In the Grass

A translation from the French of Marie Louise Lévêque de Vilmorin, with commentary

Something different.

Some things I write because they need to be heard, and some things because they need to be said. The former are expressions of my outer life, my concern for the world and what influence I hope to bring to bear on it. The latter reflect my inner life, that private world where things might bear meaning to few if any others. I say it needs to be said because for me such things come from a place of love, and that love is compelling; I feel a need to put something from within without, in the full knowledge that one opens oneself up to the weight of the world’s judgment or indifference. To me, such things are the purest sort of what Tolkien called “subcreation,” that reordering of the created world in the spirit of imitatio Dei. There was nothing, after all, not even a universe when God was and is and will be eternally uttering His eternal Word. Men, the great glory of the created world, can cleave unto this Word, ignore it, or even despise it, but it was from a place of love that God begot it. So too it is with those things which hold deep and personal meaning to us, in our small and fallen way.

That relationship between outer and inner life can be analogous to the mask and the face. The mask is that which is constructed and reshaped over time; the face is that which is born and lives. The mask is not necessarily a falsehood - it certainly can be- but for one who is sensitive, or really with any kind of depth of feeling, it serves the same function as the mask of a a fencer, preventing his organs of perception from being run through by the jabs of others. The other method of avoiding such a fate is to score one’s own hits, first and harder, so that the foes’ blades don’t even get a chance to scratch that concealing mesh. One can wear more than one mask at a time and for more than one reason. They can get so comfortable one forgets one ever even had a face; witness the great love of masks occasioned by Covid.

Sometimes, however, one feels the need to breathe a bit deeper, and so lift the screen and open one’s visage to public display. Some of you readers who are still with me perhaps understand this already, what I am getting at. Most, I suspect, will not, and that’s ok. Some work is so personal as to constitute a type of intimacy, and inviting someone to share that is, well, much like asking them to share any other form of intimacy. But if you are curious, I would like to present a translation of a French poem I am very fond of, “Dans l’Herbe.”

The author was Louise Lévêque de Vilmorin, a French novelist and poetess from the mid-Twentieth Century. Born to wealth in 1902, she lived through two World Wars and as many husbands, divorcing her second after apparently only one year. She seems to have had a lifelong taste for unfulfilling relationships with interesting men, becoming the mistress of, among others, Duff Cooper and André Malraux. At least the men got more interesting over time.

I don’t recall how I became acquainted with her poetry, but I am glad I did. I am fortunate that my I-need-to-check-a-box-to-graduate French has stuck with me all these years. I didn’t put in the effort it deserved in study, so my speaking has never been great, but through persistent later effort I have come to be able to read it fairly well. As is my practice with Greek and Latin I seek out interesting material in those languages and translate it into English, and vice-versa. And so, a few years ago, when I met M. de Vilmorin by way of her work, I thought I might try to transmute her Gallic subtleties into my own approximations.

Translation is very much a high art. Even with a dictionary and all the ‘literal’ meanings, even with access to other translations into one’s own language, one still faces the challenge of linguistic alchemy, of transmuting semantic value as fully as possible. And of course it’s more profound than just the meaning of the words. There’s a sense to a passage that has to be conveyed that is beyond the words themselves, a feeling given in one tongue that must be given in the other as well, and the challenge is magnified still more with poetry than with prose. My example here is actually fairly straightforward, but even still, if I am fortunate to have any Francophone critics, I suspect they will, with justice, question some of my choices.

This version of the poem comes from a collection of songs by composer Francis Jean Marcel Poulen called “Fiançailles pour rire” (Promises to Marry for Laughs), which is based on poems by de Vilmorin, who was his friend. The songs are not, as the name would imply, funny, but rather sad and haunting.

Here are the lyrics for “Dans l’herbe” (“In the Grass”) in French:

Dans l'herbe

Je ne peut plus rien dire

Ni rien faire pour lui.

Il est mort de sa belle

Il est mort de sa mort belle

Dehors

Sous l'arbre de la Loi

En plein silence

En plein paysage

Dans l'herbe.

Il est mort inaperçu

En criant son passage

En appelant

En m'appelant.

Mais comme j'étais loin de lui

Et que sa voix ne portait plus

Il est mort seul dans les bois

Sous son arbre d'enfance.

Et je ne peux plus rien dire

Ni rien faire pour lui.

Here is my rendering in English:

In The Grass

I can say nothing more,

And do nothing else for him,

He is dead from his beautiful one,

He is dead from his dead beautiful one, [He died his beautiful death, per

Versailles Century

]

Outside,

Under the Tree of the Law,

In total silence,

In the full wilderness,

In the grass,

He dies unnoticed,

He cries out as he passes,

He calls,

He calls out for me,

But because I am far from him,

And because his voice no longer travels,

He dies alone in the woods,

Under the tree of his youth,

And I can say nothing more,

And do nothing else for him.

The verses are enigmatic and full of imagery that begs for interpretation, but the meaning is elusive and lost in the loss of the memories of the participants as they pass from life. One is gone, one is going, and one, the singer, is either gone already or left behind. The significance of the grass, the wilderness, and especially the two trees, seem to have some sentimental meaning that endures now only in the voice of the nameless poet. She does not share it, and it is gone from the awareness of the reader as the song ends.

“Dans l’Herbe,” to me, is a poem of the Lonely Places. A Lonely Place is a habitational manifestation of that principle of subcreation, a space created by human energy and given significance by human action- a home, a playground, a place two people meet which is special to them. What makes it lonely is when the people move on, and the space remains but it is now bereft of its purpose. It retains its energy, however; a really sensitive sort can feel it. People say such things about battlefields and haunted houses, but even an old jungle gym, once full of happy children but now faded and rusty, can retain that latent power.

So too it is with this eponymous bit of grass. We do not know what happened here, but we feel it. The lingering energy of a once-love passes, crying out in a voice that cannot be heard any longer. The Tree of the Law, that Platonic Form of the Lonely Place, is what the “he” of the poem dies beneath, not merely dying but- like his voice, his energy- fading. He passes from human order to nature once more, from subcreation back to creation, awaiting another love to shape the grass once again into something possessing human meaning. Man and his works are all mortal, in the end.

You’ll note from the time of posting that I’m writing this at 1:00 in the morning. It’s the product of sleeplessness, which in turn is the product of the besetting curse of so many writers, that melancholy that springs from loneliness. That word jumps out. At once the associations arise in the readers’ minds, ‘cringe,’ ‘sympathy,’ ‘it’s a social problem affecting men that we need to do something about …’ All true and yet not really quite it. It’s arguing endlessly about Nazis. It’s my father, unwell and unsteady and the solitary prospect of caring for him and his wife; it’s Mike Adams, a man I never met but could have been. It’s other things. It’s most of all that part of me carried from young childhood as the sort of boy who could read a poem and be deeply affected, of not being able to get through Spoon River Anthology to this day, of sticking mostly to nonfiction. And now here I am telling an internet full of strangers all of this, save I do it from my Librarian’s desk, fully masked. Make of that what you will.

I’ll ask in closing that you not think me sad. Melancholy is a disposition, not an emotion. It’s a state of awareness of mortality combined with a tendency for reflection and inner-centeredness. It’s an engine of poetry and art more generally. If I feel this way it’s because I’m supposed to be producing something. Having done so, I can sleep now. Goodnight.

For those of you more interested in the technical details of my work, you can compare my translation to the one at the website.

http://www.melodietreasury.com/translations/song190_Fiancailles%20pour%20rire.html