Michael Longley’s Wounds

A translation into French of Michael Longley’s 1973 poem, Wounds:

Blessures

De la tête de mon père me viennent ces deux images  —

Gardées au secret jusqu’aujourd’hui :

D’abord, la division d’Ulster sur la Somme

Franchissant le parapet avec des « On emmerde le Pape ! »

« On se rendra pas! » ; Ce garçon à l’agonie

Qui hurle : « Foutez-leur le bonjour des gars de Shankill ! »

« Plus féroces que les Gurkhas »  disait mon père,

Admiratif et stupéfait.

Ensuite ce prêtre  écossais de Londres

Qui, d’un revers élégant de la main et d’une prière,

Réarrangeait les kilts avec son bâton.

À travers ce paysage de fesses putréfiées,

Mon père le suivit pendant cinquante ans.

Enfin, victime sur le tard,

Il annonça – souffrant des traces de plomb enflammées –

« Je meurs pour mon roi et ma patrie, lentement ».

J’ai touché sa main et puis sa tête maigre j’ai touchée.

Pour lui rendre, d’une façon, les honneurs militaires,

Décoré de ses insignes, de son arc-en-ciel de médailles,

Et de sa boussole, j’enterre maintenant près de lui

Trois soldats adolescents, le ventre plein

De plomb et de bière irlandaise, la braguette ouverte.

Avec eux je jette un paquet de Woodbines,

Un briquet Lucifer, Le Sacré Cœur de Jésus,

Pétrifié quand les mitraillettes ont éteint

Pour toujours la veilleuse dans une garderie,

Et aussi un uniforme de contrôleur de bus —

Il tomba près de ses charentaises

Sans un murmure,  tué d’une balle dans la tête

Par un garçon tremblant entré presque par hasard

Avant qu’ils ne baissent le son de la télévision

Où que le dîner ne soit débarrassé.

Aux enfants, à sa femme stupéfaite,

Je pense qu’il dit seulement « Désolé m’dame ».

 

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Belgian Seasons 2: Emile Verhaeren (1855-1916)

Verhaeren by J.S. Sargent, 1915

The Flemish poet Emile Verhaeren  was already an old man when Germany invaded Belgium in August 1914. As the leading figure of the Belgian symbolist mouvement he was also a highly respected writer, translated worldwide (most notably into German by Stefan Sweig). He is remembered for his visionnary poems on the bitter emergence of modernity and his futuristic depictions of rural and urban landscapes (Les Campagnes Hallucinées, 1893, Les Villes Tentaculaires, 1895).

A fervent pacifist, Verhaeren was distraught by the onset of war. He published several elegiac and pacifist collections  on the rape of Belgium before his accidental death in 1916 (La Belgique Sanglante/Belgium’s Blood, Parmi les Cendres/Among the Ashes, Les Ailes rouges de la guerre/The Red Wings of War).

In 1915, the  art journal L’Art et les artistes devoted an issue to the plight of Belgium “hero and martyr” (La Belgique héroïne et martyre). Verhaeren’s contribution celebrates the survival of hope and Belgium’s historical resilience : “I do not want these lines to be the epitaph of those towns that have been beaten to the ground. There is life under the ashes, as spring circulates, drops and rises to the ground under winter’s mantel”.

The same year saw the publication of his  elegy for the death of Rupert Brooke  in The Red Wings of War :

Le jour qu’il eut compris que les hautes idées
Devenaient peu à peu
L’enjeu
De la lutte vers le futur échafaudée,
Étant poète, il se promit d’être soldat.

The day he understood that high ideals
Were coming
Under threat
In the struggle towards a reinvented future,
Being a poet, he vowed to be a soldier.

“Rupert Brooke, Poet and Soldier” (1-4)

“Rupert Brooke, Poète et soldat”

 Verhaeren’s faith in a pacific resolution would gradually be eroded by the escalation of the conflict and the spreading rumors  of the atrocities commited by the Germans on Belgian civilians :

With that beautiful voice of yours
You insisted:
Will spring come again?
Will the leaves still grow?

War engulfs sky
Rivers, mountains, woods, earth.
But where does the rose rise?
Where is the brave bees’ honey?

Where do the brambles grow
The anemones bloom?
Where in the deep woods
Do Flora and Ponoma meet?

— Alas! Nothing blooms
But the fires in the sky,
Furious, threatening bouquets
Strewn across the horizon.

Alas! No more red splendours
But the mad bullets,
Splashing in great streaks over
Steeples, farms, huts and hamlets.

Everything is without joy, without pity;
The struggle spreads from plain to plain,
In great leaps of rage and hate:
This is our spring.

“Spring 1915” ( The Red Wings of Death, 1916)

“Le Printemps de 1915” (Les Ailes rouges de la guerre)

VICTOR GILSOUL—SOIR A BRUGES—LE QUAI DE LA POTERIE

Belgian Seasons:Louis Boumal (1890-1918)

Louis Boumal, 1915

Belgian war poets are often passed over in favour of their more famous French counterparts, although Belgium’s invasion by the German forces in August 1914  inspired poets on either side of the Channel.

Louis Boumal, a melancholy Walloon lieutenant influenced by the French symbolist Paul Verlaine, wrote some of his most poignant poetry at the front before his death in 1918:

Aussi monotone et triste que l’heure,
Avec tes parfums de roses mouillées,
Je reconnais mal ta chanson qui pleure,
O pluie de l’été, propice aux feuillées.

A slim output (gathered in the posthumous volume Le Jardin sans soleil, The Sunless Garden, 1919) as  well as a dearth of front-line descriptions explain his absence from war poetry anthologies.  The  discreet presence of war, set in elegiac constrast to the eternal cycle of nature, brings to mind Edmund Blunden’s Poetical Interpretations and Variations :

Entre les foins poussés la route semble verte.
Combien s’en sont allés qui ne reviendront plus !
Je les suis à mon tour avec ma vie offerte.
L’automne se tourmente entre les arbres nus.

Between the hayricks the road looks green.
How many have left never to return!
I follow in their footsteps, offering my life.
Autumn frets between the bare trees.

“Between the Hayricks” (1-4)

Mobilized from 1914 up to his death in 1918,  Louis Boumal  confesses to his  mounting despair as the war draws on: “mutilated matter can be repaired but the soul that has suffered too much can no longer feel joy”. His nostalgic poems on the permanence of love through the passing seasons, the soul’s frequent calls to resilience deserve a modern reappraisal:

The houses by the road have locked their doors.
Do not think of those hearts closed for so long:
They showed less kindness to you than things.
Forget that you were loved once.

Do not listen for your sobs in the wind.
Do not tempt love and its sad face.
Be strong and stand alone. Gather within you
The infinite bitterness rising from the landscape

 Pick up that wise book where you left it,
Order the room and your wandering thoughts.
But why do you tremble mortal, suffering flesh
As night falls and winter draws near?

 “If Fate has Marked Your Shoulder” (4-16)

The humble flowerless garden where cherries shiver,
And the slim trellis bearing green fruit,
Will be enough when rainy winter returns
And with it, the regret of things unlearned.

But if you come to me then, lifting your veil
By the hearth quick with life,
To speak of a new dress or my last book
I’ll find life is good, life is content.

Then when I’m alone, the murmur gone,
Gone the ringing words of a well-voiced poem,
When I feel all my sorrows surge,
I’ll open my home to the hounds of winter.

“The Humble Flowerless Garden” (1-8-,13-16)