its sounds, to respond to its rhythms and speech cadences and to have a broad sense of its registers, a full scale verse translation may be your only chance of experiencing the work as poetry. I\u2019ll mainly be talking about how Ad\u0450s\u2019s versions read in themselves.<\/p>\n

For many readers things will really take off with the \u201cSurrealist\u201d section, starting in 1922 with \u201cRrose S\u00e9lavy\u201d, which Ad\u0450s calls \u201cone of Surrealism\u2019s classic texts\u201d. Classic surrealism leaves me rather cold though. For me, the point of incandescence comes at the beginning of the next section, \u201cLover \u2013 Yvonne George\u201d, with five poems from the volume \u00c0 la myst\u00e9rieuse<\/em> of 1926 and some from Les T\u00e9n\u0450bres<\/em> the following year. These leap off the page, both in French and in English. They\u2019re virtually the only poems by Desnos that I\u2019d come across before reading this book. Ad\u0450s tells us that they were written out of hopeless love for a nightclub singer who ignored the poet and died of drink and drugs in 1930. In a way, such information is irrelevant. The poems present no story and tell us virtually nothing concrete about Yvonne George herself; their power is of a purely lyrical kind, to do with the emotions of the poet. And yet they give a powerful sense of reality. How does this work? Many years ago, in The Appreciation of Modern French Poetry<\/em> (1850 \u2013 1950), Peter Broome and Graham Chesters wrote that it was the mystery surrounding the beloved that created the tension vibrating through these poems. Their power and sense of reality come from this tension, from the drama of the poet\u2019s subjective feelings and yearnings swinging to and fro as they grapple with the stubborn reality of the beloved\u2019s indifference. The poems\u2019 essential life isn\u2019t so much in individual moments, though in some she seems almost within his grasp and the lover\u2019s babbling joy is finely captured in depicting them \u2013 <\/p>\n

“My laughter and joy crystallise around you. It\u2019s your makeup, your powder, your rouge, your snakeskin bag, your silk stocking … it\u2019s also that little fold between ear and nape, where the neck is born …”<\/p>\n

Nor is it in passages of soaring idealism, given blood and bone by sensuality, exhilarating though these can be \u2013<\/p>\n

“Tell yourself one must have no regrets: Ronsard before me and Baudelaire sang the regrets of old women and dead women who spurned the purest love.
\nYou when you are dead
\nWill be beautiful, still desirable.
\nI shall be dead already, all closed up in your immortal body, in your astounding image present forever among the perpetual wonders of life and eternity, but if I live
\nYour voice and its rhythm, your gaze and its radiance,
\nThe scent of you, the scent of your hair and much more beside will live on in me ,
\nIn myself who am neither Ronsard nor Baudelaire
\nMyself, Robert Desnos, who by having known and loved you
\nAm their equal.”<\/p>\n

No, it\u2019s in the swinging between poles of rapture and despair, or in individual lines that stand out because of the way they compactly encapsulate this tension within themselves:<\/p>\n

“I\u2019ve dreamed of you so much that you lose your reality.”<\/p>\n

The period of hopeless love for Yvonne was followed by one of poetic conflict and apparently continuing sexual frustration when Desnos broke with Breton\u2019s Surrealist movement. During this time he wrote \u201cThe Night of Loveless Nights\u201d, so called in its French publication. At nearly 600 lines, full of abrupt transitions and associative leaps from image to image and scenario to scenario, it makes a powerful appeal to the imagination but I found it hard to bring its series of intense moments into coherent focus or hold steady in the mind. The tone shifts between violently-wrought abstract rhetorical apostrophe, as in the first lines (\u201cNight of glaciation horrendous night putrescent \/ Night of febrile phantom rotting greenery\u201d), everyday eroticism (\u201cWomen with tight trousers clinging to their thighs\u201d), horror-schlock (\u201cYou who vomit serpents\u201d) extraordinary, cinematically evocative phantamagorical scenarios (\u201cWomen swimming naked from a midnight shipwrecked hull\u201d), scenarios like late Fellini dream sequences (\u201cHigh in the rigging the seabirds were screaming, \/ Jack-tars in the shrouds shinned silent up and down. \/ All along the stowage there were dancing-girls dreaming\u201d) and touches reminiscent of the great G\u00e9rard de Nerval, albeit replacing his reincarnated goddesses with a god (\u201cHis heart full of embers and his teeth full of ashes, \/ He\u2019s the reborn Bacchus, who surges from the flames\u201d). It\u2019s an exciting testimony to the poet\u2019s image-making powers, but I found that when I read it straight through it became overwhelming and hard to concentrate on in the middle. I have to reserve judgement on whether I\u2019ll ever see it as a satisfying imaginative whole. And yet it\u2019s very much worth sticking with for the special power in the last couple of pages, as the turmoil of the overactive insomniac imagination is penetrated by the awareness of returning day. It\u2019s a hugely ambitious piece of writing, not only because of its length but because its subject is so difficult to dramatise, and if it\u2019s only partially successful, as I suspect, it\u2019s still very much worth the reader\u2019s serious engagement.<\/p>\n

The next section of Ad\u0450s\u2019s selection is called \u201cLover\u201d and it covers the time of Desnos\u2019s relationship with the woman he married. It seems to have been a happy period. Desnos\u2019s fluency is very apparent, albeit largely in short poems, and it\u2019s matched by Ad\u0450s\u2019s fluency as a translator. Though the imaginative pressure generally seems lower here than in the periods of frustration, the poems are easy to relate to and enjoy, covering a wide range of themes and tones \u2013 love poems, of course, but also absurdist games and some delightful poems for children. Darkness falls again and the poems become both more intense and more oblique in the final section, \u201cResistant\u201d, written during the Nazi Occupation of France. Here, Desnos, who was a member of two Resistance networks, had to hide his meanings in plain sight to survive the censor. He does so in different ways in the short lyrical poems of Contr\u00e9e<\/em>, which Ad\u0450s translates as Against the Grain<\/em>, and in the powerful mythological poems of Bathing With Andromeda<\/em> with its sequences about Andromeda (the princess chained to a rock in the sea for the Kraken to devour) and Calixto. If these poems gain much of their power by indirection, \u201cThis Heart Which Hated War\u201d shows power of a different kind in the directness of its patriotism, and the way it gathers into itself the energy of Desnos\u2019s lifelong love of liberty.<\/p>\n

As a parallel text, this volume performs a double service, making so much of Desnos\u2019s work available to English readers in its original French as well as in English. Of course translation on such a scale is inevitably uneven, especially given Ad\u0450s\u2019s decision to use strict metre and fairly strict rhyme wherever Desnos does, which is a great deal of the time. It\u2019s one thing to write in strict forms when the poet\u2019s meaning can evolve as he explores the metrical and phonetic possibilities for expressing it, another when he has to try to fit pre-existing meanings to a pre-determined form. Sometimes the demands of form force Ad\u0450s into ponderous, periphrastic or simply over-emphatic expressions of what is direct and clear in the original. That\u2019s just something one has to accept much of the time when one reads poetry in translation. However, he is gifted in the creation of varied and expressive patterns of sound and rhythm. I\u2019ve already suggested that this makes his versions of the poems to Yvonne George superior to Caws\u2019s as English poetry, and many of his other versions give real artistic pleasure in a similar way \u2013 sometimes, to my mind, more than the original. I\u2019ve already quoted the line \u201cWomen swimming naked from a midnight shipwrecked hull\u201d. In the original this goes \u201cCelles renconr\u00e9es nues dans les nuits de naufrage\u201d (it\u2019s part of a list of women who\u2019ve obsessed the addressee of the poem). Making the women active, not passive, and introducing the verb \u201cswimming\u201d, Ad\u0450s has given the shipwreck metaphor a new, hallucinatory vividness, beauty and mystery that to my mind improve on the original.<\/p>\n

Altogether, this is a book I\u2019ve greatly enjoyed reading and sometimes wrestling with, a worthy transmission of a major poet with much to offer to very different tastes.<\/p>\n

Edmund Prestwich<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Robert Desnos, Surrealist, Lover, Resistant, translated and introduced by Timothy Ad\u0450s (Arc Publications, 2018) \u00a319.99 pbk Others will review this sumptuous volume in the light of a knowledge of Desnos\u2019s poetry. I can only comment on how it strikes someone almost completely new to his writing. What you want from a translation will partly depend […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":45,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":[]},"categories":[13,283],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"yoast_head":"\nRobert Desnos, Surrealist, Lover, Resistant, reviewed by Edmund Prestwich - The Manchester Review<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=9157\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Robert Desnos, Surrealist, Lover, Resistant, reviewed by Edmund Prestwich - The Manchester Review\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Robert Desnos, Surrealist, Lover, Resistant, translated and introduced by Timothy Ad\u0450s (Arc Publications, 2018) \u00a319.99 pbk Others will review this sumptuous volume in the light of a knowledge of Desnos\u2019s poetry. 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