[The following piece on the French poet René Char is based on the translator's Notes for his presentation at the Poetry Café Wednesday 26th May -- see Events and Meetings.   S.H.]

René Char’s name can generate mixed reactions. He has a high reputation amongst the international avant-garde, and counted amongst his friends Albert Camus, Pablo Picasso and Martin Heidegger. Yet, he also has a reputation of being difficult. In some ways, Char is to blame for this. His poems often throw up strange phrases, and surreal images aimed at provoking imaginative leaps. He once said it was not possible for us to live without the unknown. He invites us to leap into the unknown to change our way of looking at things. Yet, he also believed in the healing power of beauty, and even in prose poems, displays a lyrical side that can have great simplicity as in this late poem of his, with a haiku-like delicacy.

TO A TREE-BROTHER WHOSE DAYS ARE NUMBERED

Small harp of the larches,
On a spur of moss and fertile rocks
— Edge of the forest where the clouds break —
Counterpoint of the void in which I believe.

René Char was in 1907 in the village l’Isle-sur-la-Sorgue, in Province. The young René was an angry passionate young man. He lost his father early and sought solace from nature in the woods around his home. Tall and powerful — he later played rugby — he would punch tree trunks to let off steam…  A local blacksmith took him on board. In the 1920s, Char attended a Lycée in Marseille to study business, but spent more time reading literature.

He read Paul Éluard’s poems and on meeting, they became friends. It was Éluard who introduced Char to the Surrealists. Though later to break amicably with them, Char is still often referred to as a Surrealist poet. It’s around this time he married his first wife, Georgette who was Jewish.

This was in the late nineteen twenties / early thirties when Fascism was on the rise. The Surrealists campaigned against them. Char briefly joined the Communist Party, but left them, being too much of an individualist. He also broke with the surrealists at about this time. His poems of the time reflect this, there is a sense passionate engagement with politics and life. Here is a typical poem from his from his first major collection Le Marteau sans Maitre / The Hammer without a Master:

WATERSHED

Let’s yield to blessings of happy oblivion
Unperturbed
Let’s flee with the dust from those things we clung to
Let’s abandon those watery facades we call our fate
With the dignity of leaves
At the moment they shed all precedent
For whatever window appears through our tears
What are you waiting for
You partisan hearts?

The words “partisan hearts” has a prophetic ring to it. When the Second World War broke out, Char was called up. When the Germans invaded, he escaped back to Province, only to find himself outlawed as a Communist on the grounds of being married to a Jew.

He joined the Resistance. Being familiar with the Provencal countryside, made him well equipped for waging guerrilla warfare. He became the regional commander there, known as Capitaine Alexandre. He had many adventures, often sheltered by peasant farmers, escaping death many times. His memories of this are recorded in a collection of prose pieces from his notebook at this time, published after the war under the title Leaves of Hypnos, edited by Albert Camus with whom he remained friends until the latter‘s death in 1960. Hypnos is the name of the Ancient Greek of sleep, which was also Char’s codename in this time.

When war ended, Char refused all decorations and refused to co-operate in witch-hunts for collaborators, saying: “We must triumph over our rage and disgust in order to make both our actions and our morality nobler.” He was haunted by memories from this time for many years — deaths of friends  and by the fact that he had had to kill others. There’s a change in his poetry brought about by this time.

His new collection Fureur et Mystère / Furor and Mystery was published in 1948. The poems still have anger and passion. They are also denser, more hermetic, drawing on many sources. The war taught Char the importance of codes and imagery, as both a way of hiding things and as a short hand to a larger reality.. There are more descriptions of things, more imagery, and in this collection has an underling a sense of terror underneath the beauty. This next poem entitled The Swift demonstrates this.

THE SWIFT

Swift spreading wings too wide as he wheels in the air, circling round the house, crying out for joy. Just like the heart.

He dries up thunder. He sows seeds in calm skies. Touching ground tears him apart.

The swallow is his response. The familiar that he detests. What is the use of lacing round towers?

His silence’s reach into the most somber depths. No one can inhabit a smaller space.

Through the lengths of summer’s brightness, he will weave amidst shadows, through midnight’s shutters.

There are no eyes to hold him. His whole being is his voice. A rifle is going to shoot him down. Just like the heart.

The next poem is an invocation of the River Sorgue, which flows through l’Isle-sur-le-Sorgue, Char’s home-town out towards Avignon. It is an incantation to the river and has been set to music by Pierre Boulez. It was later used by Char in the 1950’s for a radio play he wrote about environmental protest which he became increasingly involved in as he grew older.

It’s in rhyming couplets, which is unusual for him, as he rarely uses rhyme. It also has many associative layers for the river. Many of these are self-explanatory. Two require clarification.

You will hear about “the sun leaving its plough to fall in with the liar.” I only found year explanation for this from notes in a French selection of his work. It is a reference to a Provinceal folk-tale. The sun was an honest worker who put his plough in the sky each night. A liar came by and they became friends. The sun stopped working.

The second is in the dedication: “Chanson pour Yvonne /. Song for Yvonne”. Yvonne was Char’s close friend, confidant and muse, Yvonne Zervos. Yvonne was the wife of a patron of the arts, who he knew. Char was also a painter, and Yvonne and her husband helped organize exhibitions of Char’s paintings. The poem suggests that he saw something elemental in her nature, and it flowed through her.

The very last line literally translated is “Keep us violent and friendly with the bees on the horizon”. This has caused some comment by academics, and not least problems for the translator! What are the bees? This I believe is simply what ever lies in the future. But bees can be a mixed blessing: they make honey and they sting! The word “violent” is also a problem. It’s a word that Char found evocative of the elemental violence in nature, which he felt was mirrored in human passion. It’s remarkably similar to Ted Hughes’ elementals in English poetry:

SONG OF THE SORGUE

River rushing by so fast, at full pelt, on your own,
Give my country’s children the full face of your passion.

River where the lightning ends, where my home begins,
Who rolls into oblivion the rubble of my reasonings.

River, in you the earth is shaken,  the sun made uneasy.
Let the poor facing night’s darkness feed from your harvest.

River, whom we so often abuse and then abandon.

River, teacher to novices of life’s calloused condition,
There is no wind that ever fails to bow down to your wave-crests.

River of the empty soul, of rags and suspicion,
Of ancient griefs let loose, of elms and compassion.

River of the foolhardy, of the feverish, of the knacker,
Of the sun leaving its plough to fall in with the liar.

River of our betters, river of the clear morning haze,
Of the lamp that dispels fears left in its shade.

River who respects the dream, river who rusts iron,
Where shadows the stars keep from the sea are hidden.

River of transmitted powers, of ferryman’s cries,
Of strong winds that nip the grapes announce new wines.

River whose heart is never broken in this mad world of prisons,
Keep our spirits violent and friends with bees on our horizons.

Char also wrote many love poems. After the war his marriage to Georgette broke down and they divorced. He wasn’t to marry again until just before his death in 1988. In the meantime he had many women friends.

This poem is a prose-poem, and in it Char also speaks of poetry as if it were a mistress that he is making love to. The Penitentiary in the title is a play on the words “penitentiary” for prison as well as implying penitence.

THE LIGHT OF THE PENITENTIARY

I wanted only the briefest night with you, so your silent stepmother would grow old in the background unable to marshal her powers.

My dream was to be beside you, a harmonious fugitive that few ever noticed, as we chanced along this sad but angelic route. Nothing would dare slow us down.

The daylight suddenly closes in. Losing all the dead I loved so much, I am casting off that dog rose, the last living thing left, a distracted summer.

I’m emptied out, yet full. Finnish me, you melancholy beauty, your eyelids fluttering in drunken rapture. Every wound from you awakens the phoenixes whose eyes appear in my window. Something sings and sighs its satisfaction at being complete out there inside the wall’s gold.

This wind that is driving my yoke along.

Gradually in the poet-war years Char’s psychological injuries healed. He looked forward to better times. His next collection Les Matinaux / The Dawn Breakers reflects this. The next poem, is really a group of aphorisms, describing his vision of an ideal country. The title is “MAKE IT SO!” which he prefigures with the note that This land is a wish of the spirit, a counter-sepulchre. This reflects something Char says in another poem, that humanity flees from suffocation.

MAKE IT SO!

This land is a wish of the spirit, a counter-sepulchre.

In my land, the tender evidence of spring and meagrely clothed birds are preferred to far off goal.
Truth awaits the dawn by the candle.
The windowpane is ignored. To the watcher what does it matter.
In my land we don’t question someone who has been touched deeply.

There is no malign shadow over capsized boats.
A half-hearted greeting is unheard of in my land.
We only borrow what we can return with interest.
There are leaves, many leaves on the trees in my land.
The branches free not to bear fruit.
Nobody trusts the good faith of a conqueror.
In my land, we say thank you.

During the years from the 1950’s onwards until his death in 1988, Char lived between Paris and Provençe. They were not as exciting as the war years in terms of external life. He dedicated it to his vocations of writing and painting

All his life Char loved art. The next two poems are taken from a sequence he wrote about the cave-paintings at Lascaux which he visited after the Second World War. The first is titled after the stags of the frieze there. In it Char looks across the whole of human history in wonder at the beauty of the paintings at Lascaux. Maybe also we are being shown Char’s belief in the power of beauty to save us, and how long it has done so.

BLACK STAGS

The waters spoke into the ear of the sky.
You stags have leapt across millennia
From darkness in the rocks to the air’s caresses.
The hunter driving you, the spirit watching you,
How I love their passion, viewed from my wide shore!
And what if, in a moment of hope, I had their eyes ?

The second poem “Young Horse With Hazy Maine” relates these paintings to other works of art. The “White Lady of Africa” is a cave-painting found in Africa. The Madaleine by the Mirror is a painting by Georges de la Tour, a reproduction of which Char carried round with him in his Resistance days, and which gave him much consolation.

YOUNG HORSE WITH HAZY MANE

Spring, horse, how beautiful you are,
Riddling your mane across the sky
Splashing the reeds with foam!
All love is there in your breast:
From the “White Lady of Africa”
To the “Madeleine by the Mirror”,
Warrior idol, grace deep in thought.

In this later period Char wrote many of his greatest poems. Many become much simpler less dense. He is a visionary poet who also still kept his sense of involvement, for example being as mentioned previously he protested against both nuclear weapons and nuclear power.

To finish of I’ll leave with a poem from this period. Like the Song of the Sorgue earlier, this poem has also been set to music by Pierre Boulez. In it a lizard lies on a stone in the Province taking in the sun. There danger, and a sense of nature going about its business. Perhaps we get a sense of Char himself, in his own element, taking in the mystery and violence of creation. It seems right to leave him here.

LAMENT OF THE AMOROUS LIZARD

Don’t pick the sunflower seeds
Lest it annoy the cypresses.
Goldfinch take flight, speed
Back to your woolly nest.

The wind will let go of you
You are not a stone in the sky
Country bird, the rainbow
Comes together in the daisy.

The hunter has his gun, so hide.
The sunflower is his accomplice.
Only grasses are on your side,
Field-grasses that bow and crease.

The snake does not know you,
And the grasshopper is sullen;
The mole sees nothing true;
The butterfly has hate for none.

It’s midday, goldfinch.
The groundsel becomes shiny.
Stay here, out of danger’s reach:
The hunter is back with his family.

The echo from this land rings true.
I watch, prophesy well.
From my ledge I see all, view
Even the twittering owl.

Who better than an amorous lizard
Can tell the secrets of this land?
O gentle, kindly king of the skies
Why not nest on my rock’s side!

Graham Mummery


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