In the Convivio, Dante says that translation is treachery. He's right. It's also theft. I'm working on a book of translations from various stages of my life. It's called Dead Letter Drop because spies and traitors use empty houses to communicate. They drop in a letter to be picked up by someone with a key, who in turn leaves another letter. I drop letters from one stage of my life to another. When I was young, I was a German traitor. Then I became a double agent, working for Spanish, Italian, French and even Belgian poets. I also stole from them. At each stage of my writing career, I have been in the pay of at least one dominant foreigner. The deal being, I translate and then steal wholesale from the vision, fencing through the Workshop. For all that, translating poetry is a very demanding discipline, but one that acts as a constant stimulus to creativity.
Bousquet writes the purest Surrealist lyrics, next to Eluard. His life was pure Surrealism. He was born in Narbonne is 1897, the son of an Army doctor. He was bright pupil at school, but was horribley abused by a family who looked after him when his father returned to active service. He went off the rails entirely, specialising in hooking fashionable married women, and getting high on morphine and cocaine. When war broke out in 1914, Joë continued his dissolute life until he signed up in desperation. He deliberately chose to belong to the 156th Corps, half of whom were sentenced criminals. They were lead by Pere Louis Houdard, a Jesuit whose hardness was legendary. Joë was wounded in 1918, and spent the rest of life completely paralised. He wrote prolifically until his death in 1950.
Joë Bousquet (1897-1950)
Ne maudis pas ces jours dont la rigueur t'assiste
ni le mal qui te broie aux redites d'un coeur
ils aimaient comme toi l'enfant qu'un frère triste
suivit d'un oeil pesant tout le long du bonheur
Il craint l'aube son vol de chauves-souris blanches
la peur de naître dure et l'attend dans le noir
aucun vivant ne sait quels soins tendres se penchent
dans le songe sans yeux qui l'endort pour le voir
Tu soulevais le ciel sur l'espoir d'une voile
et plus léger qu'un saule à la nuit qu'il parcourt
charmais d'un seul regard les siècles d'une étoile
qui buvait dans tes yeux la naissance des jours
Tu vivras d'une fin venue avant son heure
et des jours abolis en rêvant de vous deux
qui sentent dans l'air rouge où les misères meurent
leurs pleurs se détacher d'un coeur férme sur eux
trans. Duncan McGibbon
Don't curse those days when toughness helps you,
nor the evil which winds up your repeater heart.
Like you, they love the child whose sad brother
tags along behind, an eye heavy with the weight of joy.
He believes in the dawn, a flight of white bats,
frightened of a hard birth and of waiting in the dark.
No one alive knows which tender cares lean over
in an eyeless dream which sleeps that it can see.
You hold up the sky on the hope of a veil.
And, much lighter than night's willow,
you are charmed by a single look which covers it,
the eras of a star that drinks the birth of years in your eyes.
You will live for an aim, reached before its hour
and the days will be cancelled, dreaming of you both,
which sense tears come astray in a holding heart,
in the reddened air where miseries die.