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

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

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

 

    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

Daniil Kharms

 

From "A Treatise More or Less in he Spirit of Emerson"

IV. On approaching immortality

It is characteristic of every person to strive toward enjoyment, which is always a kind of sexual fulfillment, either satisfaction or acquisition. But only that which does not lie on the path of enjoyment leads to immortality. All the systems leading toward immortality, in the final analysis, are reducible to a single rule: at all times do that which you do not want to do, because every person always wants to either eat, or to satisfy their sexual urges, or to acquire something, or all of the above, more or less, at the same time. Interestingly, immortality is always connected with death, and is represented by the various religious systems either as eternal enjoyment, or eternal suffering, or an eternal absence of both pleasure and suffering.

Vincente Huidobro

 

Vicente Huidobro (1893-1948) and Robert Delaunay (1885-1941), Tour Eiffel. Poème par Vincente Huidobro; peintures par Robert Delaunay (Madrid: privately printed, 1918). 

Vicente Huidobor

 

The first modern poet of the Spanish language — in many ways its Apollinaire — Vicente Huidobro is generally considered to be one of the four greatest Spanish American poets of [the last] century. Yet unlike his peers — César Vallejo, Pablo Neruda, and Octavio Paz — Huidobro is still little-known in the English-speaking world.

Altazor, a book-length poem first published in 1931, is Huidobro’s masterpiece and one of the wildest poems of any language. The century’s great paean to flight, the poem sends its hero (Altazor, the antipoet) hurtling through Einsteinian space at light-speed, as all places and times collapse into one.” (from the back cover)

Publisher Compañia Ibero Americana de Publicaciones, Madrid/Barcelona/Buenos Aires, 1931
111 pages

Bilingual Spanish/English edition
Translated by Eliot Weinberger
Publisher Graywolf Press, Saint Paul, Minnesota, 1988
A Palabra Sur Book
ISBN 1555971067
167 pages
via filboid

Vicente Huidobro

 

Vicente Huidobro

 

    portrait by Picasso

MINUIT

Les heures glissent
Comme des gouttes d’eau sur une vitr                                                                    Silence de Minuit

La peur se déroule dans l’air 

Et le vent

                se cache au fond du puits

                            OH

                        C’est une feuille
                            on pense que la terre va finir

                            Le temps

                                                        remue dans l’ombre

tout le monde dort

                                    UN SOUPIR

Dans la maison quelqu’un vient de mourir

                                                                    translated by the author from the original Spanish

                                                                     (From Horizon Carré, Paris : Paul Birault, 1917.)                

silence de minuit

Dans la maison quelqu’un vient de mourir
(From Horizon Carré, Paris : Paul Birault, 1917.)

Paul Eluard

 

I Said It To You

I said it to you for the clouds
I said it to you for the tree of the sea
For every wave for the birds in the leaves
For the pebbles of sound
For familiar hands
For the eye that becomes a face or a landscape
And the sleep that turns it the color of the sky
For the whole drunk night
For the gridwork of roads
For the open window for a naked forehead
I said it to you for your thoughts for your words
Every touch every trust will survive.

Translated from French by Paul Weinfield, © 2016

Paul Eluard

                            photograph by Dora Maar, ca. 1935

Absence

I speak to you through the cities
I speak to you through the plains
My mouth is pressed to your ear
Both sides of the wall are facing
My voice, which knows you.
I speak to you of eternity.

O cities memories of cities
Cities draped in our desires
Cities behind and ahead of their time
Powerful cities intimate cities
Stripped of their masons
Their thinkers their ghosts

Landscapes ruled by emerald
Live alive survive
The wheat of heaven upon our earth
Nourishes my voice I cry and dream
I laugh and dream between the flames
Between the clusters of sunshine

And over my body your body stretches
The web of its unclouded mirror.

Translated from French by Paul Weinfield

 

Philippe Soupalt

 

Philippe Soupault

 

André Breton and Philippe Soupault

From 'The Magnetic Fields,' 'Feelings Are Free'

Photograph by Man Ray (1925)

THE HERMIT CRAB SAYS:  FEELINGS ARE FREE

 

Trace smell of sulfur

Public health swamp

Red of criminal lips

Quick-march brine

Whim of monkeys

Day-colored clock

 

THEY APPLAUD

 

Heat of locomotives in their Sunday best

Overcoats of prostitutes

Marine moon problem

Solid meridians beehive

Calomel of childhoods at the theater

Blue countrysides

There are three inhabitants

Flying fish in love with the stars

Beard of rivers languor

Occident

Thousand years compass

Psychologist pharmacists are a public danger

Rage of Chicago factories

Ritual

Men love the paleness of animals

 

TRANSLATED BY. CHARLOTTE MANDELL

Max Jacob

  

Poem in a Mode that Isn't Mine 

to you, Rimbaud

My horse tripped over the semiquavers! The notes splatter up to the green sky of my soul: the eighth sky!

Apollo was a doctor and me I’m a pianist of the heart, if not in fact. It would be necessary, with the flats and all the bars, to unload the scribbled steamers, to collect the tiny battle flags to compose some canticles.

The minuscule, it’s huge! Whoever conceived Napoleon as an insect between two branches of a tree, who painted him a nose too large in watercolor, who rendered his court with shades too tender, wasn’t he greater than Napoleon himself, o Ataman Prajapati!

The minuscule, it’s the note!

Man bears upon himself photographs of his ancestors like Napoleon bore God, o Spinoza! Me, my ancestors, these are the notes of harps. God had conceived St. Helena and the sea between two branches of a tree. My black horse has a good eye, though albino, but he tripped on the harp notes.

Jean Cocteau

 

Death comes through mirrors

is a blind man with a violin

collecting grudging offerings

I ask you’, is the hat

full yet

and you reply

‘Consider the fiery red

cherubims in the blue sky

or those empty cavernous

spaces where the image

scatters on the silver’

no his hat is empty

he is a young man

with violets in his eyes

he is blind and sings

 

                                                                                Man Ray. Jean Cocteau & Tristan Tzara