Serge Pey: Three Poems in English from "Why I Crush Tomatoes"

Translated from French by Yasser Elhariry 

[My first memory of Serge Pey was in Paris, sometime in the early 1980s, when he woke us up in the apartment off Saint Germain that my wife & I were then borrowing.  Our son had arrived a few hours before, traveling with a couple of friends across Europe & walking halfway across Parison the morning of a Metro strike.  The three of them were sacked out on the floor, across the room from us, but didn�t hear Serge�s heavy knocking on the door.  We did & when we opened up for him he moved in quickly, holding with both hands a large, hollow, brightly painted rain stick, filled with beans or pebbles, which when upended made a gentle swooshing sound like rain or falling water.  He told us he had come to serenade us � Aztec style � & walked out to the center of the rather large room, where the ritual began.  Those were still the years when nothing could surprise us, so we sat up on our bed & listened, somewhere between sleep & waking.  His performance, which we recognized as �his performance,� went on for 10 or 15 minutes, during which time one or other of the young men on our floor would open up his eyes from time to time & then fall back to sleep.  At one point too the live-in maid walked past him on her way into the kitchen but seemed to take no notice, & Serge, when his ritual work was over, embraced us both & left as peacefully & caringly as he had entered.

               I have seen & heard him many times since then & have come to recognize him as one of our most inventive & energized performers of a new & constantly evolving poetry.  In addition to his performances (often still with sticks and rain sticks) he is the author of nearly sixty volumes of written poetry & was the editor for many years of �meute and Tribu as two principal magazines of the European & world avant-garde.  The title poem of his new work Why I Crush Tomatoes, translated into English by Yasser Elhariry, is a masterpiece of poetry & poetics, but its 758 numbered sections are too long to publish here.  The following three shorter poems will hopefully be enough to give a hint or taste of his ongoing sense & sensibility. (J.R.)] 

Imbecile 

When I speak

of your poems

to an imbecile

it�s as

if I were pissing

against the wind
wanting the
wind
to change direction

Imbeciles are

truly numerous
on earth
Surely more
numerous
than the poems
that you write

An imbecile doesn�t

wear a watch
but chooses
the hour
we speak of you

An imbecile

may divide your hope
by zero

An imbecile may

make
onions cry
when he speaks
of his suicide
while affirming
that we�re assassinating him

An imbecile

feigns ignoring
the truth by rigging
a photograph of
poetry

For an imbecile

a thousand examples
are pointless
and a single lie
proves all

An imbecile may say

that a monster
recruits thousands
of angels
for his army

An imbecile may

declare
that this text
is no poem

When the toast

of a poet falls
the imbecile believes
the jam
changes sides
some where
in an other poem
or world

When the world falls

the imbecile knows
not 

We Have A Flag 

We have a flag

that we see and a flag

that we do not see

We have flag

with no flag

of all flags

We have a flag

like a kerchief

to vomit our blood and our skin

We have a flag that couches

a skeleton

dismantled of its own bones

We have a flag that undresses

all flags

Our flag is a sandal

Our flag is a piece of foot
 

We have a flag

A piece of serge

We have a flag

We have a hand

We have a skin

We have a flag made

with an eye and a bird

We have a flag with no flag

We have a flag

that does not love flags

We have a flag on fire that

burns all flags

We have a piece of wood

We have a piece of skin

We have a flag with no flag

amidst a million flags

We have a flag with no flag

among a single flag

We have no flag

We have a flag with no flag

  in our own flag 

Time for Assassins 

When a poem

cannot even
save death
it�s time for assassins

Death is dead

We no longer find it
in the tombs
upturned
of the bistros

Some

dedicate themselves to
find
it by dying twice
and confuse
this effort with
resurrection

The caf� is dead

The table is dead
The bread is dead
The telefilm of the dead
applauds other
dead
who run behind
balls

We know it

the dead vote
for the dead

When death has had enough

of death
we must console it
by giving it sugar
black
like to a dog

We bark

By living
we only find
the dead who
no longer attend
us & that�s what we call
death

The tombs are

cradles
constructed by babies
in cement

Our only way of being

is killing
It�s time for
assassins
The unique virtue of
man
is that he knows that a
sack
doesn�t stand up straight
when empty

Efra�n Huerta: Some Minimal Poems, from �Poem�nimos Completos�

Translations from Spanish by Jerome Rothenberg

calderoniana 

I was

A fool
& what
I loved
Has made
Me
      Into
           Two fools

no helping it

And from

Us
The
Beatified
Poets
Ariseth
The
Gloom
Of the
            Womb

insectarium

A

Place
Where
The
Sectarians
Are
Very
              In

ferocity

From the

Fallen
Poetree
Everyone
Makes
                        Ashes

gideana

Not

Having
Had
The guts
To kill himself
            Decides
            He�s dead
            Already

salem

As

Easy
As
Finding
A
Witch
In a
            Haystack

the barbarian

Always

I�ve
Sought
To descend
As far
Up
As possible

sterility

Theoretician

Of everything
Fighter
For nothing

a poem of shipwrecks

1/

Me here
Navigating
Through the
Civic
Waves

2/

Me here
No longer struggling
In the
Icy waters
Of the ego�s
Calculating
Mind

3/

That one
Drowns alone
And lonely
In a
Glass
Of water

4/

Then I
Keep on
Swimming
In betwixt
            Two waters

5/

One day
It won�t be raining
Into buckets
It will just be
Raining
Buckets

6/

You always
End up
Kicking off
Just like
            A drowned man

7/

impossibility

For now

I cannot go
To San Miguel
De Allende

I don�t have

The change to spare
Not even for
The landscape

threats

Bless�d be

The humble
Poets
Because
From them
Will rise
The kingdoms
Of the
Grass

saint francis (i)
a paraphrase

Everything�s

Fucked
Up
Except
For
Love

[note.  Born in the same year as his fellow poet Octavio Paz, Huerta (1914-1982) has come to be recognized as a pivotal figure in modern Mexican poetry.  His influence on later Mexican poets continues to grow, & if the Poem�nimosaren�t typical of his prolific work in poetry and poetics, they�re a contribution nonetheless to the creation of a minimal & �impure� poetry as one aspect of 20th & 21st-century experimental modernism worldwide.  The translations-in-progress that I�m showing here are a reflection of my own pleasure in his work over all, behind which there�s also the following account by Huerta himself:

�I believe that every poem is a world.  A world & something still more special.  A sealed-off territory immune to interference from those without credentials, the censors & the lyrically disabled.  A poem�nimo is a world, yes, but sometimes I have forebodings that I�ve discovered a new galaxy & that light years serve me only as a point of reference, a very fuzzy reference, because the poem�nimo is like the turning of a corner or the next stop on the subway line.  A poem�nimo is a crazy butterfly, captured sometimes, sometimes crammed into a straitjacket.  And you may no longer touch it, that�s the thing.  That crazy thing, that thing that�s unpredictable, that falls down onto you or just rubs up against you, still makes sense � as it has done already.�

Writes Octavio Paz: �Efra�n Huerta has a central place in the poetry of the modern city.�  

And something more than that. (J.R.)]

Translating Andr� Breton: Robert Duncan & David Antin

[Going through some old files recently I came across two translations by Robert Duncan of poems by the Surrealist overlord & master-poet Andr� Breton.  That brought me back too to a series of translations from Breton that David Antin composed & that I published sometime in the 1960s.  An old theme of mine � & ours � that I still cherish is the relation of the second great wave of American experimental poetry to antecedents not only �in the American grain� � as then widely promulgated � but in a direct line from forerunners in other languages & cultures.  For myself, writing & living in the same late-twentieth-century America, there was a sense that all of us, as poets, shared a past & future with forerunners & contemporaries across a startling range of times & places. This came at a time when we were discovering ourselves also as American poets with a new language in which to write & a new perspective � a series of new perspectives � that we could write from.  As I look at Duncan & Antin then, both of them taking pleasure in the work of our great French predecessor, I feel again the sense of what I�ve written of elsewhere as our French connection, & that connection & others I take to be as vital for us as any rooted solely on our native shore. (J.R.)]  

dreams                                                                                                                                             translated by Robert Duncan

But the light returns
the pleasure of smoking
The spider-fairy of the cinders in points of blue and red
is never content with her mansions of Mozart.
The wound heals cvcrything uses its ingenuity to make
     itself
recognized I speak and beneath your face the cone of
     shadow
turns which from the depths of the sea has calld the pearls
the eyelids, the lips, inhale the day
the arena empties itself
one of the birds in flying away
did not think to forget the straw and the thread
hardly has a crowd thought it fit to stir
when the arrow flies
a star nothing but a star lost in the fur of the night

New York, October 1943 

vigilance                                                                                                                                                      translated by David Antin                                                                                                                 

In Paristhe tower of Saint Jacques careening
Like a sunflower
Nearly collides with the Seine
Its shadow slides imperceptibly among the tugs
At this moment in my sleep
I steer silent toward my couch
I rise and set the fire
That will destroy the remains of my extorted consent
The furniture gives place to animals of the same size
With friendly faces
Lions whose manes consume the chairs
Dogfish whose white bellies absorb the last shudder
     of the sheets

I see myself in the hour of love of blue eyelids

Burning in my turn I see the solemn receptacle of

     nothing

That was my body

Excavated by the patient beaks of the fire-ibises

And at the end I pass into the ark

Indifferent to the dragging steps of life�s remote

     pedestrians

The spines of the sun fall golden

Across the white pines of the rain

I hear the tearing of human underwear like a great

     leaf

Under the nail of absence and presence who connive together
All of the ways are exhausted there remains only a scrap of

     perfumed lace

The husk of a lace perfectly shaped like a breast
I touch nothing now but the heart of things I hold the thread
     in my hands 

windward                                                                                                                                           translated by Robert Duncan

Jersey Guernsey by times somber and illustrious

restore to the flood two cups overflowing with melody,

the one whose name is on all lips,

the other which has been in no way profaned,
and this one discloses the imprint of a scene, familial and
     anodyne

beneath the lamp an adolescent reads aloud to an aged dame

but what fervor on the part of each and in him what transports
however little she had been the friend of Fabre d'Olivet

and he had been calld to exalt himself with the name of

     Saint-Yves d'Alveydre and the octopus in his crystalline

retreat gives way in whorls and ringing sounds

to the Hebrew alphabet

I know what were the poetic directions yesterday,

they are no longer valid for today.

The little songs go on to die their natural death.

I persuade you to put on your hats before going.

It will be better no longer to be satisfied with your thin soup

brewd up in measure in blinking rooms

while justice is renderd by three quarters of beef,

once for all Poetry must rise again from the ruins

in the robes and the glory of Esclarmonde

and reclaim aloud the cause of Esclarmonde

for there can be no peace for the soul of Esclarmonde

in our hearts and the words die that are not

good nails for the hooves of the horse of Esclarmonde

before the precipice where the edelweiss keeps the breath

     of Esclarmonde

the night's vision has been something it is a question now

of extending from the physical to the moral

in which its empire will be without limits.

The images have pleased me, it was the art

wrongly decried for burning its candle at both ends,

but everything is much more wick, the complicities are

     otherwise learned and dramatic.

As you will see I have just seen an eskimo mask

it's the head of a grey reindeer under the snow

realistic in conception except that between the right ear                                                       

     and eyes lies in wait the tiny rose-colord hunter

just as he is supposed to appear in the distance to the

     animal.

But fitted with cedar and a metal without alloy

the marvelous blade

cut out in waves on an egyptian

back in the reflection of the fourteenth century of our era

alone will express it

by one of the animated figures of the tarot of the days

     to come,

the hand in the act of taking at the very moment of

     letting go

quicker than at the game of la mourre* and of l'amour 

*La mourre�a game of flashing the hand and asking "How many fingers do I hold up?" R.D.

 

a man and woman absolutely white

translated by David Antin 

At the depths of the parasol I see the marvelous prostitutes

On the side near the street lamps their gowns are the color

      of polished wood

They are walking a great piece of wallpaper
At which one cannot look without that choking feeling about 
    the heart of  ancient floors in buildings being demolished
Where a slab of marble lies fallen from the fireplace
And a skein of chains is tangled in the mirrors
A great instinct toward combustion rises from the street

     where they walk

Like scorched flowers
Their distant eyes raising a gale of stones
As they sink motionless to the center of the whirlpool
Nothing equals for me the sense of their useless thought
The freshness of the gutters where their little boots bathe
     the shadows of their beaks
The reality of their wrists of fresh cut hay into which they
     disappear
I see their breasts which seize a point out of this profound night

Where the time for lying down and the time for getting up are

     the only precise measures of life
I see their breasts that are stars over waves
Their breasts in which the invisible blue milk cries as ever