Fiévreux tête-à-tête (Harlequin Azur) (French Edition)

A Tale of Two Cities (Webster's French Thesaurus Edition)

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I Have Halted My Horse t. In considering the many poets writing in French in the twentieth century and just after, I have given less attention to the number of poems and pages per poet than to the more important goal of including as many poets from as many countries as a single volume permits. The brief biographies of the poets that precede their works convey only the most basic information.

Critical analyses of their works are not possible in such limited space. These small biographical notes do not include the many major prizes awarded to these poets, nor do they reference English translations of their works. As in all bilingual editions, the translation is meant to draw attention to the original on the facing page. My warm thanks to Maggie Nelson for her comments on contemporary American poetry, and to the French poets who have made me feel at home in their poems over so many years.

Above all, I am grateful to all the poets, publishers, and rights holders, whose contributions were invaluable. What to say but thank you. It is in this belief that I have undertaken this massive volume. Our evaluation, of course, will change with our reading as the years go on. Nothing is presumed about the lasting nature of any attempt to gather what seems important at the moment, except the goodwill of this team of translators and advisers, every one of whom has my deep gratitude. The choice of translators was crucial; I often consulted them about which writers—and then which poems—should be presented.

I also listened, gratefully, to the counsel of Francophone and Anglophone friends. The bilingual presentation notwithstanding, I have tried to keep in mind the perspective of the non-French-speaking reader. Writing of the decision by the New York Review of Books not to retain him as a reviewer, the art historian Michael Fried described his way of being and seeing. Here he might well be speaking of my involvement with this volume. My commitment is to a wide reach of works, with all the risk that entails, and to the judgment of the translators I have called upon.

The deliberately extensive range of poets includes several who are well known, or even better known, in other genres: Here they are considered only as poets—I do not think they would object. The presentation of poems in this anthology is largely chronological. As we move closer to the present, the proportion of female to male artists changes dramatically; additionally, the female voice takes on increasing assurance as various feminisms develop in France.

In France, as in the United States, feminist agendas would become increasingly associated with the social sciences, relating domains formerly isolated from one another in the universities and public life. As Terry Eagleton says, the temper of the time was not only intellectually exciting, but it made room for much that had been excluded by male enthusiasts of what we call high theory. The focus on the personal and political, on what is generally termed identity politics, is far more often crucially felt in the poetic work of American feminists.

Francophone poetry also came into its own in the twentieth century— hence the wide-ranging selection of Francophone writers. This international dimension encourages the cross-fertilization of various origins, tongues, and poetic approaches. The Francophone selections in this volume are from African, Canadian, and West Indian sources—each with its unique heritage and context. The celebrations and authorial conditions of national independence are of crucial importance. Independence was won by Tunisia and Morocco in , and by Algeria in , and by the Central African Republic in After taking his exams in , the poet spent the summer in his homeland, a sojourn that inspired what is probably the best-known epic poem of return in French literature: Little by little, the countries of the Maghreb Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia gained their independence.

Within the divisions, poems appear under an alphabetical listing by poet. In the short essays preceding each of these sections, poets are discussed by generation—though, when speaking of contemporaries, the discussions are not strictly limited by birthdates. The present organization highlights six crucial pressure points in modern French poetry.

Because poetic endeavors between the s and the current era feel so intensely present, and to some extent continuous, my initial temptation, in the ultimate section, was to separate these forty or so years into two parts, alphabetically by poet: A through K and L through Y. I have therefore chosen as the starting point for contemporary poets at the end of the twentieth century. The choices were made with several criteria in mind, some of them made explicit in this introduction, some of them left implicit: Poetic Forms In addition to expected poetic forms—rhymed, unrhymed, free, and formal verse—I have included songs, dialogue poems, and a large selection of prose poetry.

The interrelation of prose and verse earns the prose poem a respectful place among other forms of twentieth-century French poetry. Between and the prose poem came to the fore through the work of Max Jacob and Pierre Reverdy. The impact of French prose poetry on contemporary American poets cannot be overstated and is overtly present in the works of John Ashbery, Michael Palmer, and Gustaf Sobin who are among the translators in this volume. In Rupture The idea of rupture—with past traditions, with the past in oneself, with the world around one—is not a modern one.

After all, the PreRaphaelites had every reason to think of themselves as a rupture from Raphael, and, long before that, Rome was itself in rupture. The notion of a break is delightfully romantic in the broad sense and allied to Romanticism in a more restricted sense. Did modern French and Francophone poetry break from the past? But continuity, like discontinuity, is in the eye of the beholder. Poetry is large enough to absorb innovation as it goes along. The Oulipian Georges Perec wrote La Disparition translated as A Void , a nearly three-hundred-page xxx introduction lipogrammatic novel in which the letter e never appears.

Instead of reducing creative possibilities, as such constraints might seem to, they actually increase them. In a seemingly irrational way, such careful attention to the material word challenges, refashions, and enhances thought. One example of his work takes a famous sonnet by Ronsard as its starting point: Note the humor, concision, and irony: Knowing that such comparisons are at once alluring and deceptive, I prefer to leave them to the reader. And next the thought came to me that to leave all out would be another, and truer, way.

It is the starting point of what today is widely practiced as both concrete and visual poetry. Type organizes itself on the page ideogrammatically. Of course, in France the visual and the verbal were never compartmentalized. Like Cubism in art, contemporaneous poetry similarly involved the idea of looking at one object from several points of view. Although Pierre Reverdy and Max Jacob would have rejected the label Cubist as having nothing essential to say about their compositions, it is in fact a useful reference.

Le Dialogue par le livre, — Painting and Poetry: Witness the international excitement of Concrete Poetry: Manifestos proliferate in the second half of the century, from Spatialism to Scum, from the aesthetic to the political, every movement wanting to proclaim its name and experimental newness. Founded by Bruce Andrews and Charles Bernstein, this movement emphasizes the word itself, as evidenced in the dramatic and eye-catching separation of letters. Experimental poetry and anything liberating, Ashbery says, are what really claim him. His personal reaction is antitraditional, in opposition to the poetry so often taught in the universities—for example, that of Robert Lowell and John Berryman.

As a heart is shaped by what it loves, and a mind by what it admires, a voice may gain its surest tones by what the speaker or singer reads and hears. The celebrated singer Patti Smith is fascinated by Blake and Rimbaud, and her verses are recognizably Rimbaudian. I believe it also. Roubaud has written about this experience and the musings it occasioned but has chosen not to publish these writings for this reason: It is not what you emulate but what you choose to carry with you that matters most. Overview With a backward glance at the nineteenth century we can now appreciate the wide range of all that Symbolism is or was: Appropriately, Part 1 of this volume includes the work of two great Symbolists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: Saint-Pol Roux and Paul Claudel.

The year was certainly an annus mirabilis in many domains. Anthropological investigations, such as those in the Swiss journal Anthropos gave credibility and backing to poetic experimentation. A strange coherence is found in these automatic texts. This is the grand epoch of Surrealism. Just before his death, he turned to a more traditional form of poetry, writing in what could be considered classic verse. The author of Maldoror and forefather of Surrealism was not to be associated with the light, the frivolous, or the horrors of commercial undertakings.

But the Surrealist spirit in poetry, as in life, was to mark successive generations. Silence was, they thought, the best xxxviii introduction weapon. Breton and several others took refuge in Marseilles at the Bel Air mansion, owned by the American Jane Gold; it was there that Varian Fry ran the Committee for Political Refugees, orchestrating plans for the foremost intellectuals to leave France for the United States. Breton was among the French refugees in New York, which was not to his liking he preferred the West and Native American culture.

Home to the Abstract Expressionists and their expressive personal visions, the magazine occupied an opposite pole from the Partisan Review and The Nation. But once there, he discovered that conditions were no longer as conducive to the kind of poetry he had championed.

In response, he turned toward a more mystical context, still invoking chance and the everyday marvelous, surrounded now by a younger group of adepts. In the meantime, Surrealism had spread internationally. The Martinican journal Tropiques displayed a Surrealism of negritude that was as vivid as anything that had preceded it in Paris. This openness was to endure beyond the political upheavals of the French presence in Algeria and other tribulations from which poetry often seemed an escape.

Latter-day manifestations of Surrealism, such as those of Joyce Mansour in her violent texts and the incendiary prose of Annie Le Brun, bear witness to the ongoing force of the Surrealist spirit. Ponge placed himself and his work, explicitly based on everyday perception, in a close-up zoom, as he put it in the title Le Parti-pris des choses On the Side of Things , an attitude congenial to that of the concrete poets.

As is the case with poetry worldwide, there is now a tremendous emphasis on performance, on the oral manifestation essential to the ever more rapidly moving world with which it has to keep pace. Technology and creation walk hand in hand: The interactive nature of the contemporary world, psychological and political, local and global, gives poetry a new place. As Jacques Derrida notes, translation is generosity. And as Walter Benjamin would have it—and so would we—languages supplement one another.

Bilingual anthologies, with all their translation work, xl introduction gather innumerable items into innumerable divisions, which any editor, poet, reader, or translator could endlessly alter according to what seems most viable at the moment. John Ashbery gets it right for all of us: Small and large journals and presses remain locked in economic crisis, but at least these heated and attention-getting debates focus on the problem of poetry and the ways poems relate to the world around them, and to us.

Today The great nineteenth-century thinker and seer John Ruskin had as his motto just one word: Energy and exchange might well be the watchwords of what we intended to do here. The enduring wish of all those involved in this production is that through their contribution readers may, in their turn, discover something new that may matter even greatly to their future readings. Gallimard, , p. Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: University of Minnesota Press, , passim. Graywolf Press, ], p. Oberlin College Press, , p.

The information is based on the informative article by Ronnie Scharfman in Denis Hollier, ed. Harvard University Press, , pp. Alex Preminger and T. Princeton University Press, , pp. Dalkey Archive Press, Pierre de Ronsard, in Les Amours, ed. Marc Bensimon and James L. Viking, , p. Le Dialogue par le livre, — Paris: See Mary Ann Caws, ed.

A Century of Isms Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, , with manifestos such as Spatial Eroticism. New Directions, , p. Jacques Roubaud, conversation with the author, New York, April Schocken, , p. Flammarion, , p. A Documentary History Berkeley: University of California Press, Pure psychic automatism, through which we propose to express, in speech, in writing, or any other fashion, the real workings of thought.

Dictation of thought, in the absence of any rational control, with no esthetic or moral consideration. And in the same Manifesto: Jean-Jacques Pauvert, , pp.

Ecco, , p. Deguy mentions two works: Mercure de France, Claudel interweaves prose and poetry in his longer poems and in his poetic plays , all of which are unmistakably lofty in style and conception. These last brief poems, written when Claudel was the French ambassador to China, remain striking examples of the prose poem: Another extraordinary adventurer into China in the early part of the century was Victor Segalen, doctor, essayist, and poet.

Thence the challenge to whomever would have them say what it is they keep. They scorn to be read. They do not express; they signify; they are. The genre of the stela is unique unto itself, celebrating life, death, and the ongoing construction and duration of poetic monuments. No twentieth-century French poet is more beloved than the immensely appealing Guillaume Apollinaire. As someone once remarked to me, Apollinaire, almost alone among poets, has left a legacy of congeniality, not only in his time but in ours. An elegy to him by Tristan Tzara, founder of the Dada movement, is an unforgettable lament.

Above all else, Cendrars was fascinated with the multiform elements of the modern: The interrelations of prose and poetry are always to be reinvented and rethought. Particularly in the early years of the century, the interrelating of genres provokes a special excitement. Gallimard, , pp. In a letter to Jules de Gaultier of February 3, , Segalen says of these monument poems: Timothy Billings and Christopher Bush have recently translated and commented upon these poems, at the time of this writing; their work is invaluable.

He continues to feel among the freshest of contemporary poets. Vitus You were sad enough to die the day you saw yourself in them You looked like Lazarus bewildered by the light The hands of the clock in the Jewish quarter turn backwards And you go slowly backwards in your life Climbing up to Hradchin and listening at night In taverns to the singing of Czech songs Here you are in Marseilles amid the watermelons Here you are in Coblenz at the Hotel of the Giant Here you are in Rome sitting under a Japanese medlar tree 11 part 1. His extensive travels—real and imagined—furnish the vital matter of his work, both in poetry and in prose.

He served in World War I, losing his right arm in combat. The Kremlin was like an immense Tartar cake Iced with gold With big blanched-almond cathedrals And the honey gold of the bells. I foresaw the coming of the big red Christ of the Russian Revolution. And the sun was an ugly sore Splitting apart like a red-hot coal. An old monk was singing me the legend of Novgorod. Me, the bad poet who wanted to go nowhere, I could go anywhere. From to he served in diplomatic posts across America, Europe, and China.

He also served as 37 part 1.

October In vain do I see that the trees are still green. Whether the year is shrouded in a funereal haze or hidden under a long calm sky, we are not one day less close to its fatal solstice. The sun does not disappoint me, or the vast opulence of the landscape, but there is something too calm, a rest from which there is no awakening. No, the sky behind me no longer casts the same light over the huge harvest; and as the road leads me by the stacks, whether I go around a pool or come upon a village as I walk away from the sun, I turn towards the large pale moon you see by day.

It was just as I came out of the dark olive-trees and caught sight of the radiant plain open before me as far as the mountain barriers, that the initiatory word was given to me. Oh, the last fruit of a condemned season! It is all over. No winds tear at her, no frosts cut her, no waters drown her. Here now, like a heart that yields to constant prompting, is the time of consent: The words she hears are holier now than those of her wedding day—deeper, richer, more bountiful: The birds are sleeping; the tree falls to sleep in the lengthening shade; the sun grazes the earth, covering it with an even ray.

The day is done, the year is at an end. Que ces eaux sont copieuses! Me voici dans la plaine. But, so that you understand the mixture of blessedness and bitterness in the act of creation, I will explain to you, my friend, at a time when the sombre season begins, the sadness of water. From the sky and the eyelid wells up an identical tear. Do not think of imputing your melancholy to the clouds or to this veil of the dark shower. Shut your eyes, listen! The rain is falling. It is the weariness of a grief whose cause is in itself, the travail of love, the hard toil of work.

The skies weep over the earth they make fertile. And it is not, above all, autumn and the approaching fall of fruit whose seed they nourish that draws these tears from the wintry clouds. Just when the hour before noon is coming to an end, as I go down into the valley full of the murmur of various fountains, I pause, enchanted by the chagrin.

How plentiful are these waters! And if tears, like blood, are a constant well-spring within us, how fresh it is to listen to this liquid choir of voices rich and frail, and to match them with all the shades of our grief! There is no passion that can fail to lend you its tears, O fountains! And although I am content with the impact of a single drop falling into the basin from high above on the image of the moon, I will not in vain have learnt to know your haven over many afternoons, vale of sorrow.

Now, once more, I am in the plain. On the threshold of this hut where a candle is lit in the inner darkness for some rustic feast, a man is sitting with a dusty cymbal in his hand. The rain is pouring down; and alone, in the midst of the wet solitude, I hear the squawk of a goose. Souvent on embrouille les anges, Victimes du mancenillier. Nous qui savons ce que ce geste attire: Quitter le bal et les buveurs de vin, A bonne distance des tirs Nous ne dormirons pas en vain.

He prized poetry above all other art forms and used it across media to explore the origin of artistic inspiration, to navigate between reality and dreams, and to juxtapose symbolic images with narrative form. Cocteau was born to a wealthy family. He counted among his friends Picasso, Erik Satie, Marcel Proust, and Sergey Diaghilev and was for years closely associated with the actor Jean Marais, who starred in many of his creations.

Make sure, though, that you locate the right one. We often mix our angels up and then get stuck With casualties done in by a manchineel. Oh, we know already what will be said: Mon chat guette la nuit, tout droit, comme une cruche. He quickly moved to adopt a unique style, however, recording his own conversations.

A Fragrance of Night. My cat watches the darkness, as rigid as a jug.

A fortune of subtle seeing looks at me through its green eyes. The lamp sings its slight song quietly, subdued as the song one hears in a shell. The lamp reaches out its placating hands. The nearest ones come forward timidly to see me, like a troop of dwarfs that discover an ogre. Des souvenirs dansent une ronde enfantine.

Un train crie dans la gare prochaine. One could believe that a person was playing alone in a house at a remote distance. Insects fall with a sidewise fall and writhe gently on the table. A big clock outdoors intones drearily. Memories take motion like children dancing in a ring. The cat stretches itself to the uttermost. Its nose traces in the air an imperceptible evolution.

Kitchen clatter mounts in a back-yard. Argumentative voices play at pigeonvole. A carriage starts up and away. A train chugs at the next station. I think of someone whom I love, who is so little to be so separated, perhaps beyond the lands covered by the night, beyond the profundities of water. I am able to engage her glance. His dreaminspired work forged a link between Symbolism and Surrealism. Born to a middle-class Jewish family in the Breton town of Quimper, he worked at a variety of jobs before devoting himself to writing, which led to friendships with Picasso, Cocteau, and other creative giants of the period.

In he purportedly saw a vision of Christ and six years later converted to Catholicism, choosing Picasso as his godfather. Jacob died of pneumonia at Drancy shortly after being detained. Ulysse est un laitier! Il a une robe de soie jaune et des parements bleus.

Il se retourne et je vois cette face paisible et rayonnante. Six moines alors emportent dans la chambre un cadavre. Yet it is always the same ones who mount the street! Always at the same time of day they pass by, happy or sad. All of you, passers-by of the Rue Ravignan, I have named you after the illustrious dead. There is Madame Hanska! Ulysses is a milkman! When Patroclus appears at the end of the street a Pharaoh is beside me! But thou, old ragpicker, who come in the enchanted morning to take away the still living rubbish as I am putting out my good big lamp, thou whom I know not, mysterious and impoverished ragpicker, I have given thee a celebrated and noble name, I have named thee Dostoievsky.

There was someone on the red wallpaper. I was stripped naked by a lightning-bolt! Truth with its tears and its joy! The Divine Body is on the wall of a shabby room. How graceful and gentle! The way He bears himself, the way He walks! He wears a yellow silk robe and blue facings. He turns around and I can see that peaceful, radiant countenance.

Six monks now come into the room carrying a dead body. Near me is a woman with snakes around her arms and hair. You have seen God!

Fievreux Tete-A-Tete (Harlequin Azur) (French, Electronic book text)

You do not realize how fortunate you are. Let me weep; oh, let me weep! I am just a poor human creature. The Evil Spirit has gone. He will be back. Qui frappe si matin? We love you, man of no account. I understand, Lord; oh, yes, I understand! Room, house, you will always be the chapel of my undying remembrance! I lay there thinking, stretched out on the box-spring held up by four bricks; and the landlord made an opening in the zinc roof to let in more light. I want to set it down. Where to escape, if the sky and hell are as closed to me as the earth? Braque tries to invite me, and looks to me like a schoolboy: From that day on, Adam kept trying to break apart the pebbles that looked like an egg.

It was a key. I came across this key: They were in the stalls of my church: The third was tossing up into the air some pearls that a very large yellow terrier was trying to catch. And I who was hoping for death yesterday, here I am frozen with fear at the idea of the scissors and the thread of my days. He was a believer in Unanism and its spirit of universal participation, which led him to volunteer at a military hospital during World War I. Apparais dans un corps Pelage vrai et Chaud, toi qui passes la mort.

Lament for the Stag Bloody like night, splendid in terror, highstrung, Whimperless you die at our approach. Come forth now above pain and perplexity. However hasty, made impotent by sperm and sweat the Hunter may have been, however culpable his Shadow and feeble the love He held! Come forth corporeal Fur genuine and Warm, crossing your death. The one I am and hate I was hollow and I was wet With rising joy more lava than milk Retaining the stars of my breast And I reached I said this exquisite death Fecund I stood up once more.

The mountains lie stilled in their light Shadows are quicker to darken and subtle golds Repose within the green. He spoke six languages and was responsible for introducing many previously unknown foreign works to the French public. His own work often took Europe as its subject, and he was most noted for his creation of the character A. Barnabooth, to whom several of his works were attributed. Barnabooth, ; reprinted in A. I move through your corridors humming, With you on your race toward Vienna and Budapest, My voice mingling with your hundred thousand voices, O Harmonika-Zug!

A fall morning at eight, and a lovely singer with violet eyes, sang in the next compartment. Prenez donc tout de moi: In it hatred dies for lack of air, And the greatest love cannot come in. So take everything I am: Bitume et roses, don du chant! Recognized by his literary peers for a small but respected body of published work, he eventually won the Nobel Prize in Literature It has been suggested that his interest in the symbolic and the personal had its origin in his Caribbean upbringing.

Perse did not begin to write poetry until the sudden death of his father in When France was invaded, he refused to act as a collaborator in his post as foreign secretary and in settled in the United States, where he served at the Library of Congress as a consultant in French poetry. Song Under the bronze leaves a colt was foaled. Came such an one who laid bitter bay in our hands.

Here comes news of other provinces to my liking. And tells us of an herb. O from the provinces blow many winds. What ease to our ways, and how the trumpet rejoices my heart and the feather adept of the scandal of the wing! Came such an one who laid this bitter bay in our hands. Out of the bronze tree comes a great bruit of voices. O what ease in our ways, how many gestes to the year, and by the roads of 63 part 1. Et quelquesuns en eurent connaissance. Au feu du jour toute faveur! Roses canines et ronces noires peuplent pour nous les rives du naufrage. Living leaves in the morning fashioned in glory.

Peace to the dying who have not seen this day! But tidings there are of my brother the poet: And some there are who have knowledge thereof. From our dream grown, on our blood fed, and haunting the purple of our nights, they are the fruits of long concern, they are the fruits of long desire, they were our most secret accomplices and, often verging upon avowal, drew us to their ends out of the abyss of our nights.

Sun of being, betrayal! Shall we trace the theme back to its birth? Majesty of the rose, we are not among your adepts: Dog roses and black briars populate for us the shores of shipwreck. Now they are ripening, these fruits of another shore. And those who have seen him pass will say: Allait-il seul au feu du jour montrer la pourpre de ses nuits? Did he go alone at dawn to show the purple of his nights? Sun of being, Prince and Master! At the gait of a binder of sheaves life goes, without hatred or ransom.

A child prodigy, he was ably abetted in his early work by his father, an art teacher himself. Inspired by sixteenth-century Italian poets, she often expressed a desire to return to a period in which thought and feeling were melded, before the intervention of the seven- teenth century and what T. Je ne sais pas de qui je suis la proie. Born to a wealthy Parisian family, Pozzi frequented the salons of the time. As a result, she lost many of her former friends and contacts, which marked the beginning of a slow decline in her health.

He moved from his native Narbonne to Paris in In he moved with his wife to the abbey at Solesmes but frequently returned to Paris. Toi, source intarissable de sang. A hand detached from its arm, a free hand, illumined from below by the glow of the hearth— and that innocent empty head smiling at the spider setting forth in the night its useless masterpiece.

The wall and the garden are white, the path black, and the house has given way without a sound. Obscure and complicated accidents take place, impossible to describe. And nevertheless the spirit of order, the even spirit, the spirit common to all despairs is questioning. You, unquenchable source of blood.

You, disaster intense with gleams which no surging spring, no cooling glacier will ever try to extinguish with its sap. You, sinuosity of buried love, hiding. Ceiling of contradictory ideas.

See a Problem?

Vertiginous balance of enemy forces. Paths confused in the fray of hair. Toi, clou de diamant. Sur la route mon ombre me suit, oblique, et me dit que je cours trop vite. You, this morning, totally alone in order, calm, and universal revolution. The curve of the night stopped at the thatched cottage which was still lit up, at the edge of the meadow, in front of the forest which was closing its gates.

All the freshness inside. The animals were there only to enliven the landscape while all the rest walked. For everything was walking, except the animals, the landscape and me, who with that statue, more immobile than the other one, was up there, on the pedestal of clouds. The trees are heads, or the heads trees, in any case the heads of the trees threaten me. And someone comes to let me in. Through the doorway I notice friends who are laughing. Is Ajar From the triangle of the sidewalks of the square all the wires start, and the scythe of the rainbow, broken behind the clouds.

In the center the one who waits, blushes, not knowing where to stand. Everyone is looking and in that same place the wall reveals its wound. Seeking a life of solitude, at the end of the century he moved to the peninsula of Roscanvel, in Brittany, where his daughter, Divine, was born. In , under the Occupation, the Nazis looted his home, destroying most of his manuscripts and badly injuring Roux and his daughter.

It looks as if each single one has been lit up to see like an eye. No sooner has one star or planet vanished than in the manner of a round the next jewelled rhyme arrives. Never any jerkiness, each rhythm always in place. Elle est en vous, pardi! But here back on the velvet is beauty all involved with putting on her dawn blouse.

Suddenly the neighbourhood rooster lets forth with a great crow of a rusted key in a lock. Now at last the Aviary opens up, a vast utterly blank eyelid. No more velvet or jewels, no more swallows or vows, no more rare birds or chickens, no perch, no white path or rose bush, no blouse or beauty, nothing at all—nothing but the great Peacock of Life in all his sapphire glory making a wheel out of our eyes.

The splendid Cheek emerges from the hawthorn muslins. Percez le trou solide au plein du mont.

Albert Giraud

He attended medical school in Brest and went on to become a naval doctor; this led to a post in Tahiti, where he spent two years. His curiosity also took him to China, which provided him with material for his poems. Segalen wrote essays on Rimbaud and Gauguin, and provided libretti for his friend Claude Debussy.

Funerary Edict Testament divining the imperial tomb. I, the Emperor, will have my burial place as I desire: Here the wind and the water in the veins of the earth and the plains of the wind are propitious. This pleasant tomb shall be mine. Extend the long ceremonial way: There you shall place the lofty crenelated fortress.

Carve in the depths of the mountain a hole without weakness. Murez le chemin aux vivants. Certes la mort est plaisante et noble et douce. La mort est fort habitable. I make my way inside. And now close the door, and wall up the space before it. Bar the road to all the living. I do not lament. I rule with gentleness and my dark palace is pleasing. Indeed death is agreeable and noble and sweet. A place one can dwell in. I dwell in death and I am content there.

And I shall listen to words. Out of respect for what cannot be said, no one is ever again to reveal the word glory or commit the character happiness. Let them no longer exist. What dazzling brushstroke would dare the gesture that she, in her innocence, imagines. Let it never come to pass. Let it even be forgotten: Rather, know that Jade is good Because it is smooth to the touch—but unyielding.

And just, since it has angles but does not cut. And full of urbanity when, hung from a belt, it bends low and touches earth. And musical, raising its voice, sustained until the sudden fall.

And sincere, for its luster is not veiled by its faults nor its faults by its luster. To praise it is thus to praise virtue itself. Ne le dis pas. For I avow that, turned away from you, I seek somewhere beyond you the response revealed by you. And I will go, crying out to the four spaces: You have heard me, you have known me, I cannot live in silence. He was born in Uruguay to French parents, but both disappeared after the family returned to France when he was just six months old. From an early age Supervielle used poetry to explore his sense of emptiness and loss, though he later turned to themes of coexistence and exchange in his poems, which are convincing and easily grasped.

Le Regret de la terre Un jour, quand nous dirons: Those who have stepped inside my cold caverns, Are they sure that they can ever leave again? What else can our hands do for us now? He was educated in the French Mediterranean. After a night of moral and intellectual anguish in October , he renounced poetry for mathematics and the study of mental processes, returning to poetry writing just before World War I. In he moved to Paris and concentrated solely on notebooks that he wrote in the morning before going to work at the French War Ministry.

His poems are among the masterpieces of the twentieth century. The Spinner The spinner, seated near the window sash that opens where a melodious garden sways, drowses by an old snoring wheel. Tired, drunk on azure blue, on guiding Wheedling hairs that dodge her feeble hands, She dreams. And now her tiny head is nodding. A living spring, formed by leaves and air, Rising in sunlight, sprinkles fresh water Over her garden as she slumbers there. Tout le ciel vert se meurt. Her dream unwinds, as on a gentle spindle That caresses as it rolls around Unendingly, and with the ease of angels.

The deep blue pales beyond so many blossoms. The saint, your sister, smiles in the rose-window, Perfumes your dazed forehead with her innocent breath, And you wither, growing faint in the twilight, Near the casement, where you sat spinning. The sky must yield to the slow tolling of blades. Leur nuit passe longtemps. The pure endless arms of the goddess Vainly oppose me, harassing my strength. But a thousand icy bonds gradually give way And the silver shards of her naked majesty.

The deep current carries me under bridges, Arches full of wind, of murmuring dark, They rush over me, their tedium crushing My proud skull stronger than their doors. Their night passes slowly. Under such weight, My very soul almost yields up its light Until in a gesture that clothes me in stone, I sweep onward to the scorn of such idle sky. Beau ciel, vrai ciel, regarde-moi qui change! Wide-open vault and chaste shrine to Athene, deep reservoir of calmly shining money, like an eye the supercilious water-structure lies somnolent beneath its burning veils; and my soul-silence too is architecture, a golden hoard roofed with a thousand tiles.

Under this clear sky it is I who change— after so much conceit, after such strange lassitude, but bursting with new power, I give myself up to these brilliant spaces; on the mansions of the dead my shadow passes reminding me of its own ephemeral hour. Caged though you seem behind a mesh of branches, great gulf, consumer of these meagre fences, a blinding secret on the lids, reveal what body draws me to its indolences, what face invites me to this bony soil. A faint spark ponders these inheritances. The future, here already, scarcely moves. Dazed with diversity, the enormous swarm of life is bitter-sweet and the mind clear.

Chanterez-vous quand serez vaporeuse? Where now are the colloquial turns of phrase, the individual gifts and singular souls? Where once a tear gathered the grub crawls. And you, great soul, dare you hypostasize a world untarnished by the luminous lies the sun and sea suggest to mortal eyes? Archaic progenitors, your derelict heads returned to pasture by so many spades, no longer knowing the familiar tread— the real ravager, the irrefutable worm is not for you, at rest now in the tomb; it lives on life and never leaves my side.

Il voit, il veut, il songe, il touche! Brisez, mon corps, cette forme pensive! Buvez, mon sein, la naissance du vent! Il faut tenter de vivre! Its secret mordancy is so intense the silent gnawing goes by many names. Does the twang wake me and the arrow kill? Sunlight, is it merely a tortoise-shade, the mighty hero frozen in mid-stride? She gained as much notoriety for her lifestyle as for her writing, participating in the weekly Friday salon of Nathalie Barney, her lover; eating almost nothing; and keeping mysterious assignations never elucidated to this day that greatly provoked Barney.

Although English was her native language, Vivien wrote exclusively in French. Queen, I raised to you this shining palace, From the remains of a vessel shipwrecked at night. Aspirin by simply standing behind the actor reciting the lines. Standing behind, Warhol seemed to be saying, can be as important as standing for. Between and the early s, French writers and intellectuals developed an intense fascination with African cultures and the notion of an exciting and novel primitive mentality: At that time, almost everyone involved in the arts was exploring things African.

In , he and Hugo Ball invented Negro chants. In drawing or painting, the initial subliminal line that Motherwell termed the doodle—which the poet Robert Desnos had used in his early Surrealist drawings—was the visual equivalent of the unthinking and uncensored speech that was thought to unleash the powers of the subconscious. American painters, and then poets, tapped into this spontaneity and energy, but in the reverse order of the movement in France, where the poets had led the way. Nor had places like Haiti, Martinique, Guadeloupe, and Senegal remained untouched by Surrealism, for Breton had multiple contacts with poets beyond the six sides of the Hexagon that is France.

La revanche du désir / A la merci d'un séducteur / Fiévreux tête-à-tête

Stopping in Martinique on his way to New York, Breton was moved to write the eulogistic tract Martinique charmeuse de serpents Martinique Charmer of Snakes. In his Le Parti pris des choses Taking the Side of Things he celebrates the dailiness of objects and their mundane but important presence. Even Breton, after his exile in New York and his encounter with the Native Americans of the Southwest particularly the Hopis in Arizona , developed a strongly mystical streak. By the time he returned to France, Surrealism—and the epoch that had nourished it—had changed, but its legacies remain undeniable.

An Anthology New York: Flammarion, , pp. Mary Ann Caws Detroit: Wayne State University Press, , p. Jean-Jacques Pauvert, , p. He was born in the fashionable sixteenth arrondissement, where his family ran a pension. Like many other Surrealists of the time, he believed revolution could occur only through a change in the predominant social structure. Deciding this was best done through politics, he broke with Breton in and, with his Russian wife, the novelist Elsa Triolet, joined the Communist Party.

En sommeil, nerfs tendus tout le long des jambes. In he was expelled from the group, along with Desnos. The Nerve Meter You see an actor as if through crystal. Inspiration with its stairs. Literature must not too readily pass. In sleep, the nerves extend along the legs. Sleep came from a displacement of belief, the embrace loosened, the absurd having stepped on my toes. A kind of constant displacement of the normal level of reality.

Are you acquainted with that sensitivity hanging in mid-air, that kind of vitality terrifying and split in two, that indispensable point of cohesion to which being no longer rises, that place of menace, that place that hurls you to the ground? I am at the point where I no longer touch life, but with all the appetites still within me, and the insistent titillation of being. I have nothing to do now but make myself over. In —, in the pages of his dissident Surrealist journal Documents, he actively studied ethnographic undertakings, linking the avant-garde, the academic, and the literary.

For years he was a librarian in Provence and in Paris. In he moved to Paris, which remained his center after several years of traveling throughout Europe. During the Resistance, he was in Roussillon. He wrote most of his works in French, his adopted language; he possessed a perfect ear for both English and French and was a well-known translator. Despite many arguments that would divide and change the movement over the years, Breton remained, until his death, in the vanguard of the most talented and gifted writers of his time.

Long after Surrealist thought had been eclipsed by the rising popularity of Jean-Paul Sartre and existentialism in the s, Breton remained true to the original conception of the tenets of the movement, frequently citing Rimbaud and Marx, who espoused the notion of changing humankind and the world by freeing the human spirit from the bounds of reason.

Born in northern France, Breton studied medicine and worked in psychiatric hospitals during World War I. Through his studies he discovered Freud. He was attracted initially to the Dadaists; Surrealism, however, enabled him to approach more directly human desire and the unconscious. With his wife, Jacqueline Lamba, and their daughter, Aube, he went into exile in New York during World War II, returning after the war to a greatly changed Paris and the accusation of the irrelevance of Surrealist thinking and writing in the new climate.

He nonetheless continued to assemble around him in Paris and in the Lot, at SaintCirq-la Popie, a group of enthusiastic followers. The Mystery Corset My lovely readers, by seeing in all colors Splendid postcards, with lighting effects, Venice part 2. I hold Paris like — to unveil the future for you — your open hand with a waist tightly bound.

Subversive, provocative, and in many ways ahead of its time, her work was exhibited with that of the Surrealists in Paris. Born in Nantes, she moved to Paris in and remained there until During the Paris years, she and her lover, Suzanne Malherbe known as Moore , participated in all the literary gatherings of the time. Cahun and Malherbe were arrested by the Gestapo in and sentenced to death.

Eventually released, Cahun was unable to rejoin the Surrealists in Paris because of illness and instead returned to Jersey, where many of her photographs and archives had been destroyed by the Nazis. Sadistic Judith Who Was Judith She had made atop her house a secret room where she remained closed in. And with a hair shirt over her body, she fasted every day of her life, except for the Sabbath. And your military discipline is praised in all countries. After making love to his slave he furtively wipes his lips. On the nights of love, his boots spot the purple in which he wallows, symbolically dyed with the red venom of his poisons, and from top to bottom, the dust or the mud of the paths or worse trail across it, depending on the season.

But at cockcry, he takes a bath, sends the girl away — and has the sheets changed the silk, the blood coagulated on them. But I have seen him, while his victorious army was parading before our closed doors, for having silently slit the throat of my dog, whose excitement bothered me , I could see through the keyhole: I love them because I recognize in them the distinctive, odious traits of the enemy race.

See this thread for more information. Lynne Graham was born on July 30, of Irish-Scottish parentage. She has livedin Northern Ireland all her life. She grew up in a seaside village with herbrother. She learnt to read at the age of 3, and haven't stopped since then. Lynne first met her husband when she was 1 Librarian Note: Lynne first met her husband when she was At 15, she wrote her firstbook, but it was rejected everywhere.

Lynne married after she completed adegree at Edinburgh University. She started writing again when she was athome with her first child. It took several attempts before she sold herfirst book in and the delight of seeing that first book for sale in thelocal newsagents has never been forgotten. Now, there are over 10 million ofher books in print worldwide. Lynne always wanted a large family and has five children.

Her eldest and heronly natural child is 19 and currently at university. Her other fourchildren, who are every bit as dear to her heart, are adopted. She has two9-year-olds adopted from Sri Lanka and a 5- and a 3-year-old adopted fromGuatemala. In Lynne's home, there is a rich and diverse cultural mix, whichadds a whole extra dimension of interest and discovery to family life.

Thefamily lives in a country house surrounded by a woodland garden, which iswonderfully private. The family has two pets. Thomas, a very large andaffectionate black cat, bosses the dog and hunts rabbits. The dog is Daisy,an adorable but not very bright white West Highland terrier, who loves beingchased by the cat.

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