HEARING EYE Publications
Poetry London Spring 2004
Jacques Prévert, tr. Sarah Lawson
Selected Poems
Hearing Eye £8.95
In what deserves to become a genuinely popular poetry book, with brief but informative introduction and notes, Sarah Lawson handles the puns and other word-play deftly. For instance, she resolves 'Hamlet at School' ('L'accent grave') by translating the famous 'to be' into Danish. One translation oddity in 'The Broken Mirror' ('Le miroir brisé'), where three lines end with fair (fête), apparently stems from a misprint in her French text; the 1949 Le pont du jour edition gives tête (head) for the third, producing in context a more striking line, 'In the desert of this head'.
We tend to think of Prévert (1900-77) as light-hearted, yet lightness applies more to his technique than his subject-matter. His first book, Paroles (1946), which made his name and remains his best-known, is steeped in the horrors of the Occupation and French postwar uneasiness. Many poems are concerned with the military one way or another. Some poems' publishing histories, as sometimes indicated in Sarah Lawson's notes, are themselves mini-histories of repression, for instance the famous song 'Barbara', banned from the radio in 1945, and the anti-religious 'Sacred Scriptures' ('Écritures saintes'), published in the magazine Méridien in 1943 causing subscribers to cancel and bookshops to refuse shelf-space.
The post-Paroles poems in this selection as well as mirroring our new concerns, pre-eminently environmental degradation, show Prévert as more lyric, more preoccupied with personal relationships, love and sex (though he may have felt compelled to self-censor earlier).
Fêted as France's most popular poet at home, Prévert seems not to have a large following in Britain. As to his anglophone influence (with Lawrence Ferlinghetti among his translators), surrealistically or through apparent inconsequentiality, why not speculate about — in different ways — the work of Alan Brownjohn, Paul Durcan, John Ashbery? Here is 'The Wonders of Freedom', a later poem:
Between the teeth of a trapVal Warner
The paw of a white fox
And blood on the snow
The blood of the white fox
And tracks in the snow
The tracks of the white fox
Who escapes on three legs
In the setting sun
With between his own teeth
A hare that is still alive.
Ambit 172 April 2003
Selected Poems
Jacques Prévert, trans. Sarah Lawson
Hearing Eye £8.95
Prévert began as a songwriter and screenwriter — most famously for Les Enfants du Paradis, 1943. In the war he joined no organisation but did noble unofficial resistance work. Then, in the post-war existentialist period, he made a hit as a poet with his accessible, witty, erotic and pacifist two-fingers-up squibs against conformity. Millions of copies of his books have been sold, which speaks well for the latent anarchism of the French.
He ruthlessly satirises slavery, both public and private. A lover buys first birds and flowers for his love, then heavy chains, and is surprised not to find her in the slave market. But a jailer with a blood-stained key has decided to let his love out, let her even forget him: she can love someone else, even come back, but:
I will keep alwaysBut there is sadness too — the sadness of freedom, development and enlightenment:
in my two cupped hands
until the end of my days
the softness of her breasts shaped by love.
You left me my dearSlipperiness is recommended as the technique of survival in a murderous age: cunningly, his speaking horse and whale turn the tables on their captors and escape being eaten. This is unlike a conformist son, who "thinks nothing absolutely nothing", gets killed in the war, and the father and mother go to the graveyard and find it natural.
As I left you
We left each other together
Each one individually
It was to hear each other better
and miss each other very much
It was to understand each other
to know who we were
You are as lovely as the day
the day when for the first time I caught
sight of you and as sad as the night
when you left without a second thought
Despair wears pince-nez and an old grey suit; he sits on a bench smoking a small cigar. He wants to draw your attention, but ignore him. Study the birds:
I learned very late in life to love birds.Two snails going to a funeral are told not to mourn by the sun but have a glass of beer and enjoy the clinking of glasses and the new summer colours.
we see eye to eye
they don't concern themselves with me
I don't concern myself with them.
they set an example
...not an example like for example Monsieur
Glacis who conducted himself remarkably
courageously during the war or the example of
little Paul who was so poor and so handsome and
so honest to boot and who later became big Paul
so rich and so old so honourable and so horrid
and so miserly and so charitable and so devout...
These are life-affirming Pansies, like Lawrence's. Unfortunately Prévert's French is not here, but there are a hundred and twenty-odd translated pages from five of Préverts collections.
Herbet Lomas
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