Translator’s Note
Now more than three decades after Béatrice Douvre’s death, her poetry continues to be passed from hand to hand. She is not a household name, but her name remains well-known to poets and avid readers of French poetry. She is a poet’s poet. By this I mean, alongside the strictly lexical, syntactic, and semantic aspects distinguishing her poetics, that her short life of 27 years seems to have been fully given over to her writing. She exemplifies a no-holds-barred dedication to the art and, as Philippe Jaccottet suggests in his preface to her Oeuvre poétique, the volume of her collected poems from which this sequence has been drawn, such a commitment has its dangers. Her first poems are dated 1986, when she was 19. From that year on, and despite much suffering from the anorexia which had afflicted her by the age of 13 and which she never vanquished, she wrote relentlessly.
I never met Douvre, nor was I reading her poetry in the late 1980s and early 1990s, but I could have chanced upon her. It was a time when I was discovering, meeting, and writing about many key poets from the preceding generation, including Yves Bonnefoy and Philippe Jaccottet, who had both encouraged her. It would, of course, have been next to impossible to peruse her work back then, when only a few of her poems were available in magazines. Indeed, one needed to know her personally. It was only at some point after 2000, when her collected poems — nearly all of which had been found unpublished among her papers after her death — were issued as Oeuvre poétique by the Éditions Voix d’encre, that I came across her name, tipped off by Jaccottet’s preface. I have long sought out the poets whom the poets I admire also read.
Yet I cannot help but imagine our paths crossing back then because of our several common literary acquaintances. I mention this hypothetical encounter because, from my very first attempts at translating her poems, beginning in 2022, I sensed how helpful Douvre’s explanations would have been. She is a poet par excellence with whom a translator would wish to engage in dialogue. The work sessions would have been extensive. I would necessarily have raised questions about the intentional grammatical ambiguity (or not), the enjambments (or not), the diction (with its occasional rare or archaic words, or, for example, technical navigation terms), the almost obsessive recurrent symbols (“lamp,” “footstep,” “salt,” and “angel,” to mention only those four examples), the sometimes puzzling use of gender (whereby the beloved or desired “other” usually is a woman, but not always), and the probable autobiographical references cropping up in poems of merely eight or ten lines.
And the sound of her poems in French? — a lyric élan, and sometimes a bit antiquated in a given line because of a little-used term or because of semantic ellipses, syntactic inversions, and other odd uses of syntax, not to mention her frequent invocations with an emphatic “O.” Yet a Rimbaud-like tonality can also emerge along with, arguably, elements of surrealist poetics through her use of heterogenous juxtapositions. A haunting use of assonance, and one sometimes thinks of Pierre Jean Jouve in this respect; his oeuvre was also essential for her. Her diction can thus sometimes be unsettling, yet it is ever compelling and always uniquely hers, emanating from a kind of personal mysticism grappling with themes of love, growing up, and being-in-the-world. In his preface, Jaccottet points out that “what still shines for us [in her poetry] depends on very little, to voice inflexions more than on genuine verbal elaboration.” This seems quite true to me, all the more so when I am faced with difficult translator’s decisions to make when two or three different interpretations of her grammar or syntax remain equally plausible. In more than one poem, a noun can also surprisingly be read as a verb, or a noun as an adjective; a definite article might refer back to a person or to a non-human entity or abstract noun; in still other cases, grammatical gender enables the reader (and translator) to attach an adjective or an article to a word that has occurred two or three or four lines beforehand, whereas in a more prosaic formulation the qualifier and the word qualified would have been much closer to each other, as they nearly always have to be in our language which has so few grammatical markers.
Thinking once again of Jaccottet’s remark about voice inflections, I am convinced that many of these ambiguities would be cleared up if we could listen to Douvre reading her verse aloud. She would surely emphasize certain words in ways that would establish their function more firmly. However, this is not to suggest that her writing has anything to do with “performance poetry.” In any event, with only written versions at our disposal, the translator must ultimately choose. (In this respect, I can only recall the similarly challenging task of rendering the poems of the Italian modernist Lorenzo Calogero.) In a word, while translating, I have been constantly confronted with the dilemma of smoothing out idiosyncrasies or, instead, keeping some of them “active” so that the characteristic qualities of her voice will be audible in English. Each poem has its particularities and has demanded reflection on this stylistic level, but as a rule of thumb I have chosen to attempt to stay as close as possible to the original French poems. If Douvre had been an English speaker, it is my hope that perhaps she would have written in ways not too dissimilar from what I have produced here. The image shown above is of Béatrice Douvre’s own ”Self-Portrait,” based on a photo taken of her in 1990 by Mathilde Bonnefoy.
—John Taylor
/ / / / /
Beyond Time
(1992)
[Untitled]
Gently invisible
Ever the voices return
On your beloved face a love lingers
The wave torments and the boats are easy
Silence is the grass we break
Over the sea the night sky is ripe
And ever the words faded away without crossing over
Ever the eyes opened on pure eyes.
* * *
[Untitled]
Yielding
To salt migrations
When the wind opens
To birds ending up at cedar doors
To gardens lying in the hills
Your hands would bring fresh water onto the roses
Set down a child’s fear in the grass
They seemed to come
From young cloud shadows
Without marking the earth of lamps.
The hands were asking to be taken
Into the magic of another hand, in time,
The grass below, the obol burning them
I had to touch them to make them live
The hands were asking, the world, to be taken,
Asking the laid-down voice, the sustaining breath
I remember a finger shadow
Two suns of water sometimes as when we weep
One hand the farewell, the other deeper.
* * *
The Footsteps of Lives
Outside
Outside blindness
Has a real face
Has paths shining with footsteps
When time stands in the grass
Neither air nor movement
This frostiness in the breath
Long I hear
Footsteps of lives long fading on the slopes
And the slowly reddening regions
Slowly arising
Neither air nor movement
Only the advance of lacy sand
The green horizon of the avenue
And shadow
And dear voices are distant songs
In the brown mud
Where I hear black hymns one by one
The unspent dreams descending
The rugged path of the ground beneath the softest robes.
* * *
Outside, Blindness
Watch me run, head off into appearances
Towards the blue laughter of the vast
Air
My thirst divided,
My appetite shut by misfortune
Even as those animals with silent foreheads
Have a thousand deaths a thousand weightless shames
A wind from the whole ground
Blows through my limbs, their perfection
Of cold sand
Again uplifts a trail of footsteps
And other footsteps fade away on the sea
Other hands, softly endless
I have the travestied age of forests, but I dance.
* * *
Life Descends
Freshness in the expanse of black sources
Little by little we penetrate unfaithfulness
Life descends
We can walk
Hands greet the appearance of evening
The path opens to dreamt-of vegetation
The old ages of birds soar up
While dozing
Everything lingers on the real slopes
And, look, nothing changes in constellated time
Over there, over there are the leafy gardens
The stones under the ripe water, over there are the birds
And others die of hunger near fertile hands
Life descends, we can walk
The footstep illuminates
The immense fear of being oneself in time
Our two almond hands are steel gates
And, look, how all the love of forests was needed
To adopt the eyes of the invisible.
* * *
Transparent Evening
I believed real flowers
Laying down their eyes in the hands of grass
O my patience
I no longer know how to cross through the iron of distance
Far from glass houses
I no longer hear the flowers
That sleep alongside their dream
With the same eyes that endlessly cease
I no longer even know if this night can be acquired
But I have the reflection
In a thousand tears
But I walk with the silent age of a love.
* * *
[Untitled]
The ancient blood
That we baptized with woolly hands
And we brought back the water from the storm houses
And we opened the common bread of the world.
* * *
Jetty
The evening was feted in the sea breeze
And the steel ships near our tables
The wine alive in the shadow of red arms
I see in the scattered gold of the lamps
Acts of goodness spreading over the cloth of currents
Of ramparts
Open to the stroller’s sea
We go away in the evening, full of sonorous visions
The birds open up far from themselves
Like elegant young cathedrals for eyes.
* * *
Vision
I was heading out, getting lost, late
Invented,
An unmoving thirst, the open hand of countrysides
A very distant love low on the horizon
Like the gentlest sunray invisible to one who is wounded
The evening’s eyes dissolved in a brief brightness
The celestial bodies were breathing in the steely vegetation
Wounds also weigh as much as vegetation
An invisible lamp
Predicts the night of glass
For drying these boats on eye upkeep.
* * *
This Darkening so that You Can Live
Now dead
In the terror of the grass you are breathing
Milky ships are sailing forward
On your red-girded limbs
The water is sleeping
Remember
That hand on well rims
You would trample the slight fear of gardens
With this birdy wind as a legacy
Remember the pensive arms, revealed
Towards the kneeling prairies of the sea
Footstep religions are invisible
And no longer are you in the gardens
I remember
On a grass bed open or black
I keep you going
Among the city’s celestial bodies.
* * *
Procession, I
And the evening bursting with smells, the tables set
Our foreheads open to visions
When we descend
With a bloody noise the holy plains
Vast wet fragrances surround us
Black enamels standing in the immobility
And the footstep resounds, moved, as if on church flagstones
Now
Only this water blinds
We perpetuate tiny massacres in the grasses
Of sweat
And this self-drunk sorrow
In hands that have no proof.
* * *
Procession, II
For a fatherland a herbage
On which our fears search for air
The constricted air
In the sweat of fragrances
So slowly we climb
An aroma-drunk path, seeing
The blessed domination of height
The evening around the purest hands
Over there on the slopes, higher than the air
A footstep is sure, far from the thresholds, the animals’ silky fur
Rough and warm and there are
Battered adorations in the herbage
But the stain of lamps has enlarged our fault
The infant swimmer of the stride
Has taken a begging footstep
In the proof of the almond-ripe one.
Look
But the footstep goes blind in the iron
Those coming from thick eyes
With a child’s courage
Watch them unlovingly trampling the place
In clear weather they move
They are inside the desecrated pain of forests
Nearing their sojourn, shadows dress them
They have the remote clothing of mountains
They cross your voice with a thousand dark canticles.
* * *
Maturity of Weeping
The troubling forests of the archway, and the murmurs. The massive momentum of prey beneath the birds, this beginning of birds that looks like you when your gaze brightens with robes, when the embankments become magi and the hand is in the offering.
I know the deserted song, and from now on I belong to you by the paths, the black verdant infinity. The water that separates is a bright mourning, I have held it, with its size and wounds. And its name was swirling over the prairies of genesis.
A seated god, imperishably, his forehead wise with a thousand brown storms, his gaze crowned with rings of snow.
But the night that takes back the eyes of big faces.
* * *
[Untitled]
Below the ships united with clouds
She smelled the sand and shells
The marvelous site of tides
An evening at the sea
Near her gray hangouts, when she was
The nudity of herself
With unhappy shadows, and when she smelled
Black like the blood of vaults
The accumulated song
The lined-up gems of the sea over there
Her arms like the currents
Her hands placed on ephemeral perfections.
* * *
[Untitled]
For a long while
Patiently in the evening
In the great shadowy house
Motionless, guardian,
Already nearby
Space kept you on your bright side
And I greeted you
In the beauty of the ground
A deep wind overwhelms you
A wind carries me
And I keep you bright on your deep side
Because the moon is in the leaves
Without gravity
Because the water flows over your name
And looks like
Gleams.
* * *
[Untitled]
The ardor of an incarnation wind
Blowing through the trees
Shakes the young vaults
Space can be measured
We are side by side
Faithful and joined
Our immense hands
On human roads
During the windy day
Our haloed hands
On the bright breasts of girlhood
Like big fragrant leaves
Warm and offered
Against a silence of one who travels
And sings.
* * *
[Untitled]
A vigor of birds exulting over the sea
Was inventing you
And you opened the prayer book
And sought
The world with your immense hands
O earth, while moving forth
To the dark destiny, to the devotions,
To the watery reflections of willows
Heading for the daylight
Through the limpid weave, and the black weeping
Another memory, another
Rustling mouth in the woody nights
And the changed fatherlands of your face
The face suddenly larger, brightening
When an angel sought
The eternity of sand beyond the iron-rail gates.
* * *
Dome
A path leads to the horizon marvelously tinted with hills. The land shines in the rut. I see blue and black lamps; they are stones shifted by a fire, in the evening, when footsteps are still digging into the avenue. And I know which sound swells the sky, I hear the patient song of the awakened one; and what is invisible between two stones, downwind, is a face. What comes, comes shattered, and the footstep attempts a dreamy step, others scorched like ours, opening the abyss at night, in the passion of the eternal.
* * *
A Wind One Morning
The gardens were bare, the grass was unreal
You were walking wide-awake, colliding with green organ pipes
I was touching the water of your pain
And you were the patience,
The wine inside the dwellings,
A wind was reigning
I was the salt and the lively hands
A near-black wind was reigning O music
A ground was threatening your face, Amante,
And I was musing, my own face enamored
Unfaithful
O lingerer in the dark sparkling shadow
To those birds enclosed in your early-morning eyes.
/ / / / /
Les temps franchi (1992)
[Sans titre]
Toujours les voix reviennent
Doucement invisibles
Sur ton visage aimé tarde un amour
La vague est tourmentante et les barques faciles
Le silence est l’herbe que l’on brise
Sur la mer la nuit du ciel est mûre
Et toujours les mots se perdaient sans franchir
Toujours les yeux s’ouvraient sur des yeux purs.
[Sans titre]
Céder
Aux migrations de sel
Quand le vent s’ouvre
Aux oiseaux finissant à des portes de cèdre
Aux jardins couchés des collines
Tes mains portaient l’eau douce sur les roses
Posaient dans l’herbe une peur d’enfant
Elles semblaient venir
De la jeune ombre des nuages
Sans marquer la terre des lampes.
Les mains demandaient d’être prises
Dans la magie d’une autre, dans le temps
L’herbe d’en bas, l’obole qui les brûle
Je devais les toucher pour qu’elles vivent
Les mains demandaient, au monde, d’être prises
À la voix déposée, au souffle qui maintient
Je me souviens d’une ombre digitale
À deux soleils d’eau quelquefois comme on pleure
L’une l’adieu, et l’autre plus profonde.
Le pas des vies
Dehors
Dehors aveuglément
A un visage réel
A des chemins rayonnant de pas
Au temps debout dans l’herbe
Ni air ni mouvement
Il y a ce givre dans l’haleine
J’entends longtemps
Le pas des vies longtemps se perdre sur les pentes
Et les régions lentement rouges
Lentement se lever
Ni air ni mouvement
Seulement l’avancée des lacets de sable
L’horizon vert de l’avenue
Et l’ombre
Et les voix chères sont des chants éloignés
Dans la boue brune
Où un à un j’entends les hymnes noirs
Les rêves indépensés descendre
L’âpre chemin du sol sous des robes très douces.
Dehors, aveuglément
Regarde-moi courir, m’éloigner dans l’apparence
Vers les rires bleus de l’air
Immense
La soif divisée
J’ai l’appétit fermé par le malheur
Comme ces bêtes au front silencieux
Ont mille morts mille hontes légères
Un vent du sol entier
Parcourt mes membres, leur perfection
De sable froid
Soulève encore une piste de pas
Et d’autres pas se perdent sur la mer
D’autres mains, doucement infinies
J’ai l’âge travesti des forêts, mais je danse.
La vie descend
Fraîcheur dans l’étendue où sont les sources noires
Peu à peu on pénètre une infidélité
La vie descend
On peut marcher
Des mains saluent l’apparence du soir
Le chemin s’ouvre aux verdures rêvées
Des vieillesses d’oiseaux s’élancent
En sommeillant
Tout tarde, aux pentes réelles
Et vois tout se maintient dans le temps constellé
Là-bas, là-bas sont les jardins de feuilles
Les pierres sous l’eau mûre, là-bas sont les oiseaux
Et d’autres meurent de faim auprès des mains fertiles
La vie descend, on peut marcher
Le pas éclaire
L’immense peur d’être soi dans le temps
Des portails d’acier sont nos deux mains d’amande
Et vois comme il fallait tout l’amour des forêts
Pour adopter les yeux de l’invisible.
Soir transparent
J’ai cru les fleurs réelles
Posant les yeux dans les mains d’herbe
Ô ma patience
Je ne sais plus franchir le fer de la distance
Loin des maisons de verre
Je n’entends plus les fleurs
Qui dorment à côté de leur songe
Avec les mêmes yeux qui cessent infiniment
Je ne sais même plus si cette nuit s’acquiert
Mais j‘ai reflet
Dans un millier de larmes
Mais je marche avec l’âge silencieux d’un amour.
[Sans titre]
Le sang ancien
Qu’on baptisait avec des mains de laine
Et l’on rentrait l’eau des maisons d’orage
Et l’on ouvrait le pain commun du monde.
Jetée
Le soir fêté dans l’air marin
Et les vaisseaux d’acier près de nos tables
Le vin vivant dans l’ombre des bras rouges
Je vois dans la dispersion d’or des lampes
Des bontés répandues sur l’étoffe des courants
Des remparts
Ouverts à la mer du marcheur
On s’éloigne le soir pleins de visions sonores
Les oiseaux s’ouvrent loin d’eux-mêmes
Comme l’élégance de jeunes cathédrales pour les yeux.
Vision
J’allais je me perdais, tardif
Inventé
Une soif immobile, la paume des campagnes
Un très lointain amour au bas de l’horizon
Comme un rayon très doux invisible au blessé
Les yeux du soir dissous dans l’éclaircie
Les astres respiraient dans l’acier des verdures
Les plaies aussi ont le poids des verdures
Une invisible lampe
Prédit la nuit de verre
Pour assécher ces barques sur le maintien des yeux.
Cet enténèbrement pour que tu vives
Morte à présent
Dans la terreur de l’herbe tu respires
Des vaisseaux de lait s’avancent
Sur tes membres ceints de rouge
L’eau dort
Souviens-toi
De la main des margelles
Tu foulais la peur légère des jardins
Avec ce vent d’oiseaux pour héritage
Souviens-toi des bras pensifs et révélés
Vers les prairies à genoux de la mer
Les religions du pas sont invisibles
Et tu n’es plus dans les jardins
Je me souviens
Sur un lit d’herbe ouvert ou noir
Je te maintiens
Parmi les astres de la ville.
Procession, I
Et le soir éclatant d’odeurs, les tables mises
Le front ouvert à la vision
Quand on descend
Avec un bruit de sang les plaines saintes
De grands parfums trempés nous environnent
Émaux debout et noirs dans l’immobilité
Et le pas sonne, ému comme sur les dalles d’églises
Maintenant
Il n’y a que cette eau qui aveugle
On perpétue de minuscules massacres dans les herbes
Des sueurs
Et cette douleur ivre de soi
Dans des mains qui n’ont pas de preuve.
Procession, II
Pour patrie un herbage
Où nos peurs cherchent l’air
Le serrement de l’air
Dans la sueur des parfums
Alors doucement on monte
Un chemin ivre d’arôme, on voit
La domination bénie de la hauteur
Le soir autour des mains très pures
Là-bas sur les versants, plus haut que l’air
Le pas est sûr au loin des seuils, la soie des bêtes
Accidentée et chaude et il y a
Des adorations martelées dans l’herbage
Mais la tache des lampes a grandi notre faute
L’enfant nageur de l’enjambée
A fait un pas mendiant
Dans la preuve du pas mûre comme l’amande.
Regarde
Mais le pas s’aveugle dans le fer
Ceux-là qui viennent de l’épaisseur des yeux
Avec un courage d’enfant
Regarde-les fouler le lieu sans affection
Dans le temps clair ils bougent
Ils sont dans la douleur profanée des forêts
Approchant leur séjour des ténèbres les vêtent
Ils ont le vêtement éloigné des montagnes
Ils traversent ta voix de mille cantiques sombres.
Maturité du pleur
Les troublantes forêts de l’arcade, et les murmures. L’élan massif des proies sous les oiseaux, ce commencement d’oiseaux qui te ressemble, quand ton regard s’éclaire de robes, que les talus deviennent des mages, et que la main est dans l’offrande.
Moi je connais le chant désert, et désormais je t’appartiens par les chemins, l’infini noir, le verdoyant. L’eau qui sépare est un deuil clair, je l’ai tenue, avec sa taille et ses blessures. Et son nom tournoyait sur les prés de genèse.
Un dieu assis, impérissablement, le front savant de mille orages bruns, le regard couronné d’anneaux de neige.
Mais la nuit qui reprend les yeux des grands visages.
[Sans titre]
Sous les navires unis aux nuages
Elle sentait le sable, et les coquilles
L’endroit merveilleux des marées
Le soir marin
Près de ses traînes grises, quand elle était
La nudité d’elle-même
Avec des ombres malheureuses, et elle était
La noire odeur du sang des voûtes
Le chant accumulé
La ligne des pierreries de la mer là-bas
Ses bras comme les courants
Les mains posées sur les perfections éphémères.
[Sans titre]
Longuement
Patiemment le soir
Dans la grande maison des ombres
Immobile, garante
Déjà proche
L’espace te gardait en ta face éclaircie
Et je t’ai saluée
Dans la beauté du sol
Un vent profond t’accable
Un vent me porte
Et je te garde claire en ta face profonde
Parce que la lune est dans les feuilles
Sans gravité
Parce que l’eau court sur ton nom
Et ressemble
Aux lueurs.
[Sans titre]
D’un vent d’incarnation l’ardeur
À travers les arbres
Secoue les jeunes voûtes
L’espace se mesure
Nous sommes côte à côte
Fidèles et rencontrés
Nos mains immenses
Sur les routes humaines
Dans la journée de vent
Nos mains nimbées
Sur le sein clair de l’âge des filles
Comme de grandes feuilles d’arôme
Offertes et chaudes
Contre un silence d’un qui voyage
Et chante.
[Sans titre]
Une vigueur d’oiseaux exultant sur la mer
T’inventait
Et tu ouvrais le livre des prières
Et tu cherchais
Avec d’immenses mains le monde
Ô terre, en avançant
Jusqu’au destin obscur, aux dévotions
Jusqu’au reflet de l’eau des saules
Qui vont au jour
Par la trame limpide, et les pleurs noirs
Autre mémoire, autre
Bouche bruissante, dans les nuits boisées
Et les patries changées de ton visage
Le visage soudain plus grand et éclairé
Lorsqu’un ange chercha
L’éternité de sable au fond des grilles.
Dôme
Un chemin mène à l’horizon merveilleusement teint de collines. Le pays rayonne dans l’ornière. Je vois des lampes bleues et noires, ce sont des pierres qu’un feu bouge, le soir, quand le pas creuse encore l’avenue. Et je sais la rumeur qui augmente le ciel, j’entends le chant patient de l’éveillé ; et l’invisible entre deux pierres, le long du vent, est un visage. Ce qui vient, vient brisé, et le pas tente un pas de rêve, d’autres pas brûlés comme les nôtres, ouvrant l’abîme nuitamment, dans la passion de l’éternel.
Matin d’un vent
Les jardins étaient nus, l’herbe était irréelle
Tu allais éveillée, heurtant les orgues verts
Je touchais l’eau de ta douleur
Et tu fus la patience,
Le vin dans les demeures,
Un vent régnait
J’étais le sel et les mains vives
Un vent régnait presque noir Ô musique
Un sol menaçait ton visage d’amante
Et je songeais, ma face éprise
Infidèle
Ô demeurée dans l’ombre sombre étincelante
À ces oiseaux fermés dans tes yeux matinaux.
French poems © 2000 Estate of Béatrice Douvre