Some years ago I was reading Philippe Jaccottet - for the first time, I think - in a Viking edition of 1987 with facing translation by Derek Mahon. It seemed to me then (I haven't been back to check on the judgement) that Mahon hadn't made all that good a job of L'Effraie, the title poem of Jaccottet's first regularly published collection (Gallimard 1953), and in particular of the last quatrain, so I set to having a go myself, translating those last four lines first, then, getting into the exercise, moving backwards up the poem.

It gradually occurred to me that with a minimum of adjustment (in particular the addition of a spurious 'that before, in the dark', around the halfway point), the poem, or rather a poem, could work that way up. The resulting version, or perversion, appears here under the title Renverse.

 

Philip Morre

 *

Versions from Jaccottet 

Renverse

Already sharp bones harden through skin.

A last star fades at the road's turn.

Our bodies exhale a thin odour

of perishable things at first light.

Is it then only a barn-owl that hoots

against day from suburban woods

(and of such I'll speak further,

of cries in the summer night, of your eyes . . .)

that before, in the dark, had seemed a lament

of souls turning in torment, a pleading

now near, now receding, and torchlight

flitting through orchards? You slept,

I was far out on the rim. It was midnight

and June, the breeze that now bothers

the hazels a wind torn from the borders,

harried to the lee of this bed, the deep night

on its haunches a crouched city asleep.

Portovenere

The sea is dark again. You understand - don't you? -

it's our very last night. But who am I calling?

Beyond my own echo, I'm talking to no-one, to no-one.

Round the tumbled rocks the sea is black,

and tolls in its cloche of rain. A lone bat

bangs off the bars of air in its startled flight,

all our days are equally lost, shredded

by black wings; these waters, their predictable

grandeur, leave me cold, though I'm still here talking,

not to you, not to anything. Let them founder,

these 'fine days'. I'll go, I'll continue to age, who's counting?

The sea knows well enough to shut the door at our back.

Interior

A long time I've been trying to live a life here,

in this room I pretend to be fond of,

the table's unthreatening clutter, the window

that opens each dawn onto altered greenery,

a blackbird's heart ticking in the dark ivy,

light-splinters throwing quaint shadows everywhere.

I make myself believe it's a milder day than most,

I'm at home, and the morning bodes well.

There is just this spider, at the foot of the bed

(because of the garden), I can't have stamped

on her adequately, she seems busy still

setting her nets to enmesh my frail ghost . . .

Sonnet

I know now that nothing is mine, not even

this rare gold which is crumbling leaves,

still less the days beating on, from here to tomorrow,

with great slow wings, to some happy homeland.

She was with them once, that ethereal exile,

the fragile beauty, with her tricky secrets,

robed in fog. They will surely have taken her

elsewhere, through the rainsoaked woods. And again

I am here at the gate of an unreal winter

where a stubborn bullfinch insists on singing, a sole

dissenter who just won't stop, like the ivy. Who can translate

what he means? I can feel my health guttering

as now this brief fire before fog-banks the frigid

wind stokes and dissolves . . . And it's late.

The Crossing

It's not quite Beauty, with a capital B, that I find

here, having hired this tourist-class cabin

disembarked at Palermo, my cares to the wind,

but something more elusive, a beauty-of-this-world.

That other, I've seen Her perhaps in your face,

but our story must seem from above like those

waters that inscribe their grand hieroglyphics

on the sands south of Naples, and the sun laps up,

faint signs we retrace on our doorposts . . .

She's not given to those who would force her,

like travellers pushing at frontiers, like hoarders

dogged by their fear of extortions.

Still less does She flower in exotic locations,

She belongs if at all to the waiting, the patient,

the quiet ones ignored by the eulogists

who simply and secretly accrue their love.

*

L'Effraie et Autres Poésies (1979) is available from Gallimard