CIV
LE SQUELETTE LABOURER
I
Dans les planches d’anatomie
Qui traînent sur ces quais
poudreux
Oû maint livre cadavéreux
Dort comme une antique
momie,
Dessins auxquels la gravité
Et le savoir d’un vieil
artiste,
Bien que le sujet en soit
triste,
Ont communiqué la Beauté,
On voit, ce qui rend plus
complétes
Ces mystérieuses horreurs,
Bêchant comme de
laboureurs,
Des Écorchés et des
Squelettes.
II
De ce terrain
que vous fouillez,
Manants
résignés et funébres ,
De tout
l’effort de vos vertèbres,
Ou de vos
muscles dépoillés,
Dites, quelle
moisson étrange,
Forçats
arrachés au charnier,
Tirer-vous, et
de quel fermier
Avez- vous à
remplir la grange?
Voulez-vous (
d’un destin trop dur
Épouvantable et
clair embléme !)
Montrer que
dans la fosse même
Le sommeil
promis n’est pas sûr;
Qu’envers nous
le Néant est traïte;
Que tout, même
le Mort, nous ment,
Et que
sempiternellement,
Hélas! il nous
faudra peut-être
Dans quelque
pays inconnu
Écorcher la
terre revêche
Et posser une
lourde bêche
Sous notre pied
sanglant et nu?
CIV
THE SKELETAL LABOURER
On the anatomical plates
Which pepper the bouquinistes
Where the textbook cadavers
Sleep like ancient
mummies,
Drawings which the gravity
And the knowledge of the
artist,
Though the subject be
grave,
Tend to communicate
Beauty,
We can see what makes them
so complete
These mysterious horrors
Digging like labourers,
The flayed alive and the
skeletal.
II
In this terrain
where you excavate,
Spalpeens
resigned and funerary,
With every
effort of your vertebrae,
Or your
remaining muscle,
Pray tell, from
what strange bog,
Forceps ripped
from the morgue,
Are you torn,
for which farmer
Have you loaded
the harvest?
Would you like
to ( a destiny too rough
Appalling
emblem that you signal!)
Expose the mass
grave
Where the
promised sleep is not at all assured;
And for us the
abyss is treacherous;
Where
everything, even Death, is a lie,
And
perpetually,
Alas! we need
to perhaps,
In some unknown
country,
Flail alive the
earth
And pass over
it a great spade,
With a bloody
naked foot?
Bog Bodies
There
is a room in the National Museum of Archaeology, on Kildare Street in Dublin,
where there are
exhibits
of bodies which have been preserved by the chemical properties in the waters of
the bog and
which
preserve almost perfectly the dismembered remains of former Irish princes who
were
assassinated
in the most Machiavellian way imaginable; inside this chamber of horrors we are,
us
denizens
of the 21st century, given, thanks to the former State Pathologist,
Marie Cassidy and the team
of
archaeologists who worked with her – my understanding is that it is the first
time that such a
project
has been realised in the country. The reason why I am referencing this
permanent exhibition in
relation
to the poem Le Squelette Laboureur is because of the wonderful
translation, or ‘impure
translation’,
by Seamus Heaney and which was to appear in his, literally and metaphorically,
groundbreaking
collection North ( 1975) and which I am going to give in its entirety here.
The Digging Skeleton
You find anatomical plates
Buried along these dusty quays
Among books yellowed like mummies
Slumbering in forgotten crates,
Drawings touched with an odd beauty
As if the illustrator had
Responded gravely to the sad
Mementoes of anatomy –
Mysterious candid studies
Of red slobland around the bones.
Like this one: flayed men and
skeletons
Digging the earth like navvies.
These
are the first three verses of the poem, and what I think is so commendable
about Heaney’s
translation
is that he manages to insert a rhyming pattern ( ABBA as opposed to ABAB, as in
Mahon’s
version of Paysage ), this alternating rhyme is so much more natural as it is
unforced, almost
conversational;
Heaney learnt this from Yeats, and of course Kavanagh, the two old masters of 20th
century
Irish poetry. But this is but to talk of the form, as for the content, then we
must refer back to
the
room in the National Museum of Archaeology, as this is Heaney’s domain.
The archaeological
referencing,
the forensic detail to the choice of words. Notice the use of navvies as a term
rather than
my
own spalpeen, as I was aping Heaney to a large extent here, but Heaney’s choice
was dependent
on
the rhyme!
II
Sad gang of apparitions,
Your skinned muscles like plaited sedge
And your spines hooped toward a
sunk edge
Of the spade, my patient ones,
Tell me, as you labour hard
To break my unrelenting soil,
What barns are there for you to
fill?
What farmer dragged you from the
boneyard?
Or, are you emblems of the truth,
Death’s lifers, hauled from the
narrow cell
And stripped of night-shirt
shrouds, to tell:
“This is the reward of faith
In rest eternal. Even death
Lies. The void deceives.
We do not fall like autumn leaves
To sleep in peace. Some traitor
breath
Revives our clay, sends us abroad
And by the sweat of our stripped
brows
We earn our deaths; our one repose
When the bleeding instep finds its
spade.’[1]
There
is just so much to commend here. To my mind it is the best translation I have
read of a poem by
Baudelaire.
No comments:
Post a Comment