#stephen romer

[onenakedfarmer]

Reading

FRENCH DECADENT TALES

Edited and Translated by Stephen Romer

Stories by Jules Barbey D'Aurevillym Catulle Mendès, Léon Bloy, Octave Mirbeau, Jean Richepin, Guy De Maupassant, Gustave Geffroy, Jean Lorrain, Georges Rodenbach, Remy De Gourmont, Jules Laforgue, Marcel Schwob, Pierre Louÿs

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Robert Desnos (translated by Stephen Romer)

[wailingghosts]

…the station with its icy winds where you dropped off a friend, and where the empty platform is a whistling track to the hidden stars.

Paul de Roux, ‘The Cold Again’

Translation: Stephen Romer

[myimaginarybrooklyn]

The gardens, bereaved of our mothers breathe gently under grey in the sadness of the morning, and tranquilly they overrun bounds of the former dispensation. An ash tree trails its fronds and a deeper than usual lilac in a recess looks shy but glowering, young Kore disturbed by the pond restored to secrecy, and I then torn by my own survival, and everything wrong that was upheld by your joy and worrying being still in this interim upheld but how soon to ruin, and this knowledge suddenly that we are forms of matter, that dangerous edge, and how we are undone, and how this knowing also will run its course.

Stephen Romer, This Knowledge

[seagull-books]

Yves Bonnefoy: More Conscious than Words

On Thursday, 9 May 2013, at the Institut Français in London, renowned French poet Yves Bonnefoy will deliver a talk with Stephen Romer, translator of the former's masterpiece The Arrière-pays, recently published by Seagull Books. On this occasion, Seagull is proud to share an extract from this complex  yet hauntingly beautiful text that takes the reader to the heart of Bonnefoy's poetic spirit.

One night a long time ago, when I was still at school, I was turning the shortwave dial. Voices were replaced by others, swelling momentarily and then fading, and I remember I received an image of the starry sky, the empty sky. Men have language, ceaseless speech, but is it not as vain and repetitive as foam, sand, or those empty suns? How poor a thing is the sign! And yet with what certitude we seem at times to be progressing with it, on the prow of a ship, or in a bus moving through dunes, existing superior to it because we can see it forming, flowering and then dying away! Thinking this, I went on turning the dial. And then at one moment I felt I had just passed something that, through poor reception, still awoke the fever in me and compelled me to turn back. I recovered what I had just heard, though the sound was still as precarious: What was it, exactly? A chant, but accompanied by the fifes and drums of a primitive society. The sound of raucous male voices came through, and then, intensely serious, a child’s voice while the choir was silent, and then joined by the ensemble—quaverings and growlings in broken rhythms. And surrounding it all, I had an impression, whether or not this was subjective, of space. And then I saw. These beings live high up in a solitude of stones, at the mouth of an amphitheatre at the meeting point of mountain passes sealed by huge rocks. Above them are rock walls ravined by water and crumbled by saxifrage; a perch for the eagle who climbs still higher. On the horizon, on outcrops and in hollows, their villages stand with blind, heavy facades, often ruined beneath their towers. But where we are is more of a campsite, dotted with fires as night draws in; how to explain the nomadic—if circumscribed—life of these awakened societies? This country itself, these men and their music—are they from the Caucasus, or Circassia, from the mountains of Armenia or Central Asia?—but the very words have for me a kind of mythic value, a polar absolute not to be found on any modern map—in fact, the Mount Ararat to my ark, which ushers in the universe, is similarly surrounded by loud waters, the bare, black horizon, the vague, rapid current.

But there is also this: I am only haunted by another world at those moments, in those places, at those crossroads, literal or figurative, within the experience of living. As if only part of the latter lent itself to this feverish volatilization, while the other anchors me in the business of this world which absorbs me for periods of time, untroubled by the horizon; a part that is, in fact, sufficient. There is, finally, a hesitation, between gnosis and faith, between the hidden god and the incarnation, rather than irrevocable choice. There is a negation, but it feeds hungrily on what it deprecates. And to that must be added the fact that if the haunting remains, an evolution within it began long before. As I move, there is this long ridge of broken fire unfolding endlessly beside me; high and low, it crosses everything and drops away from everything when I approach, only to close up again behind me. And yet, how can I describe it: the point which caught my eye seems more remote in its spiritual space, while the moment the horizon closed behind me seems closer, and less rapid, as if my valley was lit up and widened. And I also feel the need to understand this double premise better, rather than, as I have done on occasion, merely to undergo it. Most of my memories of the arrière-pays are early ones; this is because these are the only ‘pure’ evocations, more recent ones being over-intellectualized, more articulately sceptical, or at the very least somehow designed to supersede or reconcile the two dominions. Yes, there is a belated knowledge, which reasoned thought must aid even if the latter is limited and contradictory. Clarification can happen not so much through thought as within it, little by little, thanks to an evolution in one’s whole being that is vaster and more conscious than words.

(Translated from the French by Stephen Romer.)

Yves Bonnefoy, The Arrière-pays. London, New York and Calcutta: Seagull Books, 2012.