Vers Minuit, Paul Éluard
Translation by Denise DeVries, Art by Alvaro Ibañez “Clear Night,” 60×48 oil on canvas
Around midnight
Doors open and windows unveil themselves
A silent flame flares and dazzles
Everything is decided I find
Unloved, unwanted creatures
Here’s that idiot receiving international mail
That precious ring we thought was silver
The white-haired, chatting woman
Here is the immaterial girl
Incomplete and ugly, bathed in night and misery
Made up in absurd mauves and periwinkles
Nude and chaste all over, sensitive
Look at the sea and the boats on gaming tables
One free man and another free man and it’s the
same
Enraged animals before their masked terror
of
darkness
Deaths of prisoners, the mad and all the
absent
But you, why aren’t you there to wake me?
~~~
Des portes s’ouvrent des fenêtres se dévoilent
Un feu silencieux s’allume et m’éblouit
Tout se décide je rencontre
Des créatures que je n’ai pas voulues
Voici l’idiot qui recevait des lettres de l’étranger
Voici l’anneau précieux qu’il croyait en argent
Voici la femme bavarde aux cheveux blancs
Voici la fille immatérielle
Incomplète et laide baignée de nuit et de misère
Fardée de mauves et de pervenches absurdes
Sa nudité sa chasteté sensibles de partout
Voici la mer et des bateaux sur des tables de jeu
Un homme libre un autre homme libre et c’est le
même
Des animaux enragés devant la peur masquée de
boue
Des morts des prisonniers des fous tous les absents
Mais toi pourquoi n’es-tu pas là pour m’éveiller
[…] a combination of two blackout poems (seen below) from my translations of Paul Éluard’s poems “Vers minuit” and “A perte de vue dans le sens de mon corps,” part of my exploration of surrealist poetry. […]
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[…] Quasimodo was born in 1901 and trained as a civil engineer. He translated the poetry of Neruda and Eluard, among others, and is considered one of Italy’s foremost poets. His work was part of the Hermetic […]
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[…] parachuted poems*burned like autumn leaves, Surrealismreduced to a cliché of drooping clocks,at midnight, she moved […]
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