Entre deux crépuscules

by Pierre Reverdy

C’est dans ce carré de ciel plus clair qu’on allumera les étoiles pour le feu d’artifice. Par-dessus la hauteur des arbres — des mouvements de vent, des bruits d’orage — des appels menaçants. C’est l’endroit où l’on ouvre la grille. Les raies se détachent du mur et c’est une ombre oblique sur la route — qui court trop vite. On attend. Près du bois, d’où sort le pavillon, on entend — et ce sont certainement des pas tranquilles — en même temps que s’élève une prière ou, plus loin, un plus joyeux refrain. Puis le jour entre tout à fait, les cœurs se rétablissent. Puisque tout est encore remis au lendemain.

Between two twilights

by Pierre Reverdy

It’s in this clearest patch of sky that they’ll light up the stars for the fireworks. Above the treetops—the motion of wind, the sounds of a storm—menacing cries. It’s the place where they open the gate. Lines come loose from the wall and it’s a diagonal shadow on the road, running too fast. We wait. Over by the woods where the house juts out we hear what must be quiet footsteps, just as a prayer rises up, or, further off, a more joyful refrain. Then the day arrives completely, and hearts are restored. Now that everything’s been put off again until tomorrow.

translated from French by Dan Bellm

Pierre Reverdy was born in Narbonne, France, in 1889, and came to Paris in 1910, where he founded the groundbreaking, highly influential journal Nord-Sud in 1917 with Max Jacob and Guillaume Apollinaire, publishing those poets as well as the early work of André Breton, Tristan Tzara, Louis Aragon, Philippe Soupault, Vicente Huidobro, and Jean Cocteau. He also became closely associated with Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Georges Braque, and Juan Gris, each of whom later illustrated one or more of his books. André Breton, in his first Surrealist Manifesto, hailed Reverdy as “the greatest poet of the time.” Yet after living at the center of French poetry and culture for some fifteen years, Reverdy withdrew from it almost completely, converting to Catholicism in 1926 and leaving Paris with his wife, Henriette, for Solesmes, a village near the Belgian border best known for its Benedictine abbey. During the German occupation of France of World War II, he served as a partisan in the resistance movement. Except for intermittent visits to Paris, Reverdy continued to write and to live what he called a “quasi-monastic life” in Solesmes until his death in 1960.

Dan Bellm is a poet and translator living in Berkeley, California. His translations of poetry and fiction from Spanish and French have appeared in The American Poetry Review, The Ecco Anthology of International Poetry, The Kenyon Review, Pleiades, Two Lines, The Village Voice, and other journals and anthologies. He is a recipient of the 2013 Translation Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and he has also published three books of poetry, most recently Practice (Sixteen Rivers Press), winner of a 2009 California Book Award. He teaches literary translation at Antioch University Los Angeles and at New York University.