RENE CHAR

 

The Resourceful Bulrush

I hear rain even when it's not the rain,

Just nightfall;

I rejoice in dawn even when it's not the dawn,

But my own white pulp stirring among the mud.

A child's mouth ruffles me with its teeth.

Love of the silent waters!

The hawthorn has the nightingale.

I have the spells that bind.

__________________________

Rene Char

The Inventors

translated by Mark Hutchinson

Seagull Books, 2015

HYPNOS (THE LEAVES), RENE CHAR ~

 

Although the translator wishes to be

a bit snippy about previous translations

of the Rene Char masterpiece — ignore him

and seek them out — likewise take this

new edition in hand and read it with

the same gusto & courage

of the poet

_____________________________

237

In the darkness of our lives, there is not one place

for Beauty. The whole place is for Beauty.

Rene Char, 

Hypnos

1946

RE-READING RENE CHAR ~

L E A V E S     O F     H YP N O S

a selection

translated by Cid Corman

I think of that army of cowards with their appe-

tites for dictatorship that will perhaps be seen

again in power, in this forgetful country, by

those who will survive this time of damned al-

gebra.

~

We are being torn apart between the avidity for

knowing and the despair of having known. The

goad will not renounce its sting and we our hope.

~

Act as primitive and forsee as a strategist.

~

To judge by the subsoil of the grass where a cou-

ple of crickets were singing last night, prenatal

life must have been very sweet.

~

Acquiescence kindles the face. Refusal gives it

beauty.

~

The poem's line of flight. It should be within the

power of each to feel.

~

Imagination, my child.

~

Eternity is hardly longer than life.

~

I think of the woman I love. Her face is suddenly

masked. The void is in its turn sick.

~

Get intelligence going without the help of ord-

nance maps.

~

We are like those toads who in the austere night

of the marshes call without seeing each other,

bending to their love cry all the fatality of the

universe.

~

One need not love men to be of real help to them.

Only desire to improve that expression in their

eyes when it lights upon others more impover-

ished than themselves, to prolong by a second any

pleasant moment of their lives. After this move

and each root treated, their breathing would

become calmer. Above all don't deprive them al-

together of these painful paths, after whose effort

follows the evidence of truth through tears and

fruit.

~

Horrible day! I was witness, some hundred meters

away, to the execution of B. I had only to press

the trigger of my Bren gun and he could have

been saved! We were on the heights overlooking

Cereste, arms enough to make the bushes creak

and at least equal in number to the SS. They un-

aware that we were there. To the eyes around me

everywhere begging for the signal to open fire I

answered no with my head . . . .The June sun

slipped a polar chill into my bones.

He fell as if he didn't make out his executioners

and so light it seemed to me, that the least breath

of wind could have lifted him from earth.

I didn't give the signal because this village had to

be spared at any price. What is a village? A village

like any other? Did he perhaps know at that ulti-

mate instant?

~

The time of enraged mountains and fantastic

friendship.

~

Accumulate, then distribute. Of the mirror of the

universe be the part that is densest, most useful

and least apparent.

~

Keep with respect to others what you have pro-

mised yourself alone. That is your contract.

~

Sing your iridescent thirst.

~

The fruit is blind. It's the tree that sees.

~

The people of the meadows enchant me. Their

frail and venom-free beauty I don't grow tired of

reciting to myself. The vole, the mole, dark

children lost in the chimera of the grass, the slow-

worm, child of glass, the cricket as docile as any,

the grasshopper that clicks and counts its linen,

the butterfly that stimulates intoxication and an-

noys the flowers with is silent hiccups, the ants

sobered by the great green expanse, and immedi-

ately overhead the meteor swallows. . . .

~

Grassland, you are the day's encasement.

~

Since the kiss in the mountains, time is guided on

the golden summer of her hands and the ivy

swerves.

~

Children accomplish this fond miracle of remain-

ing children and seeing through our eyes.

~

This is the hour when windows escape houses to

catch fire at the end of the world where our

world is going to dawn.

~

Are we doomed to being only the beginnings of

truth?

~

If life could only be a disappointed sleep. . . .

~

There are two ages for the poet: the age during

which poetry, in all regards, mistreats him, and

that when she lets herself be madly embraced.

But neither is wholly defined. And the second is

not sovereign.

~

Plunge into the unknown which cuts deep. Com-

pel yourself to whirl about.

~

There's no more question of the shepherd being

guide. Or so the politician, this new general far-

mer, has decided.

~

Formerly at the moment I got into bed, the idea

of a death for the time being in the bosom of

sleep proved pacifying, today I go to sleep to live

some hours.

~

All the virtue of the August sky, of our trusted

anguish, in the meteor's golden voice.

~

"My body was more immense than earth and of

it I knew only a very tiny part. I receive such

innumerable promises of felicity, from the bot-

tom of my soul, that I beg you to keep for us

alone your name."

~

In the depths of our darkness there is no one place

for Beauty. The whole place is for Beauty.

______________________________

A war had begun which, though most of his country was

soon occupied, occupied Rene Char still more. . . .He was

about 36 then, and the poetic journal he kept of and at

that time comes to us under the auspices of his Resistance

code-name, HYPNOS, the Greek divinity of Sleep.

I read this now during the Covid pandemic and much of it aloud

to the one I love as we travel around, truck and book in lap, and

what are these tears in my eyes?

No book like it on earth.

[BA]

_________________

Rene Char

Leaves of Hypnos

translated from the French by Cid Corman

Mushinsha/Grossman, 1973

RENE CHAR ~

 Gala & René Char

 (1935)

 TO M.H.


                                          11 September, 1966

 

Back and forth goes Autumn, swifter than the gardener's rake.

Autumn does not overwhelm the heart, which needs the

branch and the branch's shadow.



translated by Mark Hutchinson



 

Seagull Books, 2015 

RENE CHAR ~

"Imagination, my child."

 "Children perform the delightful

miracle of remaining children

while seeing the world through

our eyes."

"In the darkness of our lives,

there is not one place for Beauty.

The whole place is for Beauty."

HYPNOS
CHAR
SEAGULL BOOKS

2015

RENE CHAR ~

THE ORIOLE


The Oriole breached dawn's capital town.

The sword of his song closed the cheerless bed.

All forever came to an end.






EVADNE


Summer and our life, we were fused
Fields devoured the hues of your perfumed clothes
Restraint and passion declared a truce
Maubec Castle was sinking in loam
Soon the ring of its lyre would cease
The violence of plants made us reel
A crow—gloomy rower—veering from the fleet
On the quartered noon of silent flint
Beat time with tender wings for our detente
Nowhere were signs of the sickle
Our rarity ushered in a new reign
(Insomniac wind that ripples the lids of our eyes
While turning each night the consenting page
Desires each part of you I retain
Be deployed to a land of famished age and towering dripstone)

This at the start of endearing years
I recall the earth loved us a little.






PROCLAIMING ONE'S NAME


I was ten.  I was set in the waves of the Sorgue like a gem.

The sun crowed the hours on the water's wise dial. Grief

and insouciance, bracing each other, had sealed the rooster-

shaped vane on the roofs of homes. But what wheel in the

wary child's heart turned harder and faster than that of the

mill, churning its white fire?






FONTIS


For native land, grapes can claim

The hands of the girl who culls

What grows, but who is waiting for her

Past the heartless vine's narrow path?



Rosary made by each cluster;

Topmost fruit, setting, bleeds

One final spark at dusk.

NO FOREST. . .


No forest can ever be great

Without age and the infinite.

Do not die too quickly, friends

Of picnics under the hail.

Pines, you who box our sleep,

Immortalize our footprints in the grass.


Alsace, 1939






THE BASKET WEAVER'S WIFE


I loved you. I loved your face — spring fluted by high winds

and rain — and the cipher made by your mouth sealing my kiss.

Some put their faith in perfectly round illusions. For me, just

going will do. From despair I brought back so small a basket,

my love, they wove it from willow.






LICHENS


I was roaming the knolls of a scoured land, through secret breaths

and plants with no past. The mountain rose up — shadow-filled

flask briefly embraced by the gesture of thirst. My existence, all

traces of me, were slipping away. Your face, looking back, was

gliding ahead, a speck in search of the bee to inspire a bloom

and charm it alive. We were going to separate. You would remain

on the perfumed ridge and I would sink below, into the garden

of rift. There, under cover of rocks and in lavish wind, I would

gift my sleep to the one true night to deepen your bliss. And all

fruits would be yours to claim.

Rene Char & Pablo Picasso 1965

ANCESTOR


I have recognized death — fugal and measured — inside a rock,

and the open bed of its little assistants beneath the shade of

a fig tree. No sign of the one who cuts stone; each of earth's

mornings would open its wings at the foot of night's steps.



Without refrain, freed of mortal dread, I dig in the air my

grave and my return.



______________________

Rene Char
from Stone Lyre
translated by Nancy Naomi Carlson
(Tupelo Press 2010)