Pierre Reverdy

Pier

Pierre Reverdy text, Pablo Picasso artwork, 1948

The Struggles of Words”, 1928

Torment wanders into the light beyond the roof. At midday, without sunlight. The walls are covered with snow, against a gray background. The eye stops and vainly seeks a better path.

They’ve rubbed away the designs that gave life to the crumbling walls. Some words raise themselves affirmatively. And the flood, too high, carries off the shore where the grass smooths the bank into well-combed hair. And while across the bluish rays turbulences whirl and slowly rise, silence falls heavily on the ground, without breaking.

trans. Michael Benedikt

Ron Padgett reading Reverdy

 

 

Reading Reverdy

The wind that went through the head left it plural.
                    •
The half-erased words on the wall of bread.
                    •
Someone is grinding the color of ears.
She looks like and at her.
                    •
A child draws a man and the earth 
Is covered with snow.
                    •
He comes down out of the night 
When the hills fall.
                    •
The line part of you goes out to infinity.
                    •
I get up on top of an inhuman voice.

Pierre Reverdy

 

portrait by Alberto Giacometti, 1962

the taste of reality

May 27, 2011 § Leave a comment

He took one step at a time, not knowing where he should place the next. Turning the corner, the wind swept up the dust and its greedy mouth engulfed all of space.

He began to run, hoping to take flight from one moment to the next, but along the gutter the cobblestones were slippery and his flailing arms couldn’t hold him. As he fell he understood that he was heavier than his dream and he loved, then, the weight that brought him down.

Translated by Michael Tweed

Pierre Reverdy

    portrait by Pablo Picasso

 

late in life

June 7, 2011 § Leave a comment

I am callous
I am tender
And I have wasted my time
Dreaming without sleeping
Sleeping while walking
Everywhere I’ve gone
I’ve found myself absent
I belong nowhere
Except the void
But I carry hidden high up in my bowels
At the spot where lightning has too often struck
A heart where each word has left its mark
And where my life trickles away with the slightest movement

(from La liberté des mers)

Pierre Reverdy

always there

June 13, 2011 § Leave a comment

I must no longer see myself and must forget
To speak to people whom I do not know
To shout without being heard
For no reason all alone
I know everyone and each of your steps
I would like to talk but no one listens
Heads and eyes turn away from me
Towards the night
My head is a ball full and heavy
Rustling as it rolls along the ground

Faraway
Nothing behind me nothing ahead
In the void where I descend
A few strong drafts
Swirl around me
Cruel and cold
From doors left ajar
Upon yet-to-be forgotten memories
The world like a pendulum has come to a standstill
People suspended for all eternity
An aviator descends like a spider by a thread

Relieved everyone dances
Between heaven and earth
But a ray of light comes
From the lamp that you forgot to turn off
In the stairwell
Ah it’s not over
Oblivion is not complete
I must still learn to know myself

Pierre Reverdy

Late at Night

[translation by Kenneth Rexroth]

The color which night decomposes
The table where they sit
In its glass chimney
The lamp is a heart emptying itself
It is another year
A new wrinkle
Would you have thought of it
The window throws a blue square
The door is more familiar
A separation
Remorse and crime
Goodbye I am falling
Gently bending arms take me
Out of the corner of my eye I can see them all drinking
I don’t dare move
They sit there
The table is round
And so is my memory
I remember everybody

Even those who are gone 

Pierre Reverdy

 

                                        Reverdy, Picasso, Cocteau, Brassai

                                    Atelier de Picasso, Rue Des Grandes Augustins, Paris, 1944

                                                                photograph by Brassai

Outside

Mask that weeps between two tree branches
A carnival evening is quenching 
tears that were streaming from its stony eyelids
tears from laughing and from bitterness and from regrets

Midnight
it’s all retouched
A new day begins
A drunkard comes to 
Tells his story to the doorways on the street
Sad story
With him a morning light

It’s raining and your eyelids glitter
The sneezing trees sprinkle the pavement
And by the caves of your nose I watch the moon pass over

The streak of clouds races on the faded sky
To all those who cling against lamp posts 
The illusion will be sweet

And dear your austere face
Mask
Smiles thinking of the dismal morrow

Passing along the clacking pavement 
Avoiding the street where shadows grow thick
High up a light gleams 
It’s so tranquil
The lodging that draws you on and awaits you where it is
The night doesn’t care about anything
          But the sky 
Perhaps it’s an empty apartment for you

            version by Frank O'Hara 

Pierre Reverdy

 Just for Now

Life it’s simple it’s great
The clear sun rings a sweet noise
The song of the bells has died away
The morning passes the light all through
My head is a re-flooded shell 
And the chamber I inhabit is finally cleared 

A lone ray suffices 
A single peal of laughter
My joy which shakes the house 
Restrains those who wish to die
With the very notes of its song

I sing false 
Ah but isn’t it droll
My mouth wide to all the winds
Launches everywhere its mad notes
Which depart I don’t know how
To fly towards the ears of others

Listen I’m not crazy
I’m laughing at the foot of the stairway
Before the great wide open door 
In the squandered sunshine 
At the wall midst the vines the greens 
And my arms are stretched towards you

It’s today that I love you

Rene Char read by Thomas Merton

 

I get too vehement but I like a certain volume ofwacky sound. That is why these days I am reading quite a lot of Rene Char, whom I had not read before. Today, Labor Day, when I get this letter finished, I' ll take off into the woods (I live in the woods anyway) with a book of Rene Char selections and maybe some I4th-cent. German mystic stuff. Char has the wacky oblique eloquence all right. I have two books of selections, same publisher, ten years or so apart: first one has picture of him looking like a champion bicycle racer, the other a picture that ought to have a number under it. The people that write about him try to do so in a hesitant imita- tion of his style, and when they happen to be a bit square the result is very funny. Mustdrivehimoutofhishead. IwouldtranslatesomebutIunderstandthatthere are herds ofpeople doing this now and the rights situation is complicated??2

Pierre Reverdy

 

photograph by Brassai, 1937

Live Flesh

TRANSLATED BY LYDIA DAVIS

Stand up carcass and walk

Nothing new under the yellow sun

The last of  the last of  the louis d’or

The light that separates

under the skins of  time

The lock in the heart that shatters

A thread of  silk

A thread of  lead

A thread of  blood

After these waves of  silence

These tokens of  love in black horsehair

The sky smoother than your eye

The neck twisted with pride

My life in the corridor

From which I see the undulating harvests of death

All those greedy hands kneading loaves of smoke

Heavier than the pillars of  the universe

Heads empty 

Hearts bare

Hands scented

Tentacles of  the monkeys who aim at the clouds

Among the wrinkles of  these grimaces

A straight line tightens

A nerve twists

The sea sated

Love

The bitter smile of  death

Pierre Reverdy

translation by Kenneth Rexroth, art by

Juan Gris

A Lot of People

Over there is only a black hole

      Beyond the gate a laughing head

And in dust the noise died away

      Cloud

      Chiaroscuro

          Stop breathing

All the birds are dead

          The sun has burst

Blood flows 

In the water where his eyes were drowning

Pierre Reverdy

 

clock ::

translated by lydia davis

    In the warm air of the ceiling the footlights of dreams are illuminated.
       The white walls have curved. The burdened chest breathes confused words. In the mirror, the wind from the south spins, 
carrying leaves and feathers. The window is blocked. The heart is 
almost extinguished among the already cold ashes of the moon — the hands are without shelter ­­­­— as all the trees lying down. In the wind from the desert the needles bend and my hour is past.

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Pierre Reverdy

 

    portrait by Brassai, 1932

from painted stars (Étoiles peintes, 1921)

Movement on the horizon

The horsemen keep to the road, and in profile. One cannot tell any more how many. Against the night that blocks the way, between the river and the bridge, a weeping spring, a tree that follows you. You could watch the passing crowd and it wouldn’t see you. It’s a veritable army on the march, or else a dream, a background of a painting on a cloud. The child cries or sleeps. It watches or dreams. All these armies obstruct the sky. The earth shakes. The horses glide along the water; the cortège glides, too, in the water that washes away all these colors, all these tears.

Translation by Dan Bellm

Samuel Backett

    photograph by John Minihan, 1984

 

Samuel Beckett

 

photograph by Richard Avedon, April

Vladimir: What do they say?

Estragon: They talk about their lives.

Vladimir: To have lived is not enough for them.

Estragon: They have to talk about it."

― 'Waiting For Godot'.

Samuel Beckett

 

  bon bon il est un pays 

all right all right there's a land

where forgetting where forgetting weighs 

gently upon worlds unnamed

there the head we shush it the head is mute

and one knows no but one knows nothing

the song of dead mouths dies

on the shore it has made its voyage

there is nothing to mourn 

my loneliness I know it oh well I know it badly

I have the time is what I tell myself I have time

but what time famished bone the time of the dog

of a sky incessantly paling my grain of sky

of the climbing ray ocellate trembling

of microns of years of darkness 

you want me to go from A to B I cannot

I cannot come out I'm in a traceless land

yes yes it's a fine thing you've got there a mighty fine thing 

what is that ask me no more questions

 spiral dust of instants what is this the same

 the calm the love the hate the calm the calm

Samuel Beckett

 

Dortmunder

Int  the magic the Homer dusk

past the red spire of sanctuary

I null she royal hulk

hasten to the violet lamp to the thin K'in music of the bawd.

She stands before me in the bright stall

sustaining the jade splinters

the scarred signaculum of purity quiet

the eyes the eyes black till the plagal east

shall resolve the long night phrase.

Then, as a scroll, folded,

and the glory of her dissolution enlarged

in me, Habbakuk, mard of all sinners.

Schopenhauer is dead, the bawd

puts her lute away.

Raymond Radiguet

photograph by Man Ray

Weeping willow

He loses his feathers loses his tears

Like a heart is empty of tears
The watering can has lost its feathers

Fan in the sun faded
Lottery of months of years
In the alley the sand is rolling up
Where my sorrow will make the wheel

Garden do you have to go
And the summer of this fan
Seconded by my little finger
That tickles a rosebud
Cheeky without however daring
To hurry its hatching

After having fun
The rose returns to its cocoon
The rose puts on her shirt
And everything has to be started again

And the tools in the shed
Garden set lament
The watering can would like on the lover
Shed tears but the spade
Has not found this mischievous
That hides under the dry grass

Jean-Patrick Manchette

 

3 to Kill

(Excerpt)

Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith

Chapter One

And sometimes what used to happen was what is happening now: Georges Gerfaut is driving on Paris’s outer ring road. He has entered at the Porte d’Ivry. It is 2:30 or maybe 3:15 in the morning. A section of the inner ring road is closed for cleaning, and on the rest of the inner ring road traffic is almost nonexistent. On the outer ring road there are perhaps two or three or at the most four vehicles per kilometer. Some are trucks, many of them very slow moving. The other vehicles are private cars, all traveling at high speed, well above the legal limit. This is also true of Georges Gerfaut. He has had five glasses of Four Roses bourbon. And about three hours ago he took two capsules of a powerful barbiturate. The combined effect on him has not been drowsiness but a tense euphoria that threatens at any moment to change into anger or else into a kind of vaguely Chekhovian and essentially bitter melancholy, not a very valiant or interesting feeling. Georges Gerfaut is doing 145 kilometers per hour.

Georges Gerfaut is a man under 40. His car is a steel-gray Mercedes. The leather upholstery is mahogany brown, matching all the fitting of the vehicle’s interior. As for Georges Gerfaut’s interior, it is somber and confused; a clutch of left-wing ideas may just be discerned. On the car’s dashboard, below the instrument panel, is a matte metal plate with George’s name, address, and blood group engraved up it, along with a piss-poor depiction of Saint Christopher. Via two speakers, one beneath the dashboard, the other on the back-window deck, a tape player is quietly diffusing West Coast-style jazz: Gerry Mulligan, Jimmy Giuffre, Bud Shank, Chico Hamilton. I know, for instance, that at one point it is Rube Bloom and Ted Koehler’s “Truckin” that is playing, as recorded by the Bob Brookmeyer Quintet.

The reason why Georges is barreling along the outer ring road, with diminished reflexes, listening to this particular music, must be sought first and foremost in the position occupied by Georges in the social relations of production. The fact that Georges has killed at least two men in the course of the last year is not germane. What is happening now used to happen from time to time in the past.

End of Chapter

Francis Ponge

The Pleasures of the Door

      Kings never touch doors. 

      They’re not familiar with this happiness: to push, gently or roughly before you one of these great, friendly panels, to turn towards it to put it back in place—to hold a door in your arms. 

      The happiness of seizing one of these tall barriers to a room by the porcelain knob of its belly; this quick hand-to-hand, during which your progress slows for a moment, your eye opens up and your whole body adapts to its new apartment. 

     With a friendly hand you hold on a bit longer, before firmly pushing it back and shutting yourself in—of which you are agreeably assured by the click of the powerful, well-oiled latch.

–Francis Ponge (translated by C.K. Williams)