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FUNERAL MARCH
Translation by Mark Spitzer
Marche funèbre
by Jean Genet
I
STAGNATING in a corner, a bit of night remains.
Sparking with hard blows in our timid sky
(the trees of silence hang some sighs)
a rose of glory at the summit of this void.
Treacherous is the sleep where the prison takes me
more obscurely, though, in my secret corridors
is that haughty lad passing through the depths of his woods
illuminating the sailors who make beautiful dead
effeminate men.
II
HE SHACKLES ME WITHIN,
this twenty-year-old turnkey.
And he shackles me forever!
A sole gesture, his eye, his hair in his teeth:
my heart opens, and the turnkey with a festive cry
imprisons me inside.
This malicious door is scarcely shut again
with too much kindness
and already you return. Your perfection haunts me
and I hear today our love recounted
through your mouth which sings.
This stabbed tango the cell listens to
This tango of farewells.
Is it you, my Lord, upon this radiant air?
Your soul will have cut through secret routes
to escape the gods.
III
WHEN YOU SLEEP horses break from the night
upon your flat breast, and the gallop of beasts
disperses the darkness where sleep conducts
its powerful machine, torn from my head
without the slightest noise.
Sleep makes so many limbs
flower from your feet
that I am afraid to die strangled by their cries.
On the curve of your delicate hip, before it fades
I decipher a pure face written
in blue on your white skin.
But should a turnkey awaken you, my tender thief
when you wash your hands (those birds which flit
about your grove, laden with a hundred griefs)
then ruthlessly you shatter the shaft of stars
upon your crying face.
In your funereal remains
glorious gestures are retained
your hand which flung it, seeding it with rays.
Your undershirt, your shirt, and your black belt
astonish my cell and leave me dumbstruck
before your beautiful ivory.
IV
BEAUTIFUL NIGHTS of the full day
darkness of Pilorge
within your black windings
my knife is forged.
My God, here I am naked
in my terrible Louvre.
Scarcely recognized
your closed fist opens me.
I am nothing but love
all my branches burn
if I darken the day
then the shadow recoils within me.
In pure air it is possible
for my dry body to crumble to dust
against the wall
I possess the lightning flash.
The heart of my sun
is burst by the rooster's crow
though sleep never dares
to spill its dreams here.
Withering to my desires
I fix on the silence
when birds of fire
spring from my tree.
V
FROM LADIES believed to be of cruel nature
their messengers bear ornaments.
These prowlers of alleys rise at night
and on a sign from them you boldly set out.
Such a kid, quivering in his dress of grace
was the angel sent to me, whose luminous trace
I followed confused, maddened through the course
all the way to this cell where his refusal was shining.
VI
WHEN I'VE wished to sing in other scales than his
my plume embroiling itself in rays of light
with a dizzying word, headfirst I fell
stupidly, conducted by this error
to the bottom of his rut.
VII
NOTHING ANYMORE
will trouble the eternal season
where I find myself caught.
The still water of solitude
guards me and fills the prison.
I am twenty years old forever
despite your study.
To please you, oh urchin of a deaf beauty
I will remain clothed until I die
and your soul leaving your decapitated body
will find in mine a white abode.
Oh to know you sleep beneath my modest roof!
You speak through my mouth
and through my eyes gaze
this room is yours and my verse is yours.
Relive what pleases you
I am keeping watch.
VIII
PERHAPS it was you, the demon who wept
behind my high walls?
Returned among us more nimble than a ferret
my divine scoundrel
Through a new death destiny destroys again
our desolate loves
for it was you again, Pilorge, don't lie --
all these stolen shadows!
IX
THE CHILD I was seeking
scattered among so many kids
is dead in his bed, alone
like a royal prince.
Hesitating on his toe
a grace shoes him
and covers his body
with a royal flag.
In the sweetness of a rose-holding gesture
I recognize the hand plundering the dead!
A soldier would never do
the deeds only you do
and you descend among them
with neither dread
nor remorse.
Like your body
a black undershirt gloved your soul
and when you profaned against the designated tomb
you carved with the point of a blade
the figure of a rebus
aligned by lightning.
We have seen you rise, carried by madness
hanging by your hair
to the crowns of iron
in pearly lace and roses soiled
arms twisted from being seized alive.
Barely returned to bring us your smile
you disappeared so quickly I believed
that without telling us, your sleeping grace
wandered other skies for another face.
On a passing child I glimpse
flashes of your well-built frame
I wish to speak to you through him
but a subtle gesture from him
makes you fade from him
and plunges you into my verse
where you cannot escape.
Which angel then permitted you to pass
unflinchingly through matter
cleaving the air with your hand
like the delicate whirl at the tip of a missile
tracing and destroying its own precious path?
We were desolated by your narrow escape.
A brilliant tailspin placed you in our arms.
You pecked our necks and wished to please us
and your hand was forgiving
to all these shorn hairs.
But you no longer appear, blond kid whom I seek.
I tumble in a word and see you in reverse.
You move away from me, I am saved by verse.
Through a bramble of cries I lead myself astray.
To seize you the Sky set subtle traps
ferocious and new, in league with Death
watching from the top of an invisible throne
the cords and knots on bobbins of gold.
The Sky even used the passage of bees
unwinding so many rays and so much thread(1)
that he finally made captive this rosy marvel:
a child's face offering itself in profile.
If this game is cruel I wouldn't dare complain
in bursting your beautiful eye
a song of despair went mad to see you
embraced by so much horror
and this song, for a thousand years
made your coffin tremble.
Caught in the snares of gods, strangled by their silk
you are dead without even knowing why or how.
You triumph over me
but lose at the game of the goose(2)
where I dare to rape you
my fugitive lover.
In spite of black soldiers who will lower their lances
you cannot flee from the bed where an iron mask
pins you rigid -- but suddenly you spring forth
fall back without moving
and return to hell.
X
MY BELOVED DUNGEON
in your stirring shadow
my eye, by chance, discovered a secret.
I have slept sleeps the world has never known
where terror knots itself.
Your dark corridors are meanderings of the heart
and their mass of dreams organize in silence
a mechanism bearing resemblance to verse
and its exact rigor.
From my eye and my temple
your night releases a flood of ink
so heavy that the plume I steep here
will bring forth flowering stars
like one sees in a barrage.
I advance in a liquid darkness
where formless conspiracies
slowly start to take shape.
Why should I howl for help?
All my gestures break apart
and my cries are too beautiful.
From my muffled distress you will only know
strange beauties revealed by the day.
After thousands of their tricks
the hoodlums that I listen to
crowd together in the open air.
They dispatch a soft ambassador on earth
a child who doesn't care, and marks his passage
by bursting so many skins
that his joyous message
gains its splendor here.
You pale with shame from reading the poem
inscribed by the adolescent with criminal gestures
but you will never know
anything of the original knots
of my somber wrath.
For the odors rolling in his night are too strong.
He will sign Pilorge and his apotheosis
will be the bright scaffold of gushing roses
beautiful effect of Death.
XI
CHANCE -- the greatest of!
Too often made my plume create
at the heart of all my poems
the rose with the white word of Death
embroidered on the arm bands
of the black warriors I love.
What gardens can flower through my night
what painful games happen here
that petals are plucked from this cut rose
and who silently takes it to the blank page
where your laughter greets it?
But if I know nothing precise about Death
from having spoken so much of her
and in a grave way
then she must live within me
in order to rise so easily
and flow from my drivel
at the least of my words.
I know nothing of her
it's said that the magic of her beauty
eats away eternity
but this pure movement explodes with failure
and betrays the secret of a tragic disorder.
Pale from moving in a climate of tears
she comes with bare feet exploding in puffs
to my very surface where these bouquets
teach me of the stifled
tenderness of Death.
I will abandon myself to your arms, gorgeous Death
for I know how to rediscover
the moving meadow of my open childhood
where you will lead me to the side
of the stranger with the flowery dick.
And strong with this strength, oh queen, I will be
the secret minister of your theater of shadows.
Sweet Death, take me, I'm ready
here I am, on my way
to your somber city.
XII
ON A WORD my voice stumbles
and from the shock you spring forth
as eager for this miracle
as you are for your crimes!
Who then will be astonished
when I lay down my files
to thoroughly explore
the thickets of the word?
My friends keep watch to slip me some ropes
you fall asleep on the prison grass.
For you, and even your friendship
I don't give a damn.
I guard this luck
the judges grant me.
Is this you, other me, without your silver slippers
Salome, who brings me a cut rose?
This bleeding rose, finally unwrapped from its linen
is it hers, or is it the head of Jean?
Pilorge, answer me! Make your eyelid twitch
Speak to me askewly, sing from your throat
chopped near your hair
and fall from your rosebush
word by word, oh my Rose
enter my prayer!
XIII
OH MY PRISON where I die without aging
I love you.
Life, laced with death, drains from me.
Their slow heavy waltz is danced in reverse
each unwinds sublime reason
opposed to the other.
Still, I have too much room, this is not my tomb
my cell is too large and my window too pure.
Waiting to be reborn in the prenatal night
I allow myself to live so I
can be recognized by Death
through a higher sign.
To everyone except the Sky I shut my door forever
and I only grant a friendly minute
to the young thieves whom my ear spies upon
with cruel hope, the call for my help
within their finished song.
If I hesitate often my song is not faked
for I search far beneath my deep terrains
and always emerge with the same soundings
pieces of a treasure buried alive
since the beginnings of the world.
If you could see me above my table bent
face wasted by my literature
you would know that it sickens me also
this dreadful adventure of daring to discover
the gold hidden beneath so much
putrification.
A joyous aurora bursts in my eye
like the bright morning a carpet
was laid on the stones
to muffle your walk across the labyrinths
of suffocated corridors
from your threshold to
the gates of dawn.
End Notes
1. "Rayons" (rays) also means honeycombs.
2. "Jeu de l'œie" (the game of the goose) is a children's game similar to chutes and ladders, but might have other goosular connotations.
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Once again i thank you for your efforts to promote this author. However we need to know a little more about the provenance of the translations before they can be posted on his author page here at OP.
Did you do the translation yourself?
Do you have the originals.
And most important as the author's work is still under copyright control, do we have permission to use it here?
Jim
Oldpoetry Research team
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Lute
Jul 11 2:05 PM
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