R. Desno's "La Voix de Robert Desno" 羅拔. 廸士奴的聲音

In this second poem of Robert Desno that I translate, we see once more the incantatory quality of his poem. We see the same repetitive sentence structure, the same lack of adjectives and adverbs and the same mere presentation of a series of images. The surrealists are in a certain sense the descendants of the Parnassians who advocated a style of poetry, in reaction against the excessive subjectively emotional description of the romantics, denuded of such excesses. They wish to restore to the words their own integrity, their own nature as nouns, as objects, their own independence from man. They wish to retrun to the word their own concreteness. In this poem we see again the emphasis on specificity of the details of things, and not the emotions that the poet may wish to clothe them with. In this, the surrealists have established a tradition which is later taken up by the symobolist poets who succeeded them in France. But let's hear what the poet has to say.

La Voix de Robert Desno

Si semblable à la fleur et au courant d'air

au cours d'eau aux ombres passagères

au sourire entrevu ce fameus soir à minuit

si semblable à tout au bonheur et à la tristesse

c'est le minuit passé dressant son torse nu au-dessus des belfrois et des peupliers

j'appelle à moi ceux-là perdu dans les campagnes

les vieux cadavres les jeunes chênes coupés

les lambeaux d'étoffe pourrisant sur la terre et le linge séchant aux alentours des fermes

j'appelle à moi les tornades et les ouragans

les tempêtres les typhons les cyclones

les raz de marée

les tremblement de terre

j'appelle à moi la fumée des volcans et celle des cigarettes.

 

The voice of Robert Desno

So like the flower and current of air

over the waterways and passing shadows

the smile of the famed night glimpsed at midnight

So like all happiness and sadness

It's the midnight just gone raising its naked body above the belfries and the poplars

I call to me all those lost in  the fields

the old corpses and the young oaks felled

the rags rotting on land and the linens drying around the farms

I call to me the tornados and the hurricanes

the tempests the typhoons and the cyclones

the tidal waves

the earthquakes

I call to me the smoke of the volcanoes and that of the cigarettes

 

羅拔. 廸士奴的聲音

多麽像花和風

在河道上和閃身而過的影子

在那難忘晚上午夜眨見之淺笑

多麼像快樂與憂愁

是剛過午夜挺起在鐘樓與白楊樹赤裸的軀體

我號召所有迷失在郊野的

年長的屍骸和年幼被砍的橡樹

在泥上腐化的爛布和田莊附近晾晒的床布

我號召龍捲風和旋風

暴風颱風和氣旋

海潮的巨浪

地震

我號召火山之煙和香煙之煙

In this poem, we see Desno talking about himself as a person who would like to speak of things which are light as air, delicate as flowers and who uses his power of imagination to beckon all sorts of images to appear in his poem, everyday objects of the here and now and also extraordinary phenomena both natural and human. He presents them. He does not tell the reader what kind of emotions and feelings he wishes to express.  The emotions and the feelings are concretely embodied in his images. I like in particular his last line which skilfully tells us that all that he is talking about are things of the imagination. The smoke of the volcanoes are not real smoke. It is the smoke of his imagination, embodied by the wisps of smoke which circles above his head whilst he was thinking about what he was going to write. They are  as "substantial" as his cigarette smoke!