SANDRA BERMANN
Just as the manifestations of life are intimately connected with the phenomenon of life without being of importance to it, a translation issues from the original—not so much from its life as from its afterlife…. In the final analysis, the range of life must be determined by history rather than by nature, least of all by such tenuous factors as sensation and soul. The philosopher’s task consists in comprehending all of natural life through the more encompassing life of history.
—Walter Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator”
René Char’s “Feuillets d’Hypnos” brings before us the lived history of the French resistance, joining traumatic memory with hopes for a future of freedom and human dialogue. Closely intertwined with Char’s own actions as captain on the maquis, the collection of prose poems offers a rare engagement with historical experience in poetic form, both a tragic affirmation of life and, in its own right, a means of resistance. But I also argue here that this example of historical poetry illustrates some important connections between the writing of lived historical event and translation. Both are linguistic acts dedicated to the “survival” of an “original,” a survival, which as Derrida suggests in a reading of Benjamin’s “Task of the Translator,” has a double sense—both a continuity, or “living on” of the original (Benjamin’s fortleben) and also a “life after death,” (Benjamin’s überleben).1 But what makes Char’s text such a telling example is that it is not only a historical inscription that allows the past to “survive,” but also an “original” in its own right, a highly self-conscious poetic text capable of generating a literary afterlife of its own. By considering Char’s translation of historical event into poetry and its own claim to an interpretive afterlife in the years that follow, I mean to underscore Benjamin’s fundamental insight that cultural “life,” like the greater empirical life of which it is a part, can best be seen in its temporal or historical trajectory, and that “translation,” variously understood, plays a vital role in this.
I would like to thank the Jacques Doucet library, the Columbia University Insitute for Scholars at Reid Hall, and especially Marie-Claude Char, without whose generous assistance this work could not have been completed. I am also grateful to Michael Wood and Mihaela Bacou for their helpful comments and suggestions. Parts of this essay appear in French translation in René Char et ses alliés substantiels:artistes du XXe siècle (Association Campredon Art et Culture: “Maison René Char,” 2003).
When France entered World War II in 1939, the poet was thirty-two years old. He was by this time known as one of the younger surrealists, having joined the group nine years earlier. Collaborating with Eluard, Aragon, Breton, as well as with Picasso, Buñuel, and Dalí, and often emphasizing violence and revolt, he had already registered his opposition not only to bourgeois cultural norms, but also to Franco in Spain, to the Colonial Exposition, the Indochina colonization and especially to the rise of Nazism.2
But Char’s entrance into historical action, like that of many of his contemporaries, was not premeditated. It was abrupt and even surprising. He was mobilized in Nîmes in 1939 and sent to fight in the battle of Alsace, in the 173rd regiment of heavy artillery. Demobilized in 1940, he returned to his home at L’Isle-sur-la-Sorgue, but only briefly, since he was soon denounced there as a militant of the extreme left. Thanks to a friendly warning, he escaped, traveling East and North to Céreste. There, while other French poets, including his friend André Breton, waited in Marseille for American visas, Char began creating links with local resistants in Céreste, L’Isle-sur-la-Sorgue, Aix, Avignon, and Digne.
By 1941, Char’s armed opposition had begun. Military history tells the rest.3 From between 1941 and 1942 he was part of the Armée Secrête (AS), acting as head of the section Durance-Sud under the code name of Capitaine Alexandre, the name he kept until the end of the war. By 1943, he was leading partisan groups of the FFC (Forces Françaises Combattantes) in the Alpes de Provence and serving as departmental chief of seven regions of the maquis for parachute landings of arms and munitions (S.A. P.-R2) in the Basses Alpes. Eventually, he acted as joint regional chief in preparation for the Allied landing in Provence in 1944, and traveled to Algiers to advise the Supreme Allied Headquarters. After the war, he was decorated for bravery and leadership by both France and the United States.
It is well known that throughout the long years of Char’s military resistance, he wrote prolifically. Yet unlike most other “Resistance poets,” Char did not publish any of his work between 1940 and 1945, not even in clandestine journals. Not only was he skeptical about the political and personal motives of much resistance poetry, he also did not want to support any appearance of normalcy during the “Hitlerian night.” Yet with the postwar publication of his wartime poetry, first “Seuls demeurent” (1945), then extracts of “Feuillets d’Hypnos” (1945), and eventually the entire text of the “journal” in Camus’ series, “L’espoir” (1946), and in his own collection from the war years, Fureur et Mystère (also 1946), his reputation grew enormously. He would always claim that this period and the poetry he wrote during it fundamentally changed both his life and his writing. The prose poetry of “Feuillets d’Hypnos,” reflecting upon the years 1943–44 is, in many ways, a central document in this transformation.
Though Char never wrote much about interlingual translation as such, except in letters to those translating him during his lifetime, he did describe poets as great “trans-porteurs,” who transport meaning through metaphor and imagery, “mais qui doivent d’abord déguster jusqu’au bout les cataclysmes du réel” (but who first must savor to the fullest the cataclysms of reality).4 A reading of Char’s “Feuillets” confirms this intense engagement with lived experience. If some poets use language to signal their attempt to leave the material world for something more transcendental, Char instead strives to recall it, grappling with the memory of the maquis in a language at least as keenly trained on the historical events it transcribes as on its multiple semantic potential as poetry. For this reason, perhaps, the word “translation” seems particularly apt. In Char’s poetic response to the traumatic events of the maquis, we see the poet’s often mournful gesture toward an original impossible to transcribe, and at the same time, his paradoxical insistence that this lost original must live on, if differently, in its new linguistic site.5 A deep meditation on historical experience, Char’s text casts new light on the mourning of the original that haunts the writing of history as it does, in a different but related way, the writing of translation. But it also sets into relief the “new beginning” that language, and especially poetic language, permits.
Written in the bleakest years of the war (1943–44), Char’s wartime journal, “Feuillets d’Hypnos,” began as a notebook kept on the maquis. He describes its material history in a letter to Gilbert Lély, “J’ai été heureux pour retrouver récemment ce journal que je tenais à Céreste, enfoui à mon départ pour Alger dans un trou de mur. C’est ce journal que je vais publier (une sorte de Marc-Aurèle!)” (I was pleased recently to recover this journal that I used to keep in Céreste, buried in a hole of a wall when I left for Algiers. It’s this journal that I am going to publish [a sort of Marcus Aurelius!]).6 Supplementing this between 1945 and 1946 with a number of other poems similarly reflecting upon the experience of the war, Char underscores its material connection with the historical events it records—and his reaction to them—in his introduction to the published collection:
Ces notes n’empruntent rien à l’amour de soi, à la nouvelle, à la maxime ou au roman. Un feu d’herbes sèches eût tout aussi bien été leur éditeur. La vue du sang supplicié en a fait une fois perdre le fil, a réduit à néant leur importance. Elles furent écrites dans la tension, la colère, la peur, l’émulation, le dégoût, la ruse, le recueillement furtif, l’illusion de l’avenir, l’amitié, l’amour. C’est dire combien elles sont affectées par l’événement.
[These notes owe nothing to love of self, to chronicle, to the maxim or the novel. A fire of dry grass might just as well have been their publisher. The sight of tortured blood once made me lose their thread, reduced their importance to nothing. They were written in tension, anger, fear, emulation, disgust, guile, furtive contemplation, the illusion of a future, friendship, love. Which is to say how much they are affected by event …]7
Situated between the reality of the empirical experience and its recollection in the prose poems to follow, this preface prepares the reader well for the text as a whole. The contingent event—the grass fire that could have served as editor, the spilled blood that caused him to lose the thread—sparks the reactions of the author who writes. These individual texts, short poems in themselves, in no way claim to be transparent windows to the “original” acts taken or suffered. They are a dense poetic “living on” of events inscribed in memory and suffused with human affect. Like other histories of traumatic events, they emerge from a past no longer directly accessible, and at the same time reach toward a future where a cultural survival is sought.
As poetic memories, Char’s poems preserve a significant number of referential details. Of the 237 entries that together make up the “Feuillets d’Hypnos,” a number reflect upon particular historical incidents or persons. Some of the most notable include Char’s careful list of orders for his lieutenant, Leon Zingermann (#87); Roger Bernard’s execution by the Nazi SS (#138); the torture and death of a farmer near Vacheres (#99); the aerial dropping of munitions (#97) and men (#148); the forest fire that once ensues (#53); the SS’s search for Char himself in the village of Céreste (#128) and his eight-meter fall and injury while on a nocturnal mission near German guards (#149); the mourning for Francis Curel’s capture and deportation (#11); the remembered murder of friends and fellow resistants such as Emile Cavagni, Roger Chaudon, Gustave Lefèvre (#157, #231, #94).
Such references testify repeatedly to the history of the French Resistance, specifying the uniqueness of the moments witnessed and the role that poet and reader have in their afterlife. They thereby accentuate the complexity entailed both in remembering lived experience and in “translating” it into a poetic language that is able to bear witness. Char’s are “haunted” texts, haunted by event, by the poet’s own affect, and by other texts in this collection. Several announce themselves as acts of mourning and clearly reveal the subjectivity, complexity, and strange temporality that characterize them. Take, for example, the remembered execution of Roger Bernard (#138):
Horrible journée! J’ai assisté, distant de quelques mètres, à l’exécution de B. Je n’avais qu’à presser la détente du fusil-mitrailleur et il pouvait être sauvé! Nous étions sur les hauteurs dominant Céreste, des armes à faire craquer les buissons et au moins égaux en nombre aux SS. Eux ignoreant que nous étions là. Aux yeux qui imploraient partout autour de moi le signal d’ouvrir le feu, j’ai répondu non de la tête … Le soleil de juin glissait un froid polaire dans mes os.
Il est tombé comme s’il ne distinguait pas ses bourreaux et si léger, il m’a semblé, que le moindre souffle de vent eût dû le soulever de terre.
Je n’ai pas donné le signal parce que ce village devait être épargné à tout prix. Qu’estce qu’un village? Un village pareil à un autre? Peut-être l’a-t-il su, lui, à cet ultime instant?
[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 Céreste, arms enough to make the bushes creak and at least equal in number to the SS. They unaware 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 seems 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 ultimate instant?]
Playing on the themes of what can be “seen” and what lies beyond any individual’s physical sight or memory of it, the three short paragraphs describe the final moments of the historical Roger Bernard, Char’s young friend, partisan and poet, as witnessed by the resistants. Imagery of the natural world, at odds with itself in the antithesis “soleil de juin—froid polaire,” depicts a moment of contradiction, desperately out of joint, while references to B’s lightness and the “souffle de vent” that almost lifts him point to the mystery and to the “almost resurrection” implicit in the terrible events described. The final lines provide the “explanation” of the poet-witness: the execution, otherwise preventable, could not be interrupted, since the village had to be saved. But they end with questions to the reader: What is the value of the village, this or any other, compared with a single life? And had Bernard somehow understood his sacrifice at the “ultime instant”? The questions must remain unanswered, poised in the anguish of the speaker’s responsibility, the mysterious complexity of memory, and the appeal to the reader to continue the meditation. Such questions, related with the profound lightness attributed to B’s fall, and scattered in the leaves of Char’s text, transform the experience of the maquis into an intense dialogue engaging both poet and reader.
As I suggest above and as this brief prose poem emphasizes, the “Feuillets” provide a record that, while witnessing a traumatic historical event, draws the reader, like a cinematic lens, into the realm of individual memory. Here we find exclamations and a first-person perspective, dramatized in passion, recollection, and rumination. The effect is heightened by an omission of the simple past, the tense reserved for history, in favor of the passé composé and imperfect, that tie each remembrance to the linguistic present. Moving in the end to address the reader in explanation and questions, a dialogue between poet and reader holds to the zone of discours rather than récit. Char thus recalls a lived moment and engages the reader as directly as possible in this effort to “pass on” a traumatic experience.
Such deliberately subjective and dialogical diction is hardly limited to #138, cited above. It accumulates throughout the collection where events, though pointing to the referential world of the past, are rendered in discours and often, in phrases without verbs at all, for which the reader must provide the temporal framework.8
Each moment is itself a zone of intense complexity, and necessary interpretation. The subjective lens of Char’s prose poems discloses some of this complexity, indeed the mystery and plurality, of poetic memory. We find, for instance, that references to Bernard’s passing recur elsewhere in Char’s oeuvre, suggesting the need to repeat, in therapeutic fashion, the traumatic memory of a death and a decision. But even the single text quoted above emphasizes the multiple perspectives from which any given event is seen and remembered: the SS sees Bernard but not the partisans surrounding them; the partisans have their sights on Bernard, but also on the SS and their leader, the poet as witness; Bernard appears not to see the SS (“comme s’il ne distinguait ses bourreaux”) but perhaps, the last line suggests, focuses on an interior vision; the witnessing poet physically sees not only the SS, his men, and Bernard, but also mentally “sees” the nearby village, and speculates upon Bernard’s inner vision; he also “sees” in the important section two, that Bernard is almost transported, or that he ought to have been, transported; in the final questions, the reader is asked to view these various layers. In this hallucinating play of perspectives, one “sees” a tragic historical event but, equally important, one “sees” the difficulty of seeing, and the limits of interpreting.
For what is the reader given to observe? The event narrated is as absent as present. Inscribed as a painful metonymy in which the cause is suppressed in favor of the result, the one thing the poet does not describe, and that the reader cannot see, is the execution itself, which remains hidden in the blank of the page separating the first paragraph from the second. The “original” from which the poet works is a memory refracted through several perspectives. Recalled explicitly and in some detail, the event emerges as both multiple and opaque, incomplete even when so brilliantly etched. Nor is Bernard monumentalized through the fullness of his name. Though his complete name is provided in other texts, here we find only the initial “B.,” the mere synecdoche of the referential anchor normally afforded by the proper name.
As is evident from this one example, the poet’s words do not pretend to lift an integral and cognizable past into language. Rather, they disseminate an awareness of the human complexity of events witnessed, while tracing the keenness of loss and intensity of an instant’s decision. As the body of Bernard was almost, but never quite, transported by a “breath” of wind, the human breath of the poet’s own words do not in fact transport the past “original” into poetic history. Any such complete transposition is impossible—and ultimately unsought. His words do figure a “translation,” but a poetic and therefore not fully “relevant” one, in the usual sense of the word.9 A subjective mourning, a memory transcribed in the present, it lives on in the different, more exemplary “materiality” of poetry where it survives “otherwise,” able to affect the future. A later poem in the collection (#228), referring to this and the deaths of many others, describes this afterlife in words that echo the passage on Roger Bernard: “La grandeur réside dans le départ qui oblige. Les êtres exemplaires sont de vapeur et de vent” (Greatness resides in the departure that is binding. Exemplary beings are of vapor and wind).
In these ways, Char’s “Feuillets d’Hypnos” creates a haunting paradigm of an important aspect of translation, even interlingual translation. Impossible yet necessary, translation inevitably entails a loss as well as a gain. Loss is nowhere more evident than in translation’s nostalgia for an original it can never fully render, nostalgia, that is, for a singular textual body it can never appropriate or recreate. A translation can at best inscribe a subsequent understanding, detailed in a new language that can never repeat the original but, at the most, touch it from the point of a tangent, allowing it to live into the future along a new and different line.10
Though this may well be the condition of all translation, or even, if we follow a certain line of reasoning, of all linguistic meaning, Char’s “translation” of traumatic experience into the medium of language lays bare this more general yearning and loss. Here, the original toward which language yearns is not only inaccessible because it is in another language (assuming that memory is another language); here the original is inaccessible because it refers to an irretrievable past, even as memory. Like the death it attempts to describe, the past this text “translates” lies beyond any tactile or visible certainties. A text translating the lived experience of the past can only be produced out of new and different cloth, woven in the airy uncertainties of memory, affect and language. Char’s “Feuillets d’Hypnos” shows the difficulty of this—the suffering, the mourning, and the complexity that are part of any such poetic trans-port, any such use of language. But as I will attempt to outline briefly, it also shows its necessity and the linguistic “gain” that brings with it a difficult but clearly affirmative hope.
It is a loss and a gain that is best gauged by looking not only to individual poems, but also to the collection as a whole. For here it becomes evident that Char writes both of individual loss and also of a more general loss, or disillusionment. Opening the “Feuillets d’Hypnos,” one immediately sees each entry standing alone, a poetic particular, juxtaposed rather than logically connected to other poetic descriptions, exhortations, self-reflections. Though all are numbered, they follow no usual chronological or logical order. In this notebook, deeply inscribed by event but seemingly untouched by traditional beliefs in Providence, far from the Hegelian dialectic, and beyond—or before—usual realistic, linear “plotlines” or historical mythologies, we see a world of constant change and unpredictable reversals. It is a text with close ties to Nietzsche and Heraclitus, riven with a tragic pessimism that comes not only from the shock of horrific events but also from the loss of more general historical certainties. Nowhere in the collection does Char envision specific positive outcomes, or even a telos, a point of closure that would offer an end and therefore meaning to the individual entries. Quite the contrary. He asks at one point, “La vie commencerait par une explosion et finirait par un concordat? C’est absurde” (Life should begin with an explosion and end with a concordat? It’s absurd.) (140). Even more specific to his own time and frighteningly prescient of our own is entry #7:
Cette guerre se prolongera au delà des armistices platoniques. L’implantation des concepts politiques se poursuivra contradictoirement, dans les convulsions et sous le couvert d’une hypocrisie sûre de ses droits. Ne souriez pas. Écartez le scepticisme et la résignation et préparez votre âme mortelle en vue d’affronter intra-muros des démons glacés analogues aux génies microbiens.
[This war will prolong itself beyond platonic armistices. The implanting of political concepts will be conflictingly pursued in convulsions and under cover of an hypocrisy certain of its rights. Don’t smile. Thrust aside skepticism and resignation and prepare your mortal soul for the intramural confrontation with icy demons analogous to mircrobial spirits.]
There is no foreseeable end to the agon Char describes, or even an easily vanquished enemy. The journal, though heroic in some of the acts it relays and in its persistence in relaying them, engages not at all in “patriotic” rhetoric. There is surprisingly little discussion here of Germans or French militia as enemy. Even the Resistance appears through a veil of irony and transience. In this poetic rendition of wartime, a time described without the usual mystifications or nationalisms, we note Char’s refusal of simple dichotomies of good and evil, heroes and enemies, or of a dialectics of trauma and revenge, to embrace instead what Nietzsche might call the “tragic,” a keen awareness of the fearful contingency, changefulness, and inevitable conflict at the heart of existence. This is certainly an important aspect of this journal, and one of its most honest and courageous themes. If it is essential to take arms against oppression and cruelty, an oppression and cruelty Char knew at close range, such war, even such oppression, is anything but a simple matter. It does not have a single face or a predictable end. Endemic to his time, perhaps to all time, it is ultimately fought against internal, intransigent, demons.
In this temporal context without anchors in historical patterns from the past or in clear expectations for the future, life is lived—and here portrayed—as so many individual, unpredictable, often harrowing moments. As in the entry on Bernard, which ends so provocatively with the word “instant,” Char emphasizes the war’s way of whittling experience down to the second: “On donnait jadis un nom aux diverses tranches de la durée: ceci était un jour, cela un mois, cette église vide, une année. Nous voici abordant la seconde où la mort est la plus violente et la vie la mieux définie” (They used to give names to the different portions of duration: this was a day, that a month, this empty church a year. Here we are approaching the second when death is most violent and life best defined.) (#90). It is in the individual, seemingly disconnected moment, that life and death precariously vie. Like so many clicks of the camera, each marking one event, one insight, one action, one instruction, Char’s entries attempt to give us time without myth, without the framing narrative, without the explanatory logic, without the distilling and distancing lens of history’s usual “realist” perspective. Etched instead in the “real time” of poetic enunciation, the “Feuillets” attempt to evoke the unadorned particularity that, ascribed to history since Aristotle, is ultimately its most haunting and most eagerly disguised quality.
Yet as Hannah Arendt eloquently notes in her preface to Between Past and Future, the time Char describes at this historical juncture was not only a site of radical disillusionment or courageous acceptance of the tragic. It was also a site of active conflict and of thoughtful action.11 In this space/time where past and future meet, a site no longer prepared by philosophical or political thought as also no longer channeled by a continuity of tradition, or its most cherished historical myths, human action could—and did—choose to mark out new and unexpected meanings. In a time “out of joint,” yet in the only time there was, the physical and intellectual struggle of the resistance went on, outside the official government, outside its official history, in day-to-day—indeed in moment to moment—acts, always unpredictable, requiring discriminating decisions that held life and death in the balance.
In this context, Char claims that poetry itself has an important role to play: “la part imaginaire qui, elle aussi, est susceptible d’action” (the imaginary part which, also, is susceptible of action.) (#18). And it is in this poetic “action” that the “gain” to be found in Char’s translation of history is most clearly seen. If Char’s “Feuillets” provides a powerful “living on” of traumatic memory (fortleben) in some of the ways outlined above, it also acts in the “now” of language to offer a life after death, (überleben), a moment of renewal, a new beginning.
AN “AFTER LIFE” IN HISTORY
Char clearly saw poetry not only as memorial or mimetic, but also as an act of signification, one that, by its very nature, gives birth to the future and to hope. Like the physical resistance, his poetry offers no answer, no specific truth, certainly no new government or political system. Yet it does act to foster change, to enter into lived history and offer an inaugural moment, a new beginning. “Être du bond,” writes Char, “N’être pas du festin, son épilogue” (To be of the leap. Not to be of the feast, its epilogue, (#197). Erupting within the ruins of mortality, the death and guilt so poignantly described in the recollection of Bernard, such poetic action allows for a continual nascency. Action for Char (as for Arendt), is defined precisely by its opening to the future, by its indeterminability, the uncharted effects it will have in times to come.12 This relation to the future, not as telos but as site of the unknown, as a zone of rebirth or renewal, is evident throughout Char’s poetic translation of the past. Such awareness of incompleteness, existing not only because the past can never be recovered, but also because the future is itself filled with mystery, with the living possibility for new action and interpretation, makes Char’s text “translatable,” in Benjamin’s sense of the term. Through its acts of signification, it becomes an “original” that calls to the future for its own continuity and its interpretive afterlife.
Char’s call to the future pervades the collection in many ways. It does so, for instance, through its profound and ever-vigilant sense not only of risk but also of beauty: “Dans nos ténèbres, il n’y a pas une place pour la Beauté. Toute la place est pour la Beauté” (In the depths of our darkness there is no one place for Beauty. The whole place is for Beauty.) (#237). It also appears in a surprising reapprehension of the specific images of the everyday that demand gratitude—and interpretation: “Le silence du matin. L’appréhension des couleurs. La chance de l’épervier” (The morning silence. The apprehension of colors. The chance of the sparrowhawk.) (#152) or, “Toute la masse d’arôme de ces fleurs pour rendre sereine la nuit qui tombe sur nos larmes” (All the massed fragrance of these flowers to pacify the night that falls upon our tears) (#109), or “Vous tendez une allumette à votre lampe et ce qui s’allume n’éclaire pas. C’est loin, très loin de vous, que le cercle illumine” (You hold a match to your lamp and what is lit provides no light. It is far, far away from you, that the circle illuminates) (#120).
But often Char’s orientation toward semantic transformations and to the interpretive work of his readers is yet more evident. It can emerge, for instance, through the energetic and surprising aphorism. An admirer of Heraclitus, he describes his aphoristic powers this way: “Héraclite possède ce souverain pouvoir ascensionnel qui frappe d’ouverture et doue de mouvement le langage …” (Heraclitus possesses this sovereign ascensional power that strikes in opening and endows language with movement.)13 In Char’s own use of this short, pithy form, examples of which are frequent in the “Feuillets” (as the entries cited above begin to illustrate), ordinary grammar gives way to disjunctive splicings of verbs and nouns, while metaphor bears the burden of poetic trans-portation. Nourished by the reading of Heraclitus, Rimbaud, and Baudelaire, Char’s metaphoric images are neither ornamental nor mimetic. They are themselves surprising journeys of emotion and thought—beyond referential anchors into a zone of new possibility. Essential to their quality is a force of contradiction and complexity that resists any sense of knowledge possessed. Often the aphorism is born of the verb, the linguistic matrix of action and transformation. Consider, for instance, “Conduire le réel jusqu’à l’action comme une fleur glissée à la bouche acide des petits enfants. Connaissance ineffable du diamant désespéré (la vie)” (Bring the real to the point of action like a flower slipped into the acid mouth of little children. Ineffable knowledge of the desperate diamond [life]) (#3). Fusing a general directive with the particular and surprising instance, this is a poem driven by the energy of transformation, or translation: reality into action, flowers into the acidic mouth of children. It addresses its readers through an infinitive that takes an imperative tone, and looks to them to lead its juxtaposed images to some, albeit incomplete, resolution.
Through their linguistic action, such aphorisms speak to the future inhabiting interpretation as it inhabits all human deeds, whose consequences can never be determined at the moment they occur. As Char states in #187, “L’action qui a un sens pour les vivants n’a de valeur que pour les morts, d’achèvement que dans les consciences qui en héritent et la questionnent” (The action that has a sense for the living has value only for the dead, conclusion only in the consciences that inherit and question it). Actions themselves, be they physical or linguistic, give birth to future dialogues that only in time may hope to create their meanings.
But if Char’s subtle meditations and energetic aphorisms engage the reader’s interpretive efforts, they can also challenge and defy, resisting imprisoning myths that came before.14 They can transform religious imagery, humanizing it. For instance, Char’s use of the term “Ange” translates divine expectations to the earthly (“Ange, ce qui, à l’intérieure de l’homme, tient à l’écart du compromis réligieux … Connaît le sang, ignore le céleste. Ange: la bougie qui se penche au nord du Coeur,” (Angel, what, within man, holds aloof from religious compromise…. Knows the blood, is ignorant of the celestial. Angel: the candle that inclines to the heart’s north.) (#16). The theological term Verbe becomes Char’s word for the language of poetry. One of the most notable mythic reversals concerns Hypnos, the almost forgotten Greek god of sleep, now firey and transformative, who leaves his signature on the collection as a whole and whose name becomes synonymous with poetry and hope: “Résistance n’est qu’espérance. Telle la lune d’Hypnos, pleine cette nuit de tous ses quartiers, demain vision sur le passage des poèmes” (Resistance is only hope. Like the moon of Hypnos full tonight in all its quarters, tomorrow vision upon the passage of poems) (#168).
In ways such as this, the “Feuillets” perform their own intervention in the world, acting to reject prescribed mythic patterns (all the more palpable in the era of Nazi mythology), as well as language’s accustomed syntax and lexicon. This strategy alone allows for a loosening of everyday conventions, an opening for the new to appear—for interpretation, for hope, and even for freedom. “A tous les repas pris en commun, nous invitons la liberté à s’asseoir. La place demeure vide mais le couvert reste mis,” (At all the meals taken in common, we invite freedom to have a seat. Its place remains empty, but it stays set.) (#131) writes Char. It is poetry’s action that helps prepare this place.
But at one point in the collection, the poetic “gain” of Char’s translation of the historical becomes especially explicit. Striking in its reference both to the historical past and to the hope offered by linguistic action is Char’s well-known meditation on “Le Prisonnier,” by Georges de la Tour (#178):
La reproduction en couleurs du “Prisonnier” de Georges de la Tour, que j’ai piquée sur le mur de chaux de la pièce où je travaille, semble, avec le temps, réfléchir son sense dans notre condition. Elle serre le coeur mais combien désaltère! Depuis deux ans, pas un réfractaire qui n’ait, passant la porte, brulé ses yeux aux preuves de cette chandelle. La femme explique, l’emmuré écoute. Les mots qui tombent de cette terrestre silhouette d’ange rouge sont des mots essentiels, des mots qui portent immédiatement secours. Au fond du cachot, les minutes de suif de la clarté tirent et diluent les traits de l’homme assis. Sa maigreur d’ortie sèche, je ne vois pas un souvenir pour la faire frissonner. L’écuelle est une ruine. Mais la robe gonflée emplit soudain tout le cachot. Le Verbe de la femme donne naissance a l’inespéré mieux que n’importe quelle aurore. Reconnaissance à Georges de la Tour qui maitrisa les ténèbres hitlériennes avec un dialogue d’êtres humains. (emphasis mine)
[The color reproduction of the “Prisoner” by Georges de la Tour, which I’ve stuck on the whitewashed wall of the room in which I work, seems, with time, to reflect its sense upon our condition. It wrings the heart but how it quenches thirst! For two years, not one partisan who, coming through the door, hasn’t burnt his eyes at the proofs of this candle. The woman explains, the immured listens. The words that fall from this earthbound silhouette of a red angel are essential words, words that immediately bring help. In the dark of the dungeon, the tallow minutes of clarity draw out and dilute the features of the seated man. Scrawny as a dry nettle there isn’t a memory comes to my mind to make him shiver. The bowl is a ruin. But the swollen robe suddenly fills the whole dungeon. The Word of the woman gives birth to the unhoped-for better than any dawn whatever.
Gratefulness to Georges de la Tour who subdued the Hitlerian darkness with a dialogue of human beings.]
Claiming a new beginning (“une naissance”) through the act of language, this text returns us to issues of translation and history in a number of ways. Most clearly, the poem provides a miniature, or mise en abyme of the historical situation of the resistance, and one with which Char clearly identified.15 At the same time, it is a fragment that resumes a number of images scattered throughout the “Feuillets.” Here is the “Ange,” presented as human, dressed in red (Ange, ce qui … connaît le sang, ignore le céleste,” #16); here is the “chandelle,” like the “lampe,” associated by Char with the resistance itself, the light provided by human action, not nature, and able to extend its rays beyond the immediate “ténèbres” (#5, #174).
On another level, the fragment might well be called an intermedial translation—an ecphrasis that “translates” the visual arts into poetry. Not surprisingly, Char’s words translate in such a way as to reveal the specific interaction of art object with the referential and the real. The painting, described in some detail, is a reproduction, taken from its “original” historical context, and now placed within his workroom where, the poet explains, it reflects its “sense upon our condition.” The painting is seen in direct relation with the specific historical situation. Indeed, not unlike the later Benjamin in his insistence on the “dialectical image,” the poet here acts to seize an image from the past and reveal its resonance for “now.”16 And in Char’s poem, as in Benjamin’s momentary junctures of past and present, the “now” is a present in which the “unhoped for” future is able to appear.
Written in the first person, with exclamations that anchor it in the emotional response of the writer’s memory, this entry depicts a painting that is, according to Char, ultimately about language itself, the words a terrestrial “Angel” speaks to a prisoner. Her presence in the cell, her candle, but above all her words (the poetic “Verbe”), give birth to the “unhoped-for” and do so better, Char claims, than any (merely natural) dawn. The final line, with its antithetical echoes “ténèbres hitlériennes” and “êtres humains,” and its definitive and otherwise rare use of the passé simple, praises the painter, Georges de la Tour, for having mastered the “hitlerian shadows” with the liberating act of dialogue.
In examples such as this, we begin to see that Char’s texts are haunted by the past and by the future as well. Whether the afterlife of “Les Feuillets” is generated through the subtle use of imagery, the “commotion” of unresolved aphorisms, the defiant redefinitions of myth, the allegorical readings of Georges de la Tour, or the poignant questions that end #138 on Roger Bernard, it creates an interpretive future that is as much a part of Char’s text as the historical memory it perpetuates.
In one of his rare statements about translation, Char writes, “Traduction, si j’ose dire, comme re-création du souffle et des mots; les mots sont une forme d’action, la perpétuité concrétisée de cette Action fugitive” (Translation, if I may say so, is like the re-creation of breath and of words: words are a form of action, the concretized eternity of this transitory Action).17 The historical translator’s words set into motion an attempt to re-create the “souffle” of what is past, but also a present and ongoing action whose consequences usher in a future as yet unknown. Through the dialogue it initiates, this action will persist as long as readers read. It will allow a “living on” of the remembered action of the past (Benjamin’s fortleben) but also an active participation in its “life after death” (überleben). With it comes an opening to reflection upon times “out of joint,” both those of the past and our own, but also upon freedom and hope. It is precisely this dual reach, toward a future as well as a past, that animates Char’s translation of history in “Feuillets d’Hypnos,” and has allowed it to live on over the years, in France and abroad.
Benjamin tells us that the “the task of the translator consists in finding that intended effect [Intention] upon the language into which he is translating which produces in it the echo of the original.”18 The translation ought not, that is, aim for a literal rendition of meaning, the mere “what” of the text, but rather for its distinctive “how,” which he calls its mode of intention.19 If this can be achieved, the translation, calling toward the language of the original, will create an echo effect in its own that evokes the original text, allows us to “hear” it again, through the words of its translator. As Benjamin reminds us at various points in his essay, such translation is a temporal as well as a geo-linguistic or spatial affair. The translator elicits the echo not only of a different but also of a previous language in his or her own: “For translation comes later than the original, and since the important works of world literature never find their chosen translators at the time of their origins, their translation marks their stage of continued life…. The life of the original attains in them [the translations] to its ever-renewed latest and most abundant flowering.”20
In the sixty years since Char wrote the “Feuillets d’Hypnos,” it has been translated many times and into many languages. Several have, I believe, contributed to what Benjamin would call its historical “flowering.” The best–known Anglo-American translation appears in the 1956 collection Hypnos Waking: Poems and Prose by René Char, selected and translated by Jackson Matthews with the collaboration of William Carlos Williams, Richard Wilbur, William Jay Smith, Barbara Howes, W. S. Merwin, and James Wright.21 Another version, to which Char contributed suggestions, is the 1976 Leaves of Hypnos by Cid Corman used in the translations above.22 But to explore further the afterlife of Char’s journal, I will turn briefly to a brilliant text by Adrienne Rich, another, more recent, “resistance poet.” Her poem, entitled “Char,” published in the 1999 collection Midnight Salvage,23 interprets portions of “Feuillets d’Hypnos” through the lens of her own textual memory: “Hermetic guide to resistance I’ve found you and lost you several times in my life.” Part translation, part poetic interpretation, and part overt dialogue, it evokes in its different language and from its own historical perspective a number of themes already discussed. It reminds us, for instance, of interlingual translation’s investment in historical memory—the mourning, the nostalgia for the body of the “original” text. But it also provides an intriguing example of the ongoing “afterlife” of the original. Like Char’s writing of lived history, Rich’s poem allows the past to “live on,” but also to acquire an active “life after death” as it speaks to its Anglo-American audience.
In its relatively brief span, some fifty-eight lines divided into three numbered sections, Rich refers to a number of Char’s fragments, eliciting and re-“activating” episodes. In part #1, she evokes Char’s text primarily through poetic paraphrase or impersonation: “There is the bracken, there is the mulberry,” she writes, taking on the poet’s stance as witness to everyday sights and sounds on the maquis. Without attempting full translations, her pointed references, articulated through a series of deictics that highlight action in the here and now, begin to catch the echo of the original: “there is the moon ablaze in every quarter,” “there is the table set at every meal/for freedom whose chair stays vacant.”
Only in the last six lines of the opening section does translation, in the usual sense of the term, appear. It is a fragmentary translation—selected, shaped, and set into italics, like an artwork or collage—that deliberately transports shards of memory into a new linguistic site. Yet as Rich’s footnote makes clear, these translations themselves entail a complex, historically rich, and clearly perspectival “living on” of the original: “I have drawn on both Jackson Matthews and Cid Corman’s translations of Char’s journal in integrating his words into my poem.” Like Char’s own memories, refracted through conflicting viewpoints, the poetic memory that translation permits is mediated here through a linguistic archive, emphasizing the “impossibility,” as well as the continual renewal, implied by translation.
Which texts are translated in the few lines of Rich’s poem? Though several appear, two dominate. One is the episode of Bernard’s assassination. Shades of Char’s #138 thread their way through the first two sections of the poem, sometimes in actual translation (“A horrible day…. Perhaps he knew, at the final instant? / The village had to be spared at any price”), sometimes in Rich’s imitation (“All eyes on him in the woods crammed with maquisards ex- / Pecting him to signal to fire and save their comrade / Shook his head and watched Bernard’s execution.”). In this way, her description of Bernard’s passing recalls its repetitive, fragmentary mode of survival in the “Feuillets.” If anything, it is yet more ghostly now. Through history-laden English translations, themselves indirect citations of Char, Matthews, and Corman, the complex perspectives of traumatic memory persist, with their inability to repeat or recapture the past they nonetheless relate.
But Rich’s text, like Char’s original, calls to the future as well. It does so thematically, by foregrounding a complete translation of #7 of the Feuillets (the only entry translated in full), echoing in contemporary English Char’s earlier disillusionment and dire prediction. Situated at the head of section two, creating a framework for references to Bernard, it asks today’s reader to hear once again what was written between 1943 and 1944 and to judge its pertinence for now: “The war will prolong itself beyond any platonic armistice. The implanting of political concepts will go on amid upheavals and under cover of self-confident hypocrisy. Don’t smile. Thrust aside both skepticism and resignation and prepare your soul to face an intramural confrontation with demons as cold-blooded as microbes.”
The choice of text and its dramatic positioning underscore Rich’s own role as fellow “poet-resistant,” a role reinforced in section #3. Here the poet suddenly addresses Char directly, an “I” speaking to a “you,” over the rift of time and death: “Insoluble riverrain conscience echo of the future / I keep vigil for you here by the reeds of Elkhorn Slough.” Though connections of place frame the two figures, two internal phrases bind them yet more closely. The first is “echo of the future.” If Char’s poetry is, in its sentiments as well as in its linguistic action, a text that not only haunts the future but looks to it for interpretation, Rich’s text acts to respond. Through her choice of incidents, her image-filled mode of writing, her “historicized” translation, and the pervasive fragmentariness of her sections #1 and #2, she calls Char’s past into the poetic present. But in the overall unfolding of her poem, and especially in its progression from impersonation, to translation, and finally to dialogue in part #3, we see that her own text, not unlike Char’s dialectical illumination of present and past in his description of “Le Prisonnier,” has cited/translated Char’s poetry from the past at least in part in order to allow it to reflect its “sense into our condition.” Speaking to our war-torn planet at the turn-of-the century through the poetic memories of World War II, it asks us to pause, to reflect. In the process, Char’s work, this “echo of the future” acquires new vitality.
The second phrase, “I keep vigil for you,” repeated at the beginning and end of Rich’s last section, underscores the point. Does the term “vigil” look to the past, suggesting a rite in memory of the dead? Or does it look to the future, signifying the watch kept on the eve of a festival or holy day? Standing between past and future, like so many of Char’s own words, it seems to insist, above all, on a purposeful wakefulness. As Rich herself tells us, “the poem is the vigil.”24 Its “now” entails that particular wakefulness that poetic language can provide: a resistance to expected myths or fixed meanings, a sharpened sense of semantic possibilities, and a call to readerly engagement.
In its strange, fragmented form, Rich’s poem thus creates a complex “dialogue d’êtres humains.” It speaks to the ghost of Char—and Char’s ghostly figure Bernard, presenting the poet’s historical action against injustice and his hope through tragic awareness. It speaks to the voices of previous translations. It also reminds us of something that Char—like Rich herself—believes: that poetry can, and perhaps must, be a part of action and a taste of life: “[Y]ou / held poetry at your lips a piece of wild thyme ripped / from a burning meadow a mimosa twig / from still unravaged country. You kept your senses about you like that and like this I keep vigil for you.” Using metaphor to bridge poetry and historical reality, English and French, Rich’s vigil offers its active wakefulness in remembrance, and as a contemprorary model of resistance and hope. In the process, her text extends its dialogue to twenty-first century Anglo-American readers. As she writes in a recent essay, “To read, to listen, to write, to feel, to fear, to draw courage from others, to take risks, to wrestle with contradictions, to engage with others—this is, indeed, the verb without tenses, the conversation without an end.”25
Through these readings, I have attempted to draw out some of Benjamin’s insights into the way translation contributes to the “more encompassing life of history.” While focusing primarily on Char’s poetry of World War II, I have also considered more briefly Rich’s compelling “vigil,” the 1999 poem entitled “Char.” Both, I would argue, are linguistic acts that relay historical experience with all the power of that “temporal imagination” so evident in writers who matured through the violent upheavals of the twentieth century. In different ways, each creates a verbal echo of the past that resonates in the consciences—and words—of those who, as Char puts it, “inherit and question.” Translating history, they remind us that translation is a temporal art, one that can contribute to the action of history itself, and to the ongoing “conversation” that gives it a meaning and a future.
NOTES
1. Jacques Derrida, “What is a ‘Relevant’ Translation?” Critical Inquiry 27(2), pp. 174–200. Also Jacques Derrida, “Des Tours de Babel,” in Difference in Translation, ed. Joseph F. Graham (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), pp. 209–49.
2. See René Char, Oeuvres complètes (Paris: Gallimard, 1983), pp. LXVI–LXXII; Marie-Claude Char, ed., René Char: Dans l’atelier du poète (Paris: Gallimard, 1996), pp. 96–319; Mary Ann Caws, René Char (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1977), pp. 13–34; also Laurent Greilsamer, L’éclair au front: la vie de René Char (Paris: Fayard, 2004) pp. 47–133.
3. See testimonies collected in René Char: Cahier de l’Herne (Paris: Edition de l’Herne, n.d.), pp. 14–15; 191–209. Also Greilsamer, L’éclair, pp. 137–224.
4. Paul Veyne, René Char en ses poèmes (Paris: Gallimard, 1990), p. 419. (Translation mine)
5. On the topic of trauma and the need for the “unspeakable” confession, see Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, M.D., Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis and History (New York: Routledge, 1992); Cathy Caruth, ed., Trauma: Explorations in Memory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995); Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narration and History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996).
6. Letter of René Char to Gilbert Lély, July 17, 1945. Cited by Jean-Claude Matthieu, La poésie de René Char II (Paris: José Corti, 1985), p. 211. Translation mine.
7. René Char, Feuillets d’Hypnos in Oeuvres complètes (Paris: Gallimard, 1983), p. 173. Further references to individual numbered texts will be included parenthetically. Unless otherwise noted, this and all subsequent translations of Feuillets d’Hypnos are drawn from René Char, Leaves of Hypnos, trans. Cid Corman (New York: Grossman, 1973).
8. See, for instance, #23, “Présent crénelé,” (“Crenellated present”), or #101, “Imagination, mon enfant” (“Imagination, my child.”)
9. Derrida, “What is,” pp. 179–83. See, by contrast, pp. 199–200.
10. Walter Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator,” p. 80.
11. Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future (New York: Penguin Books, 1993), pp. 3–15.
12. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), pp. 175–247.
13. René Char, “Héraclite d’Éphèse,” in René Char: Dans l’Atelier du poète, ed. Marie Claude Char (Paris: Gallimard, 1996), p. 547. Translation mine.
14. See, for instance, Char’s fragment #153 with its words, “L’homme s’éloigne à regret de son labyrinthe. Les Mythes millénaires le pressent de ne pas partir” (Man withdraws reluctantly from his labyrinth. The millennial myths urge him not to go).
15. Bertrand Marchal, “Le tableau pulvérisé: le prisonnier, la lampe, l’ange. René Char et Georges de la Tour,” L’Information littéraire, 41 année, no. 5, pp. 14–19. See the article for further details on motifs mentioned here. It cites, for instance, a letter from Char a G. Lely, du 10 avril, 1944: “La poésie représente ‘la liberté’ c’est vers elle que se tendent mes bras du prisonnier intense (J’ai devant les yeux la reproduction que tu connais de l’admirable peinture de Georges de la Tour où tout au fond d’un cachot lointain, inatteignable, une femme éclaire verticalement, d’une bougie dense comme la racine du jour, un homme assis plus nu et decharné que le limon des origines: me voici).” (Poetry represents “liberty”; it is toward her that my arms, those of a desolate prisoner, reach out [I have before my eyes the reproduction that you know of the wonderful painting by Georges de la Tour where, in the depths of a remote, unreachable dungeon, a standing woman gives light, from a candle thick as the root of day, to a seated man more naked and emaciated than the dust from which we came: this is me]).
16. Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations, p. 263. Though Benjamin’s article on translation preceded his “Theses on History” by more than fifteen years, it is clear that his ideas about translation and his later description of history are closely linked. In each case, the past becomes redeemed in the present and in a way that allows a “future” to appear. Past lived experience, or past language acquires new meaning in the “now” of the translator’s language in a way that allows it to live actively in the present as it opens to the future of unformulated interpretation.
17. Letter of René Char to Vittorio Sereni, December 21, 1969, courtesy of Marie-Claude Char. Translation mine.
18. Benjamin, “The Task,” p.76.
19. See essay by Samuel Weber, part I of this volume.
20. Benjamin, “The Task,” pp. 71–72.
21. René Char, Hypnos Waking: Poems and Prose by René Char, selected and trans. by Jackson Matthews, with the collaboration of William Carlos Williams, Richard Wilbur, William Jay Smith, Barbara Howes, W. S. Merwin and James Wright (New York: Random House, 1956).
22. René Char, Leaves, trans. Cid Corman.
23. Adrienne Rich, Midnight Salvage (New York: Norton, 1999), pp. 16–18, and 71. For Rich’s essays on poetry and politics, see her What Is Found There (New York & London: W. W. Norton, 2003).
24. Adrienne Rich, Arts of the Possible (New York: Norton, 2000), p. 132.
25. Rich, What, p. XVIII.