Selected Poems 1930-1988

  Dans les tavernes chanter des chansons tchèques

  Te voici à Marseille au milieu des pastèques

  Te voici à Coblence à l’hôtel du Géant

  Te voici à Rome assis sous un néflier du Japon

  Te voici à Amsterdam avec une jeune fille que tu trouves belle et qui est laide

  Elle doit se marier avec un étudiant de Leyde

  On y loue des chambres en latin Cubicula locanda

  Je m’en souviens j’y ai passé trois jours et autant à Gouda

  Tu es à Paris chez le juge d’instruction

  Comme un criminel on te met en état d’arrestation

  Tu as fait de douloureux et de joyeux voyages

  Avant de t’apercevoir du mensonge et de l’âge

  Tu as souffert de l’amour à vingt et à trente ans

  J’ai vécu comme un fou et j’ai perdu mon temps

  Tu n’oses plus regarder tes mains et à tous moments je voudrais sangloter

  Sur toi sur celle que j’aime sur tout ce qui t’a épouvanté

  Tu regardes les yeux pleins de larmes ces pauvres émigrants

  Ils croient en Dieu ils prient les femmes allaitent des enfants

  Ils emplissent de leur odeur le hall de la gare Saint-Lazare

  Ils ont foi dans leur étoile comme les rois-mages

  Ils espèrent gagner de l’argent dans l’Argentine

  Et revenir dans leur pays après avoir fait fortune

  Une famille transporte un édredon rouge comme vous transportez votre cœur

  Cet édredon et nos rêves sont aussi irréels

  Quelques-uns de ces émigrants restent ici et se logent

  Rue des Rosiers ou rue des Écouffes dans des bouges

  Je les ai vus souvent le soir ils prennent l’air dans la rue

  Et se déplacent rarement comme les pièces aux échecs

  Il y a surtout des Juifs leurs femmes portent perruque

  Elles restent assises exsangues au fond des boutiques

  Tu es debout devant le zinc d’un bar crapuleux

  Tu prends un café à deux sous parmi les malheureux

  Tu es la nuit dans un grand restaurant

  Ces femmes ne sont pas méchantes elles ont des soucis cependant

  Toutes même la plus laide a fait souffrir son amant

  Elle est la fille d’un sergent de ville de Jersey

  Ses mains que je n’avais pas vues sont dures et gercées

  J’ai une pitié immense pour les coutures de son ventre

  J’humilie maintenant à une pauvre fille au rire horrible ma bouche

  Tu es seul le matin va venir

  Les laitiers font tinter leurs bidons dans les rues

  La nuit s’éloigne ainsi qu’une belle Métive

  C’est Ferdine la fausse ou Léa l’attentive

  Et tu bois cet alcool brûlant comme ta vie

  Ta vie que tu bois comme une eau-de-vie

  Tu marches vers Auteuil tu veux aller chez toi à pied

  Dormir parmi tes fétiches d’Océanie et de Guinée

  Ils sont des Christ d’une autre forme et d’une autre croyance

  Ce sont les Christ inférieurs des obscures espérances

  Adieu Adieu

  Soleil cou coupé

  Zone

  In the end you are weary of this ancient world

  This morning the bridges are bleating Eiffel Tower oh herd

  Weary of living in Roman antiquity and Greek

  Here even the motor-cars look antique

  Religion alone has stayed young religion

  Has stayed simple like the hangars at Port Aviation

  You alone in Europe Christianity are not ancient

  The most modern European is you Pope Pius X

  And you whom the windows watch shame restrains

  From entering a church this morning and confessing your sins

  You read the handbills the catalogues the singing posters

  So much for poetry this morning and the prose is in the papers

  Special editions full of crimes

  Celebrities and other attractions for 25 centimes

  This morning I saw a pretty street whose name is gone

  Clean and shining clarion of the sun

  Where from Monday morning to Saturday evening four times a day

  Directors workers and beautiful shorthand typists go their way

  And thrice in the morning the siren makes its moan

  And a bell bays savagely coming up to noon

  The inscriptions on walls and signs

  The notices and plates squawk parrot-wise

  I love the grace of this industrial street

  In Paris between the Avenue des Ternes and the Rue Aumont-Thiéville

  There it is the young street and you still but a small child

  Your mother always dresses you in blue and white

  You are very pious and with René Dalize your oldest crony

  Nothing delights you more than church ceremony

  It is nine at night the lowered gas burns blue you steal away

  From the dormitory and all night in the college chapel pray

  Whilst everlastingly the flaming glory of Christ

  Wheels in adorable depths of amethyst

  It is the fair lily that we all revere

  It is the torch burning in the wind its auburn hair

  It is the rosepale son of the mother of grief

  It is the tree with the world’s prayers ever in leaf

  It is of honour and eternity the double beam

  It is the six-branched star it is God

  Who Friday dies and Sunday rises from the dead

  It is Christ who better than airmen wings his flight

  Holding the record of the world for height

  Pupil Christ of the eye

  Twentieth pupil of the centuries it is no novice

  And changed into a bird this century soars like Jesus

  The devils in the deeps look up and say they see a

  Nimitation of Simon Magus in Judea

  Craft by name by nature craft they cry

  About the pretty flyer the angels fly

  Enoch Elijah Apollonius of Tyana hover

  With Icarus round the first airworthy ever

  For those whom the Eucharist transports they now and then make way

  Host-elevating priests ascending endlessly

  The aeroplane alights at last with outstretched pinions

  Then the sky is filled with swallows in their millions

  The rooks come flocking the owls the hawks

  Flamingoes from Africa and ibises and storks

  The roc bird famed in song and story soars

  With Adam’s skull the first head in its claws

  The eagle stoops screaming from heaven’s verge

  From America comes the little humming-bird

  From China the long and supple

  One-winged peehees that fly in couples

  Behold the dove spirit without alloy

  That ocellate peacock and lyre-bird convoy

  The phoenix flame-devoured flame-revived

  All with its ardent ash an instant hides

  Leaving the perilous straits the sirens three

  Divinely singing join the company

  And eagle phoenix peehees fraternize

  One and all with the machine that flies

  Now you walk in Paris alone among the crowd

  Herds of bellowing buses hemming you about

  Anguish of love parching you within

  As though you were never to be loved again

  If you lived in olden times you would get you to a cloister

  You are ashamed when you catch yourself at a paternoster

  You are your own mocker and like hellfire your laughter crackles

  Golden on your life’s hearth fall the sparks of your laughter

  It is a picture in a dark museum hung

  And you sometimes go and contemplate it long

/>   To-day you walk in Paris the women are blood-red

  It was and would I could forget it was at beauty’s ebb

  From the midst of fervent flames Our Lady beheld me at Chartres

  The blood of your Sacred Heart flooded me in Montmartre

  I am sick with hearing the words of bliss

  The love I endure is like a syphilis

  And the image that possesses you and never leaves your side

  In anguish and insomnia keeps you alive

  Now you are on the Riviera among

  The lemon-trees that flower all year long

  With your friends you go for a sail on the sea

  One is from Nice one from Menton and two from La Turbie

  The octopuses in the depths fill us with horror

  And in the seaweed fishes swim emblems of the Saviour

  You are in an inn-garden near Prague

  You feel perfectly happy a rose is on the table

  And you observe instead of writing your story in prose

  The chafer asleep in the heart of the rose

  Appalled you see your image in the agates of Saint Vitus

  That day you were fit to die with sadness

  You look like Lazarus frantic in the daylight

  The hands of the clock in the Jewish quarter go to left from right

  And you too live slowly backwards

  Climbing up to the Hradchin or listening as night falls

  To Czech songs being sung in taverns

  Here you are in Marseilles among the water-melons

  Here you are in Coblenz at the Giant’s Hostelry

  Here you are in Rome under a Japanese medlar-tree

  Here you are in Amsterdam with an ill-favoured maiden

  You find her beautiful she is engaged to a student in Leyden

  There they let their rooms in Latin cubicula locanda

  I remember I spent three days there and as many in Gouda

  You are in Paris with the examining magistrate

  They clap you in gaol like a common reprobate

  Grievous and joyous voyages you made

  Before you knew what falsehood was and age

  At twenty you suffered from love and at thirty again

  My life was folly and my days in vain

  You dare not look at your hands tears haunt my eyes

  For you for her I love and all the old miseries

  Weeping you watch the wretched emigrants

  They believe in God they pray the women suckle their infants

  They fill with their smell the station of Saint-Lazare

  Like the wise men from the East they have faith in their star

  They hope to prosper in the Argentine

  And to come home having made their fortune

  A family transports a red eiderdown as you your heart

  An eiderdown as unreal as our dreams

  Some go no further doss in the stews

  Of the Rue des Rosiers or the Rue des Écouffes

  Often in the streets I have seen them in the gloaming

  Taking the air and like chessmen seldom moving

  They are mostly Jews the wives wear wigs and in

  The depths of shadowy dens bloodless sit on and on

  You stand at the bar of a crapulous café

  Drinking coffee at two sous a time in the midst of the unhappy

  It is night you are in a restaurant it is superior

  These women are decent enough they have their troubles however

  All even the ugliest one have made their lovers suffer

  She is a Jersey police-constable’s daughter

  Her hands I had not seen are chapped and hard

  The seams of her belly go to my heart

  To a poor harlot horribly laughing I humble my mouth

  You are alone morning is at hand

  In the streets the milkmen rattle their cans

  Like a dark beauty night withdraws

  Watchful Leah or Ferdine the false

  And you drink this alcohol burning like your life

  Your life that you drink like spirit of wine

  You walk towards Auteuil you want to walk home and sleep

  Among your fetishes from Guinea and the South Seas

  Christs of another creed another guise

  The lowly Christs of dim expectancies

  Adieu Adieu

  Sun corseless head

  SÉBASTIEN CHAMFORT

  Huit Maximes

  Le sot qui a un moment d’esprit étonne et scandalise comme des chevaux de fiacre qui galopent.

  Long after Chamfort

  Wit in fools has something shocking

  Like cabhorses galloping.

  Le théâtre tragique a le grand inconvénient moral de mettre trop d’importance à la vie et à la mort.

  The trouble with tragedy is the fuss it makes

  About life and death and other tuppenny aches.

  Quand on soutient que les gens les moins sensibles sont, à tout prendre, les plus heureux, je me rappelle le proverbe indien: ‘Il vaut mieux être assis que debout, couché qu’assis, mort que tout cela.’

  Better on your arse than on your feet,

  Flat on your back than either, dead than the lot.

  Quand on a été bien tourmenté, bien fatigué par sa propre sensibilité, on s’aperçoit qu’il faut vivre au jour le jour, oublier beaucoup, enfin éponger la vie à mesure qu’elle s’écoule.

  Live and clean forget from day to day,

  Mop life up as fast as it dribbles away.

  La pensée console de tout et remédie à tout. Si quelquefois elle vous fait du mal, demandez-lui le remède du mal qu’elle vous a fait, elle vous le donnera.

  Ask of all-healing, all-consoling thought

  Salve and solace for the woe it wrought.

  L’espérance n’est qu’un charlatan qui nous trompe sans cesse; et, pour moi, le bonheur n’a commencé que lorsque je l’ai eu perdu. Je mettrais volontiers sur la porte du paradis le vers que le Dante a mis sur celle de l’enfer: Lasciate ogni speranza etc.

  Hope is a knave befools us evermore,

  Which till I lost no happiness was mine.

  I strike from hell’s to grave on heaven’s door:

  All hope abandon ye who enter in.

  Vivre est une maladie dont le sommeil nous soulage toutes les seize heures. C’est un palliatif; la mort est le remède.

  sleep till death

  healeth

  come ease

  this life disease

  Que le cœur de l’homme est creux et plein d’ordure.

  how hollow heart and full

  of filth thou art

  Tailpiece

  who may tell the tale

  of the old man?

  weigh absence in a scale?

  mete want with a span?

  the sum assess

  of the world’s woes?

  nothingness

  in words enclose?

  APPENDIX

  Translations of Beckett’s untranslated French poems

  to be there without jaws without teeth

  to be there without jaws without teeth / where the pleasure of losing flees / along with that scarcely inferior / of winning / and Roscelin and waiting / adverb oh little gift / void void if not for tatters of songs / mon père m’a donné un mari / or bunching your fingers / waiting for her to moisten / so much that she’ll crave until the elegiac / hobnailed clogs still far from Les Halles / or the rabble’s water groaning in the pipes / or no more sound / waiting for her to moisten since that’s how it is / get the rest over with / and come / to the idiot mouth to the creeping hand / to the basement door to the eye that listens / for the far-off motion of silver scissors

  Ascension

  through the thin partition / this day when a child / prodigal in its own way / returned to its family / I hear the voice / it is excited it is commenting / on the football world cup // always too young // at the same time through the open window / in brief t
hrough the air / mutely / the swell of the faithful // her blood spurted in abundance / on the sheets on the sweetpea on her bloke / with his revolting fingers he closed the lids / on her large green astonished eyes // she wanders nimble / on my tomb of air

  The Fly

  between the scene and me / the window / empty besides // belly to the ground / girthed in its black guts / panicked antennae joined wings / hooked legs mouth sucking the void / slicing the azure crashing against the invisible / under my impotent thumb it makes / the sea and the peaceful sky capsize

  so it’s no use

  so it’s no use / through good times and bad / imprisoned at home imprisoned abroad / as if it were yesterday remember the mammoth / the dinothere the first kisses / the glacial periods bringing nothing new / the great heat of the thirteenth of their era / Kant hunched coldly over smoking Lisbon / to dream in generations of oak and forget one’s father / his eyes whether he wore a moustache / if he was kind what he died of / it won’t stop eating you for want of appetite / through bad times and worse / imprisoned at home imprisoned abroad