L’ombre et l’image

by Pierre Reverdy

Si j’ai ri ce n’est pas du monde éclatant et joyeux qui passait devant moi. Les têtes penchées ou droites me font peur et mon rire aurait changé de forme en une grimace. Les jambes qui courent tremblent et les pieds plus lourds manquent le pas. Je n’ai pas ri du monde qui passait devant moi — mais parce que j’étais seul, plus tard, dans les champs, devant la forêt énorme et calme et sous les voix qui, dans l’air endormi, se répondaient.

Shadow and image

by Pierre Reverdy

If I laughed it wasn’t because of the bright and joyful world passing before me. Heads leaning forward or facing straight ahead scare me, and my laugh would have turned into a grimace. Running legs tremble and heavy feet misstep. I wasn’t laughing at the world passing before me—I laughed because I was alone, later on, in the country, standing in front of the calm enormous forest under voices that answered each other in the drowsy air.

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.