Comfort and Affliction: A Poery Reading Group and Writing Workshop
“Poetry comforts the afflicted and afflicts the comfortable.” – Lucille Clifton
Robert Desnos
On the of 8th May I met with my poetry group on zoom and, in addition to workshopping poems by participants, we discussed Robert Desnos’s ‘I Have So Often Dreamed of You’ (translated from the French by Paul Auster) titled ‘J’ai tant rêvé de toi’ in the original. (I have posted the original and Auster’s translation below).
Desnos (1900-1945) was initially associated with the surrealist movement in Paris in the 1920s although he grew away from that group. He was Jewish (and also a part of the French resistance in World War II), and died in a Nazi concentration camp. See Jake Marmer’s recent essay on Desnos in Tablet.
In our class we talked about longing and vulnerability and the repeated line in the poem (‘I have so often dreamed of you’ / ‘J’ai tant rêvé de toi’). What does it mean to live, sleep, talk, walk with someone who isn’t with you or even no longer alive? This is the question that haunts the poem. We discussed how within that line lives both affliction and comfort and how its repetition provides some solace even as the longing embedded in the line opens up fresh hurt. We compared the poem to the Song of Songs (found in the Hebrew Bible – Shir Ha’shirim, שִׁיר הַשִּׁירִים) and observed how the painful intensity of longing is palpable in both the 20th century poem and in the holy text. However, the speaker in Desnos’s poem seems to be longing for a beloved who may no longer be alive. The sense that the longing is for a ghost, one who has ‘become unreal’, saturates the poem. But over the course of the poem, the speaker himself sinks into a shadow and becomes a ‘phantom among phantoms’; the beloved transforms into a real ‘body’ with ‘lips’, a ‘forehead’, a person to whom he addresses with the last words ‘your life’ / ‘ta vie’).
After our discussion we watched this beautifully animated video of the poem.
I Have So Often Dreamed of You
I have so often dreamed of you that you become unreal.
Is it still time enough to reach that living body and to kiss
on that mouth the birth of the voice so dear to me?
I have so often dreamed of you that my arms used as they are
to meet on my breast in embracing your shadow would
perhaps not fit the contour of your body.
And, before the real appearance of what has haunted and ruled
me for days and years, I might become only a shadow.
Oh the weighing of sentiment,
I have so often dreamed of you that there is probably no time
now to waken. I sleep standing, my body exposed to all the
appearances of life and love and you, who alone still
matter to me, I could less easily touch your forehead and
your lips than the first lips and the first forehead I
might meet by chance.
I have so often dreamed of you, walked, spoken, slept with your
phantom that perhaps I can be nothing any longer than a
phantom among phantoms and a hundred times more shadow
than the shadow which walks and will walk joyously over
the sundial of your life.
Translation Paul Auster
……………………….
J’ai Tant Rêvé de Toi
J’ai tant rêvé de toi que tu perds ta réalité.
Est-il encore temps d’atteindre ce corps vivant
Et de baiser sur cette bouche la naissance
De la voix qui m’est chère?
J’ai tant rêvé de toi que mes bras habitués
En étreignant ton ombre
A se croiser sur ma poitrine ne se plieraient pas
Au contour de ton corps, peut-être.
Et que, devant l’apparence réelle de ce qui me hante
Et me gouverne depuis des jours et des années,
Je deviendrais une ombre sans doute.
O balances sentimentales.
J’ai tant rêvé de toi qu’il n’est plus temps
Sans doute que je m’éveille.
Je dors debout, le corps exposé
A toutes les apparences de la vie
Et de l’amour et toi, la seule
qui compte aujourd’hui pour moi,
Je pourrais moins toucher ton front
Et tes lèvres que les premières lèvres
et le premier front venu.
J’ai tant rêvé de toi, tant marché, parlé,
Couché avec ton fantôme
Qu’il ne me reste plus peut-être,
Et pourtant, qu’a être fantôme
Parmi les fantômes et plus ombre
Cent fois que l’ombre qui se promène
Et se promènera allègrement
Sur le cadran solaire de ta vie.
Eve Grubin 