Letter
For Henry-Louis Mermod
Two wheat carts: the very wee hours of a thresher’s morning.
For it is not yet the time of long days spent threshing until nightfall. The wheat for sowing, ten or so big sacks perhaps, that is what we need for the moment, and nothing more.
Two wheat carts, but the best of the harvest, the part left standing till the hour of the scythe, the part where the hay is tallest, the ears heaviest. (I recall this field on the hill, from very far off quite the same as a tawny sandbank against which the blue sky would break, a blue riven with violet and rose and which took on, at the touch of this ripening harvest, a sort of earthly weight. What a fire on the three mowers in the scent of hot hay and clover fading! Before me Fernand halts, sets his scythe upright and sharpens it. The sun, like an oil-soaked finger, draws and discloses upon the broad naked back the play of muscles, that lovely secret keyboard of a young body about to reach the height of its powers . . . )
Two wheat carts that carried with them into the barns’ blackness the humming blaze of summer, two carts that we stacked again yesterday, sheaf upon sheaf, with pitchforks, and led to the threshing machine by a path of puddles and dying leaves, past ploughing and waterlogged prairies. Nothing more sorrowful than these carts of a harvest arisen again in the miserly light of October or November. It seems to have followed, inside its prison of beams and shingles, the slow decline of the season itself. The pale hay of the long, weary sheaves matches the worn-out day. Fernand (the harvester of old), his fist at the head of his horses, would turn towards me, beneath the flap of grey felt, a barely gilded face, and the blue of his gaze become like that of the mountains there above the valley, elusive and soft.
*
Where did I get this persistent love for great solitary farms lost amid their orchards and their prairies, closed universes, the sole places in the world where Sundays yet keep the taste of true Sundays, where one might sometimes find that thing more and more wrested from man: rest. From a childhood spent in one of these houses? Perhaps. I do not know, just as I am ignorant also from whence is born my contentment at living a few hours in one of those mills that are still found here and there in our countryside, in the fold of a river or a stream. They have a wheel (or no longer have it) day by day mossier, and drowse near their lock where the dragoons in summer come to bathe their naked horses. There, a bit of flour is made (not much), autumn fruit is crushed, poppies and walnuts are pressed, the harvest is sometimes threshed. There are many birds in the willows and the alders and fishermen often on the shore, never weary of being patient in vain. Also places where rest dwells. Could drama happen there? Could the ‘young blond-haired valet miller’ of the Beautiful Miller’s Daughter lie down in the water for ever and the river sing him that lullaby that is still sung because of Schubert and which is already, without music, entirely music:
Good rest, good rest ...
Close your eyes!
Weary wanderer, here is your home welcoming you ...
I prepared for you
The cool bed, the tender pillow
In the blue crystal’s heart in my little chamber.
Come here, come here
What cradles and sways!
Cradle to sleep, cradle the boy to sleep . . .*
No, don’t you think? And yet I remember my astonishment long ago, reading these poems. They could have been composed right here, on this bridge that our two carts of wheat crossed yesterday with the creaking of brakes overtightened, then loosened, on this bridge where I can effortlessly see a Müller in a romantic cape leaning, tilting his too-pink face framed with sideburns and blond curls, perhaps to throw in a final farewell to his ill-fated hero or to catch on the shore the gaze of a flower that, like all true poets, he knows how to read.
*
Separated from the mill by a garden that is a solemn procession of particoloured dahlias, by the road and a space of enclosed pastures and meadows, the threshing machine occupies a barn and is arranged in three tiers. All the way at the top where we have stacked our sheaves gape the jaws of the machine, the metal-toothed drum into which, from the table where the miller himself spreads it out, the raw wheat slides towards the divorce of hay and grain. There are a few steps to descend, and one arrives in a little room open to the north onto an overhanging cement walkway. That is where the sifted hay falls and piles up. Caught in a moving web of brown string and blue cast-iron hooks, the hay turns back into bundles (vain bundles). Lined up against the sidewalk, an empty cart receives them, and one last time the trembling castle of hay is built. Beneath this chamber of bundles, at the heart of a low room taking on daylight over the rumbling water and foliage, in a pretty tumult of ventilators and belts, the pure grain separates from the chaff and flows into three sacks hanging next to each other (the last one for the small grain); two other sacks, beneath the belly of the machine, receive the chaff . . . and the chaff sprays out in light swirls, falls back onto a stretched-out floorcloth, raising pretentious pyramids dispersed with a flick of the hand.
This bagging room is my residence for the morning. Perhaps Fernand granted it to me for friendship’s sake, guessing what pleasure I might take in a few gestures and, still more, in gliding through my hands, as from a spring, the wheat’s inexhaustible jet. There is no longer, as at the threshing machines of times past, that plentiful presence of dust that made our fellow labourers cough, spit and swear all at once. We barely saw each other through a sort of perpetual rain of ash, a threat of night that disappeared only with the real night. Nothing affronts the length of landscape I am contemplating, and I can cinch and shake the full sacks, hang up the empty ones (with their naive stencilled bouquets, their names half worn away, in that lovely writing of times past, forever vanished), tie the floorcloths bursting with chaff without the slightest blasphemy. The very sound of the threshing machine, a lament without pathos, does not interrupt thought but rather sharpens it with an edge of fatigue that is also a kind of intoxication. Contrary to a train inscribing in the brain the naked rhythm in which some errant melody becomes mercilessly stuck, or to a stream that haunts you deliciously with a thousand mingled voices: reflections of phrases, reflux of songs, the lamentation of threshing lodges itself right away in the ear, once and for all, embeds itself in the mind, weaving a sort of neutral background against which stand out reveries, gazes, other sounds, even victorious ones over this basso continuo: up to this limpid, this aching birdsong.
(Three full sacks, and I can tie the first floorcloth beneath a prickly rain of glumes.)
Without the monotonous succession of filled and empty sacks, I would live here outside of time. And I need only turn my eyes towards the bit of landscape granted me to return to a sort of absolute. It is the time of ‘grey weather’ dear to painters concerned with ripping objects and beings out of the moment in order to place them in their eternity. The light neither grows nor fades. a steady daylight bathes all things: the grass at my threshold green in its true everlasting green, the stream swollen with the rains precipitating its eternal disorder, the eternal wagtails on the shore (not those of the ploughing but those of the streams, larger, with a pretty green-and-yellow breast), the eternal hedge of alders and ash trees whose tops a light fog comes to gnaw at . . . Fernand himself, who has left his horses to say farewell to me, and who leans back against the wall, his palm full of wheat that he tastes a grain at a time, Fernand becomes, with all his serene strength half-unaware of itself, this young eternal peasant, as my long quests once glimpsed him from village to village. I am surrounded by essential presences; it seems that all is ready for the heart to find its satisfaction, for our profound hunger for poetry to be finally appeased . . .
An abrupt return of memory seizes me by the throat and all collapses into anguish.
*
I owed you the confession of this collapse, dear friend. Forgive me the interminable story that precedes it, and that was there only to make felt, by contrast, the suddenness, the unpredictability of this sort of ruination. I remember that at that moment I took your letter from a pocket of my overalls (where it was lodging between a bunch of twine and the slice of bread for the ‘nine o’clock’). I reread your words: The war creates a present that we did not choose. Beyond the civic and charitable obligations it imposes on us, it gives us plenty of leisure to flee into poetry; the war that threatens our life threatens what we love the most in life: poetry. Poets thus take on a singular topicality, for never will we have read them with more fervour. That’s clear indeed, and exact. But you speak of the poetry that we read, hence of a poetry that is already made, and I, I can think only of that which shall be, and I tremble. Poetry (real poetry) always seemed to me to be (I thought, tying up my tenth sack) a quest for signs taken up at the heart of a world that asks only to answer, questioned, it is true, according to a given inflection of the voice. War, due to that excruciating doubt it instils in us regarding ourselves and the universe, can only paralyse the conversation between the poet and the world, founded on a reciprocal abandon. Whether one fights or merely ‘stands guard’, war is perpetual presence to us, and if one attempts to forget about it as I tried just now, having reached the very edge of the poetic exchange, everything suddenly collapses, duplicitously undermined by the presence denied that wreaks its vengeance. The eternal grass is surrendered to the scythe, the eternal foliage to winter, that eternal peasant who is my friend again becomes the soldier on holiday who returned the other day, who still carried on his deep chest the little plaque of polished bone on which can be read:
Dragoon
Fernand Cherpillod
Squadron 4
and, tomorrow perhaps, will depart again.
I swear to you, it is not a matter of mirages; it is the bare and strict truth.
At the very moment when the clear bell of a village outside any hour began to ring, soon followed by other bells all along the valley (we loaded tall carts with the second crop on the hill; the men left well before the end, without looking back), I saw the immense landscape up to the mountains change abruptly in appearance, becoming, from one minute to the next, just like an inscrutable face. In vain, in the weeks that followed, did I hope to seek the most concealed fields, at the edge of forests or enclosed by hedges, I had only to bend down to a flower—mute—towards a branch—still—to understand that they too already knew and that they could no longer say anything to men.
Until when?
I am myself out of habit, like an empty hotel room that remembers its absent guests, like an abandoned crossroads. It is going to rain.
The wind drags along the cement stoop, with the sound of crumpled newspapers, of fat, dried-out birthwort leaves. Then it throws itself into the curtains billowing like sails and pulls from their folds the sad scent of snuffed-out cigars. Milk steams on the big grey tablecloth, near the grey bread and butter the colour of oranges. A pewter spoon is stuck at an angle in a ribbed glass full of a fruit jelly, murky like a dead wine. The wife has gone back to her kitchen. I remain alone in this room with the November morning beginning, like it without vigour, inexplicably happy.
Bullfinch
The foot is unsure on the morning paths, in the December prairies. A thin freeze has spangled the rutted earth; that sparkling register of yesterday’s crossings, carts, horses, labourers, becomes mud again at the first impact. One trips, with arms waving so sharply that they rouse from each tree, from each hedge, a storm of birds, soon calmed. And arisen again all taut from its long night of cold wind and naked sky, the country yields to the impact of the gaze, recovers that peace following fulfilment, that somewhat weary gentleness by which it glides at a slow pace towards rest. From blade to blade of grass, the frost becomes dew again; beyond the bunches of alders and ash trees, a wind out of nowhere plays with the village smoke and, just at the edge of the sky, the mountains traced in snow float on a bank of blue fog so fragile and so sad that the heart dares no longer.
The mill sleeps nearby the open locks. What silence in this place where all through October and November seethes the enormous noise of rushing water, when the wheat threshing machine, from dawn to dusk, voices its complaint! The dead surface of the water conforms without a sound to its rocky bed; its crust of carved-out ice lies upon the sand of the shore: a chaos of pale shards of light beneath the reeds and the boughs. Winter (it is that season’s customary game) tries to bury the site in a sly temporal absence and, the better to do so, disconcerts the soul by imitating other seasons. Suddenly in the sun it brings to flower a whole bush of clematis. A hedge of hawthorn appears, the hair of a woman in the light, a horse’s blond mane left to the wind . . . One approaches and all is extinguished. The hand brings back the mockery of a vine, a string of seeds: hundreds and hundreds of tufts of grey wool. Ah! It is indeed the winter, and time is not abolished! The shadow of the barn, painted in blue-black on the grassy bank, glides forth and uncovers another shadow the colour of snow: a double, discordant calque of frost and shadow which confesses the sun’s frailty. The eye stops there for an instant and questions it, then in one leap rises to the tip of the highest ash tree where burns a tiny pink flame, the body of a bird. In the very time of this gaze, the bird sings, a single note—and the whole winter is in it.
*
I think that the man in the prime of his vigour and his strength, and who feels it enough to doubt not his gaze, his hearing, is, to the letter, blind and deaf. I think that only certain extreme states of the soul and the body: fatigue (at the edge of nothingness), illness, invasion of the heart by a sudden suffering maintained at its paroxysm, can return to a man his true strength of hearing and seeing. No allusion, here, to Plotinus’ words: ‘Close your eyes, so that the inner eye may open.’ It is a question of the supreme instant when communion with the world is given to us, when the universe ceases to be a perfectly legible spectacle, entirely inane, to become an immense spray of messages, a concert of cries, songs, gestures ceaselessly beginning again, in which each being, each thing is at once sign and carrier of signs. The supreme instant also at which man feels his laughable inner royalty crumble, and trembles, and gives in to the calls coming from an undeniable elsewhere.
Of these messages, poetry alone (is it necessary to say it?) is worthy to suggest some echo. Often it gives up, weeping, for they are almost all muttered on the verge of the ineffable. It awakens from its knowledge, its lips still heavy with absent or mad words that it does not dare repeat—and yet which contain the truth. Or if it dares to repeat them, it does so while seeming to have forgotten their origin, their importance. It divulges in two verses a devastating secret, then falls silent. Eichendorff, in a poem to his dead granddaughter, tells her of the larks that sing above his bleak walk:
I weep without a word—they bring
A message you gave them for me.
Without his tears, the poet would have heard the song, not the message. It is at the price of all the torment of his grief that he grew to know the terrible secret of the birds. For these two verses contain nothing that resembles a ‘poetic image’, even a beautiful and touching one. They speak the strict and entire truth.
This secret is also yours, bullfinch, little pink flame blown from branch to branch by the wind out of nowhere. And I knew it, since that former December, day after day, near the dead water where dead leaves were floating among the foam. ‘Ah! that lost voice is not from here!’ I cried when your first song pierced my heart. One sole note, as if from a somewhat hoarse and yet-so-sweet flute; a lament, a call, a timid prayer. ‘But who laments, then, who prays, who calls to me beyond this song?’ I asked again. And, already, I knew the answer.
But today it is not your message that I can hear, it is your song alone where all of winter triumphs, that song that keeps the very time of winter like a heart without courage. At each beat, the soul also totters. It calls to its defence its dearest images, but poetry is without power over this cry erupting higher than any poetry. Lost bird, must one lose oneself with you, and for ever? Must one mock one last time the agonizing memory trying to dispel the frost and the ice, to resurrect a June sky upon the foliage, a flat lock where three swallows blur their flight paths and reflections, a horse burst from the branches and his wild, naked rider? ‘It was your friend at harvest time, and there will be other harvests!’ but the name that it tries to repeat to me, already I no longer hear it.
The woodcutter with the chest fractured by one of those long firs that hesitate as they topple, bounding suddenly with an unpredictable out thrust upon one of their murderers, the woodcutter, waking from his first rest in days finally dares to turn his head towards the little window at the back of his room. He sees a bit of hill cleansed by the rain, of a gentle, somewhat yellowish green, and on the grey of the sky a fine spray of boughs from a solitary apple tree. A limp wave of tepid wind rolls along the walls up to his face. He is dreaming. March? April? Tomorrow he will open his eyes with surprise, bathed in a light cold and pale like chalk; his son, all black against the blinding window, his lips on the windowpanes, will cause to perish with his breath alone a whole garden of frost that is ceaselessly reborn. It is sad and cosy in this narrow chamber. A just-extinguished oil lamp stands on the commode, next to a stone marten silently crying towards the door. Close by, an iron platter painted in dark red with a wreath of golden leaves holds an empty glass, a gleaming bottle. A rifle hung on the wall can still be seen, at an angle beneath an old lithography: With the current (a boatman has dropped the oars and sat down next to the young lady passenger whom he amorously embraces; at their feet gives way a mountain of grapes and watermelons upon which they shall soon feast). No one comes, no one calls. The gaunt face, so near, without anguish abandons itself to sleep again.
* Adapted according to Roud’s variations from Berton Coffin, Werner Singer and Pierre Delattre, Word-by-Word Translations of Songs and Arias, VOL. 1 (oxford: Scarecrow Press, 1966), p. 369.
Gustave Roud, ‘Air of Solitude’ Followed by ‘Requiem’, translated from the French by Alexander Dickow and Sean T. Reynolds (Seagull Books, 2020).
Gustave Roud (1897–1976) was a major Swiss poet and photographer whose neoromantic poetic prose influenced a generation of poets including Maurice Chappaz and Philippe Jaccottet. His works include Ecrits (1950) and Campagne perdue (1972). He also translated German writers including Rilke, Hölderlin and Novalis.
Sean T. Reynolds is a literary scholar, poet, and translator living in Chicago, Illinois. His critical work on poetic translation has appeared in Postmodern Culture, Journal of Modern Literature, and Postmedieval. With David Hadbawnik he edited Jack Spicer's Translations of Beowulf, which won the 2016 Howell D. Chickering Prize in Translation.
Alexander Dickow is a poet, literary scholar, and translator. He is the author of Appetites (2018) and has translated works by Henri Droguet, Max Jacob, Guillaume Apollinaire and others.