The Landscape

Author(s): Robert Desnos and Don Paterson

Source: Poetry, Vol. 188, No. 1, The Translation Issue (Apr., 2006), pp. 62-64
Published by: Poetry Foundation
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20607386
Accessed: 31-12-2015 17:16 UTC

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 ROBERT DESNOS

The Landscape
A Version

I dreamt of loving. The dream remains, but love

isno longer those lilacs and roseswhose breath
filled the broad woods, where the sail of a flame
lay at the end of each arrow-straight path.

I dreamt of loving. The dream remains, but love

isno longer that stormwhose white nerve sparked
the castle towers, or left themind unrhymed,
or flared an instant, justwhere the road forked.

It is the star struck under my heel in the night.

'Itis theword no book on earth defines.
It is the foam on thewave, the cloud in the sky.

As they age, all thingsgrow rigid and bright.

The streets fallnameless, and the knots untie.
Now, with this landscape, I fix; I shine.

TranslatedfromtheFrenchbyDon Paterson

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 Translator'sNote

I've always loved this late poem of Desnos; itwas published in

I944, the year the Gestapo caught up with him, the year before he
died in Terezin. It's long struckme as one of those poems so deeply
folded in itsown music, italmost defines "the problem of translation."
How could any rendering of that first line- "J'avais reve d'aimer.
J'aime encor mais l'amour" - be anything but a disappointment?
Like a lot of thispost-Breton stuff,the imagery in the poem swings
between unlocked metaphor and locked symbol. The fact thatwe
understand the former can perhaps make us feel overconfident about
interpreting the latter,but statements like "C'est le silex en feu sous
mon pas dans la nuit" (line nine) are too hermetic-and therefore,
paradoxically, too richly suggestive- to convince by anymeans other
than their "vibe," their emotional or atmospheric truth.The more
locked the symbol, themore itspoetic success will inevitably depend
upon its lyricor imagistic integration, since ithas no fixedmeaning
that is to say no paraphrasable sense-by which itmight be easily
woven into the poem's argument. The operation of lyric (by which
Ijust mean the repetition of phonemes to unify and deepen the sense)
iswholly dependent on hopelessly tongue-specific phonosemantic
coincidence. The more we work to unify themusic in the target lan
guage, themore those unfixed, freer senses will shift, and themore
likelywe'll end up saying something different.
Here, I've takenmy usual indefensible approach of screwing around
with just about everything for the sake of wringing some kind of
English tune out of it. (No, I can't believe I skipped silex either.) By
definition, pursuing a lyric aesthetic in translation makes it an act
of versioning, not translation proper. Because you know the original
surface-sense will sufferas a result, your allegiance switches from the
original words to your subjective interpretation of them, i.e. to that
wholly personal mandala of idea and image and spirit that floats free
of the poem, and functions in a kind of intercessory capacity in its
reincarnation. A translation is different. It tries to remain true to
those original words and their relations, and itsprimary aim isusually
one of stylistic elegance (meaning essentially the smooth elimination
of syntactic and idiomatic artifacts from the original tongue, a far

ROBERT DESNOS 63

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 more subtle project than it sounds) - inwhich lyricunity is only one
of several competing considerations. Someone like Edward Snow
understands this supremely well. Most things in between are plain
ugly procedures, with plain ugly results.
Not that- heaven knows - I'm making any great claims for this
version. This isjustwhere I amwith it,as ofHogmanay, 2005 Versions
.
genuinely are abandoned; knowing they can never be definitive, they
turn into exegeses, and so are really open-ended inquiries.- D. P.

64 POETRY

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