The Transcendental Friend no. 9, 3/99

Issue No. 9, March 1999

Idiosyncratica

Prologue to the Birth of an Angel
a translation of Jean Cocteau's Prologue
to the "Discours du Grand Sommeil"
by Kristin Prevallet

While riding in an elevator up to Picasso's flat for lunch, Jean Cocteau's invisible angel appeared to him as a name on a brass door-plate which read: Heurtebise Elevator. The angel then dictated the poem "L'Ange Heurtebise" against Cocteau's will. Although this was in 1925, the angel had first appeared in 1915 while Cocteau was working for a Red Cross ambulance dispatch unit, Sector 131, during World War I. There he wrote two war poems, "Le Cap de Bonne-Espérance," (in which angel is manifest as an airplane) and "Discours du Grand Sommeil" (in which the angel first speaks).

It is out of the montage of war images in the prologue to "Discours du Grand Sommeil" that Cocteau's expresses his grief over the death of his lover Jean LeRoy, a young poet killed on the front line. It is out of Cocteau's prologue that the angel emerges from the devestation of war, to offer advice and counsel to the spiritually shattered poet.

PROLOGUE
to the memory of Jean LeRoy

Translating from what? This dead language, this dead country, or my dead friends.

I stand firm but
alone in the mine
with my map
my pickax
and my stupidity.

•
More white-capped scandals
more laughter, they
put a window
over the golden bee factory.

•
Great Walls fall
between the tribunal of each day
and I who cannot defend myself.

•
The innocent one
accused of espionage
is troubled. His attitude accuses him,
and he faints
before the guards.

•
How to escape this atrocious farce
of my friends disguised as phantoms:
twelve times I pull the trigger
of the revolver
they already emptied.

•
Stop the revolt,
my rich heart, and beat
a cymbal right through the center
where an orchestra plays.

•
Nothing,
not invented vocabularies or race,
not proof nine hundred times proven
and always false,
can shake our old love, Poetry.

•
Poetry, oh my love
here I am
alone in your game,
you are better
than love,
it is so sad
there is no longer
anything else to do
but love
when no longer
there is nothing else to do
but make love or
never love again.

•
In the house of logic
I annoy everyone.
The elevator
carries me
as if I were a fairy.

•
I took the vow of solitude.
I squint everywhere I go.
I float in a dream:
the world in a sleeping
century
where I emerge
like a crocodile
in a traffic jam of canoes.

•
The eye half-closed and a tooth
stuck in a smile,
hibernating,
asleep for one hundred days,
a strange enchantment.

•
Here disappears
my severity,
these songs that smash in the skin,
a breath so hard it imprints its form
on trumpets.

•
I lived with the victims of war.
I saw young ancestors
carving cows.
I saw the watchman
who is the ear plant
and the eye plant
take root.

•
The wet kisses of the nurse
makes the soldiers marching through the mud
retreat.
I saw what man is capable of becoming
and that, thanks to the sky, he will never be.

•
I saw the real heroes who survived
and the shy criminal who finally found
impunity at the scene of the crime.
This and that all
on the same palm.

•
I heard the marching feet
of the night guard
the click of the can on the gun's butt.

•
The torpedo of the trench mortar, a vault
badly attached to the cable,
hesitates,
falls from the second story
and crushes the gawkers on the street below.

•
Evening, several feet above, I heard
the silence of Fafner
bustling with electricians and mechanics.
Snow.
The barrel plugged the cudgel blasts
upon the plank.
The staggering shadow
of roman candles.

•
Déchariot! Poor thing,
what have they done to you?
Your blood is pouring, and death seeps
in through four holes.

•
I found the captain.
The roads were torn apart by shells
and the car was bumpy.
I took his arm.
I did not notice he was dead
because his watch
was ticking in my hand.

•
Blaise, they ripped off your right hand.
You carried it for miles,
like a dead parrot.
They pruned you
so colorful poems might blossom.

•
This evening, Marrast went to the line.
Where is my little goat?
It kicked my marble forehead.
It nibbled Bastos cigarettes
from the rifles of sailors.

•
Paul, pilot,
Sector B.R. S.P 12.

•
I went back to the village.
My room is hot.
The 860th day
of the crime epidemic.
The 860th day
of misunderstandings
and eternal grief.

•
A sick god takes care of us
on our red glob
that will never heal.

•
Already the sun is calm.
The moon: a corpse;
earth,
between the two,
chomping, cow,
continents painted on its belly.

•
Nature!
On a face no longer young,
the appearance of majestic resignation.
Life goes on,
let purification begin.

•
A man finds refuge
in responsibility.
He doesn't want to be the sacrificed beast,
he wants to be the sacrificer.
He doesn't want to build an ark,
he wants to be the storm clouds.
He doesn't want to be
prey of the earth,
he wants to offer her a banquet.

•
But
the earth is no longer hungry or thirsty
so no one dares be the first to prepare a table.
We stuff ourselves,
she dribbles,
with profound grimaces.

•
Peace
huge sleeping shepherdess
you take bad care of your trumpets.

•
What prince, what captain
will wake you
where you sleep?

•
Already, everywhere, dawn hides
wet dawn, dawn beaten down;
the canon spasm will kill
her rosy thighs.

•
And the poor mother who recounts
again for the hundredth time,
the testimony of a friend:
"Then he said: Ah! and fell just like that."

•
I work, here is the pen,
the paper: the white pistol
where a man can writhe the mystery.

•
He's playing,
he agitates, he sets
his wing-tips in the curl.
Then the bull
like the black Virgin Mary
adorned in seven daggers
falls to his knees
and pours out his tongue to the sand.

•
Here is the future, the ocean
where death floats with the drift
and just when I reach the mine
my cargo
is flooded.

•
Here is an easier lover;
without specialty or garb,
without a nervous husband
who sizes up
medicine cabinets
in the bathroom.
Skull not
of Minerva
but grasshopper.
Greek summers,
the athletic force
of the stubborn
poem.

•
Quietly I fall. Alas,
nine times out of ten, a single
track, deep in the darkness,
pushes down, climbs out
and disappears
in a fizz of stars.