Aloysius Bertrand : First French Prose Poet
Introduction and Translations by Michael Benedikt
Last Modified 5/06 & 8/05
With 11 Prose Poems Selected from Gaspard de
la Nuit
including the 3 upon which Ravel based his Gaspard de la Nuit piano
suite
The Mason
Haarlem
The Five Fingers of The
Hand
New
The
Tulip-Seller
Moonlight
The Gothic Chamber
Scarbo
Departure for The
Sabbath
About
Ravel's Gaspard de la
Nuit
Ondine
The Gallows
Scarbo
Baudelaire on Bertrand. And Intro Notes Bertrand's Gaspard Preface Poems Forthcoming To Site About The Translator
Charles Baudelaire on Bertrand (from a letter to Fernand Houssaye)
"I have a little confession to make to you. It was while thumbing through--for the twentieth time at least--the celebrated 'Gaspard de la nuit' of Aloysius Bertrand (a work known to both of us and to so many of our mutual friends, that it deserves to be called "celebrated" doesn't it?) ...that the idea came to me to try to do something analogous, and apply to...modern life... the method which Bertrand applied to painting scenes of ancient life with such strangely picturesque results."
INTRODUCTORY NOTES
Aloysius Bertrand (pen-name of Louis Bertrand) is a highly original 19th-Century poet and a precursor of both later l9th Century French Symbolism and 20th Century French Surrealism. He was born in Northern Italy and was brought up in Belgium. He's sometimes considered a Belgian poet although Bertrand spent most of his life in France. He died in Paris in l841. Bertrand's writing dates from the period of 'Romantic' French literature and he's sometimes classified as a Romantic poet, but Bertrand is a forerunner of 'Modernism' & more. Bertrand was Europe's--and perhaps the world's--first full-fledged prose poet and helped inspire the slightly later but better-known prose poems of Baudelaire. The prose poems of Rimbaud, Mallarmé and other later 19th century French poets probably owe a debt--even if acquired only just in passing--to Bertrand.
Bertrand wrote in French, and wrote prose poems almost exclusively. But unlike Baudelaire (who in 1855 titled his first gathering of works in the form Petites Poemes en Prose--Little Poems in Prose), Bertrand never used the term "prose poetry" to describe any of his own brief prose poems. Bertrand's book-length major opus, Gaspard de la Nuit (Gaspard of The Night) is subtitled "Fantasies in the manner of Rembrandt and Callot" perhaps because its prose pieces often evoke real or imagined scenes of Medieval to 17th-century Flemish and French life, in addition to picturing scenes--often supernaturally supercharged scenes--from the poet's own life. The first Bertrand "Fantasies" date from l827. An edition replete with drawings by the poet was planned in 1836, but the manuscript remained unfinished at the poet's death--& as far as we know, an edition with illustrations has not been realized to date. Bertrand had enthusiasts among well-known contemporary French writers of his time--19th-century poet-novelist Victor Hugo, and influential literary critic Saint-Beuve being among his fans--but for the most part he remained virtually unread by even the literary public of his day. Tragic too is that this master of fantastic literature and highly independent spirit who was neglected even by most of his literary contemporaries, lived and died in virtual poverty. Bertrand's "Fantasies" were published posthumously in l842. They were reissued in l863 and again in l895. Many subsequent editions have appeared. And--in one language or another and in one form or another--new editions keep on appearing.
*
As Gaspard's subtitle "Fantasies in the manner of Rembrandt and Callot" also suggests, Bertrand is a highly visual poet. Bertrand himself emphasizes that, in a brief Preface to the work. Nothwithstanding the sense of sheer magic which fills the Fantasies, Bertrand was obviously also highly aware of his poems as pure art and artifact. A sense of craftsmanship, of the need for transparency & economy of phrasing in evoking the outlandish & the extreme too, is omnipresent in the work. The poems are self-consciously refined & highly polished. In addition to a brief Preface, Gaspard has a much longer Prologue. Part of the Prologue takes the form of a dialogue about esthetics. It includes the following, telling exchange: "And the devil?--He doesn't exist! And art?--It exists! But where?--In the bosom of God!" Elsewhere in Gaspard's Prologue, Bertrand declares outright that he's a highly self-exacting literary perfectionist: "This manuscript... will reveal how many instruments have touched my lips prior to discovering the one which could produce the purest and most expressive note possible; how many paintbrushes I wore out against canvas before evoking the aurora of chiaroscuro." Biographical reports also confirm that Bertrand frequently re-worked the poems of his masterpece. Bertrand's poetic technique includes highly visual effects, and seems decidedly "modern" on that score, too. His prose poems include lots of zoom-outs and zoom-ins and cross-cutting, and have more in common with techniques of modern-day filmmaking than with literary techniques generally practiced in his time. And, for a long time afterwards!
*
The great 20th Century French "Impressionist"--& afterwards
post-Impressionist--composer Maurice Ravel based a 1908 trio of piano pieces
on 3 poems from Gaspard. (Ravel's biographers tell us that a copy
of the l895 edition had come into Ravel's possession). Entitled Gaspard
de la Nuit, Ravel's suite for piano is among that remarkable composer's
most startling creations. This website includes translations of all 3 poems
on which Ravel based his Gaspard piano suite.
The Surrealists of the l920's admired
Bertrand and considered him a forerunner. "Bertrand is Surrealist re the
past," André Breton wrote in his First Surrealist Manifesto
(l924)--thus consigning to Bertrand quite a large piece of historical
territory, and re-launching Bertrand's reputation. To this day many prose
poets--French prose poets in particular--acknowledge Bertrand's
poems
as a major source of inspiration.
*
Besides being a highly visual poet, Bertrand is also a decidedly visionary poet--seeing beyond even his own keen sense of the visual to arrive at that perhaps still higher plane. Although the "Fantasies" often have elegantly unruffled surfaces and also the masterful perfection of those "genre" scenes in painting which capture the spirit of particular times and places whether or not the poet is evoking antique subject-matter, there is much more to them than that. A major theme in the work is the disquieting presence of mysterious forces which run through landscapes and life, lurking beneath the surface of even everyday, seemingly ordinary events. Bertrand does not (as might seem at first) exactly celebrate those underlying dark forces--some of which take on insidiously supernatural forms, and some of which are destructive besides being just plain spooky. But his poems do propose, we think--and in a highly sophisticated way--that to perceive the presence of such dark forces is to be fully alive, alert, and awake to the underlying nature of Reality and thus to all of Reality itself. And certainly, to psychological reality! As we see it, Bertrand's "Fantasies" encapsulate in small, neat packages which seem almost about to explode (i.e., in relatively short, deceptively simple poems fraught with internal tensions and incipient volatility), a vision of discontent with the world as he knew it--and dissatisfaction with the limitations of conventional, unimaginative and yes, insensitive ordinary life in general.
The majority of Bertrand's poems are set in specific times (Night being a favorite time of day) and in specific places (for example Holland, Italy, and France--but particularly Dijon, the very old French city in which Bertrand lived for the most part, and whose history he was fascinated by). Nevertheless, the poet's all-seeing eye seems ubiquitous and somehow both placeless & timeless. Bertrand, we would propose, is not only a poet with a Visual Eye--but one of the first poets with a truly "Virtual" Eye. This selection starts with examples of prose offering unusual overviews of 'outer,' objective experiences in broad daylight--such as "The Mason" and "Haarlem" and "The Tulip-Seller"; then focusses on down to prose portraying dark, intensely inward visions of darkness and deviltry--such as "Moonlight" amd "Scarbo" and "Departure For The Sabbath." Although Bertrand's poems are economical in phrasing & compact, his vision has wide range.
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This is a Web Premiere--even as far as these briefly introductory notes go, and even as far as this substantial a presentation of a group of Bertrand's poems in English is concerned. Bertrand's Web Debut in English has long been overdue, we think. This site will eventually present a larger selection of Bertrand poems than the group of 11 already here, & will constitute still more of a "Selected Aloysius Bertrand Poems " on The Web.
BERTRAND'S OWN GASPARD DE LA NUIT
PREFACE
Art is a coin with two antithetical faces--one side bearing resemblance to Paul Rembrandt, and the other to Jacques Callot. Rembrandt is the philosopher with long white beard self-ensconced in his retreat, his thoughts absorbed in meditation and prayer, closing eyes to dwell within and to converse with the spirits of beauty, science, wisdom and love--consumed by the desire to penetrate the mysterious symbols of nature. Callot, on the contrary, is the blustering joker who swaggers through the town, causes disturbances in taverns, and makes love to loose women-- believing in nothing but his rapier and his blunderbuss--his deepest earthly concern being to keep his moustache waxed. The author of his book has conceived of his art in terms of this double personification--but so as to avoid being too exclusive, he also presents here studies in the manner of Van Eyck, Lucas de Leyde, Albert Dürer, Peter Neef, Breughel de Velours, Breughel d'Enfer, Van-Ostade, Gérard-Dow, Salvator Rosa, Fuseli, and several other masters of various other painting-schools.
And if you ask the author why he hasn't taken it into his head to model his book according to some noble literary theory, he will be forced to respond that after all, M. Seraphin doesn't explain the mechanism behind his Chinese shadow puppets--even to himself; and that Punch always conceals from his curious audience the wires connected to his arms. Therefore, he's content to simply sign his work: GASPARD OF THE NIGHT.
----------------
Translator's
Note: Gaspard--once a relatively commonplace
male French name. Top of
Site
11 SELECTED BERTRAND POEMS AT THIS WEBSITE THUS FAR
The
Mason
Haarlem
The Five Fingers of The
Hand
New
The
Tulip-Seller
Moonlight
The Gothic Chamber
Scarbo
Departure for The
Sabbath
About
Gaspard de la Nuit &
Ravel
Ondine
The Gallows
Scarbo
Translated by Michael Benedikt
The Master Mason: "Come look at these bastions, these buttresses;
they seem to have been built for all
eternity."--Schiller, William Tell
The Mason Abraham Knupfer is singing, trowel in hand, scaffolded up so high that, as he examines the gothic inscription on the great cathedral bell, even the soles of his feet stand high above the flying buttresses of this church--all thirty of them, in this town of thirty churches.
He sees gargoyles spewing water from the roof-slates down into the entangled abyss of stone galleries and stained-glass windows, pendants, pinnacles, and spires, rooftops, turrets and timberwork, which the falcon's hovering wing punctuates with its one still point.
He sees the star-shaped outlines of the fortification-walls, the citadel sticking out like a hen's head from inside a piecrust, and the monastery cloisters, where the sun throws shadows that revolve around the pillars.
The imperial guard is quartered at the edge of town. Look!--In the distance, a soldier's drumming! Abraham Knupfer can see his tri-cornered hat, his epaulets stitched with bright red yarn, his cockade crimped with a rosette, and his pigtail tied with a bow.
The next thing he sees are some other soldiers who, in a far-off park surrounded by dense foliage, and standing on broad emerald lawns, are firing with some blunderbusses at a wooden bird nailed to the top of a maypole.
And towards evening, when the echoing nave of the cathedral falls asleep, stretched out with its arms flung out in the shape of a cross, he sees from his lofty ladder an entire village set afire by troops, flaming like a comet in the deep-blue sky.
Translated by Michael Benedikt
When Amsterdam's Golden Cockerel doth crow, Haarlem's hen doth
eggs bestow.
--The Centuries by Nostradmus
Haarlem, that fine free-hand sketch, Haarlem, that delectable caricature summing up the work of the Flemish School--Haarlem as painted by Breughel the Elder, Peter Neefs, David Teniers and Paul Rembrandt
With its canal full of shimmering blue water, and its great church with windows glazed golden by the sun; and with its balconies covered by bed-linen drying, and with its roofs, green with straw.
And the storks flapping their wings and sailing around the town clock,
and stretching out their necks in high winds
to catch raindrops in their beaks.
And the slow-moving, impassive burgomeister slowly stroking his double chin, and the lovelorn florist growing thinner and thinner, her eye battened upon a tulip.
And the gypsy leaning over her mandolin, and the old man playing upon the rommelpot, and the child filling up his wineskin-bladder.
And the drinkers smoking in some dark dive, and the inn-keeper's servant hanging up a dead pheasant in a tavern window.
Translated by Michael Benedikt
An honorable family, in which no one has ever gone bankrupt, in
which nobody has ever been hanged
--The Family Lineage of Jean De Niville
The thumb is this fat Flemish innkeeper, lusty and fond of lewd jokes, smoking before his doorway and beneath the sign-board announcing the doubly-potent beers of March.
The index finger is his wife, a shrew as stiff as an old dried herring,
who starts each day by slapping the serving-maid
of whom she is so jealous, and gently stroking the bottle of which she is
so fond.
The middle finger is their son, a stout lad who'd be a soldier if he weren't
already a bartender; and who'd be a horse
if he weren't a man.
The ring finger is their daughter, the shapely and pert Zerbina, who sells her lacework to all the ladies, but refuses even a single smile to the soldiery.
And the little finger, the "ear finger"--he's the youngest of the family, a petulant brat perpetually clutching at his mother's waistband or dangling from his mother's apron-strings--a crybaby sobbing as if hooked on the fang of an ogress.
Taken together, this hand and its five fingers can give the most resounding
slap in the face ever heard
in the gardens of the noble city of Haarlem.
Translated by Michael Benedikt
The tulip is to flowers what the peacock is to birds.
One has no fragrance, the other lacks song.
One prides itself on its attire, the other on its tail.
--The Garden of Rare & Unusual Flowers
Not a sound, except for the rustling of vellum pages being thumbed through by Master Huylten, who never takes his eyes off his bible and its gothic illuminations except to occasionally admire the gold and purple hues of two fish floating captive inside the moist, curved sides of a glass bowl.
The door-hinges squeak. It’s a Tulip-Seller, his arms laden with several pots of tulips and apologizing for interrupting the studies of such highly learned man.
"Master," he announces, "behold here the treasure of treasures, the marvel to end all marvels--bulbs like these bloom but once a century in the seraglio of the palace of the emperor of Constantinople!"
"A tulip!" the old man cries out angrily. " A tulip! That symbol of the lustfulness and pride which begat the hideous heresies of Luther and Melanchthon in the miserable city of Wittenberg!"
Master Huyten fastens the clasp on his Bible, slips his reading-glasses back into their case and draws back the drapes so the sun can shine on a Passion-Flower, with its crown of thorns and its sponge, with its whips & nailholes & five wounds of Our Lord.
In silence, the tulip-seller bows respectfully and withdraws--albeit disconcerted somewhat by the inquisitional gaze of the portrait of the Duke of Alba--a masterpiece by Holbein--glaring down at him from the wall.
Translated by Michael Benedikt
Awaken, all you sleepy-heads
And pray now for the dead.
--Call of the Night-Crier
Oh, how delightful it is, as nightly hours ring out from the steeple, to see the moon--with its nose so like a golden coin!
*
Two lepers were wailing beneath my window, a dog howled at the crossroads, and the cricket on my hearth chirped out its tiny, ominous prophesies.
But soon, only utmost silence filled my listening ear. The lepers had retreated to their huts, amid the familiar sounds of Jacquemart beating up his wife again.
The dog had skulked off down an alleyway, past the halberds of the night-watch, all rusted by the rains and chilled by the keen, north winds.
And the cricket had fallen asleep the moment the last coal flickered out, there in the ashes of my fireplace.
And as for me, it seemed to me (for such are the confusions of fever!) that the moon had screwed up its face and was sticking out its tongue at me--like a hanged man!
Translated by Michael Benedikt
Nox et solitudo plenae sunt diabolo.
--The Church Fathers
At night, my room is full of devils.
"Oh! the earth"--I murmured into the night--"is a perfumed flower whose pistel and stamens are the moon and the stars!"
And, eyes heavy with sleep, I closed my window inlaid with the cross of Calvary, outlined in black among the yellow haloes of the stained glass.
*
Oh were it only on this midnight--this traditional time for dragons and devils!--some little gnome once again, drunken from drinking the oil of my lamp!
Were it only some wetnurse droning a dismal lullaby, and rocking a tiny, still-born baby in the hollow of my father's breast-plate.
Were it only the skeleton of the old swordsman imprisoned in the wall-paneling, and banging on it with his forehead, elbow, and knee!
Were it only my grandsire stepping down full-figure from his worm-eaten picture-frame, and dipping his gauntlet in the holy-water fount.
But no: Instead it's Scarbo, gnawing away at my neck, and then cauterizing my bloody wound by thrusting one iron finger--red-hot from the fireplace--straight out into it!
Translated by Michael Benedikt
"Dear Lord, at the hour of my death,
give me the prayers of a priest, a linen shroud, a coffin made of pine
and a nice dry place."
--The Paternosters of a General
"Whether you die absolved or damned," muttered Scarbo into my ear that
night, "your shroud shall be a spiderweb,
and I'll wrap up the spider right in there with you!
"Oh, let my shroud at least be"--I replied, with eyes red from so much
weeping--some trembling leaf in whose hollow
the breezes of the lake may rock me!"
"No!" snickered that scoffing dwarf, "you shall be a feast for some
dung-beetle who comes creeping out at dusk
to hunt down gnats blinded by the setting sun!"
Sobbing, more in tears than ever, I bitterly replied--"I suppose you'd like it still better yet were a tarantula with a stinger the size of an elephant's trunk to suck the living daylights out of me?"
"Now, now, console yourself," he interrupted, "for your shroud you shall
have speckled bands of golden snake-skin,
in which I'll wrap you up as snug as any mummy."
"And from the shadowy crypt of Saint Benigne, where propped up against
one wall we'll bury you bolt upright,
you'll be able to hear to your heart's content the weeping of little children
in Limbo."
-------
Translator's Notes: St. Benigne--a
very old Monastery in Dijon. Scarbo--Bertrand wrote many poems
about Scarbo, a miniature devil, demi-urge, or Satanic companion or assistant.
Compare the 2 Scarbo poems directly above with the
Scarbo which was the inspiration for the climactic,
final piano piece in Ravel's Gaspard
de la Nuit. Tip: Or, scroll down for our third Scarbo. He will
re-appear 'ere long...
Translated by Michael Benedikt
She arose with nightfall; and, after lighting a candle, anointed
herself from a little bottle;
then, after muttering a word or two, she was transported to the Sabbath
revels.
--The Demonology of Sorcery, Jean Bodin
There were a dozen of them together there, sipping their soup from a coffin--each of them using as a spoon a dead man's forearm-bone.
The fireplace shone bright red with glowing coals, the candles mushroomed smoke, and their plates gave off the same odors that graves do in the springtime.
And when Maribas cackled or cried, it sounded like the groaning of a bow
across the three remaining strings of a
broken violin.
Meanwhile, in the tallow glow, their ringleader spread out upon the table a book of ancient spells, onto which a fried fly fell forthwith.
That fly was still buzzing slightly when, dragging its great, soft, hairy belly, a spider scaled the page edges, and crawled into the margins of that magical tome.
But already the sorcerers and witches had flown off up the chimney-flue,
several astraddle the broom, some astraddle
the fire-tongs--with Maribas alone, flying off on the handle of a
frying-pan.
Top of Site Top of The Above 8 Selections Benedikt Links
Note 1: In l908, the great 20th-Century French "Impressionist" composer Maurice Ravel--perhaps best known orchestrally as the composer of The Bolero (1928)--composed a trio of piano pieces based on 3 poems from Gaspard. Entitled Gaspard de la Nuit: 3 Poems for Piano after Aloysius Bertrand, the Gaspard suite is among that remarkable composer's most startling--and also technically most challenging--keyboard creations. Ravel's contemporary, renowned French Pianist Alfred Cortot, wrote: "These 3 poems enrich the piano repertoire of our epoch with one of the most extraordinary examples of instrumental ingenuity which the industry of composers has ever produced." In the light of the mystery, strangeness, and haunting power of Ravel's 3-part piano suite--even Cortot's praise is perhaps an understatement.
Note 2: Bertrand's Ondine is we think one of the most magically beautiful poems in the French or any other language. The beauty of Ravel's piano piece, we think, matches it. ('Ondin'as some readers may know, is in French a generic term for an 'undine' or water-sprite. Bertrand converts the generic term, and uses it as his name for the little upstart temptress in his prose poem). The music evokes the alluring glories of Ondine's watery kingdom with its currents, pools, and fountains; a kingdom containing in poem & pond, the dangerously alluring beauty of the irrefutably present--yet also somehow regrettably evanescent--water-sprite, Ondine. Ondine is the coy yet love-lorn water-sprite who begs the poet 'to slip her ring on /his/ finger, and... return with her to her palace, there to become king of the lakes.' In other words, to drown! In The Gallows, Ravel translates the relentless tolling of the bell which accompanies the dangling of the hanged man 'swinging back and forth, reddened by rays of the setting sun' from text to the context of an atmospheric tone poem whose allure is as strange as its subject-matter. The steadfastness of the reiteratedly tolling chords is appalling--all the more so because the music remains so strangely sensuous, despite gathering undertones of increasing sadness as the piece proceeds. (To compare the esthetically sublime to the commonplace ridiculous: one might compare listening to The Gallows to an experience in which while feeling suitably aghast, one rubber-necks at a traffic accident--while a somewhat less aghast co-bystander coolly whispers sweet, seductive somethings in one's ear). The Gallows is soothingly lush enough to be listened to purely as pre-New Age 'Ambient,' background keyboard music--but if one takes into account what's being set to music, one may find more than a few of one's hairs standing on end. In Scarbo--the final piece of the set--the nails of that 'evil dwarf' Scarbo' raking down the length of the silk curtains' surrounding the poet's bed, also relentlessly rake the ears of the listener. Music critics tell us that Scarbo's special fascination for pianists has for generations of been the outrageous degree of sheer pianistic virtuosity which the piece demands. Ravel's evocation of Scarbo's maddeningly ubiquitous appearance at various locations around the poet's bed-chamber also keeps the ear off-balance as it struggles to size up an ever-changing musical situation. Like Ondine, Scarbo is an evanescent creature whose fantastical portrayal--evoked amidst relentless cascades of arpeggios--contrasts with the relatively stolid block chords which depict The Gallows. In Sum: Ondine evokes fatal beauty somehow gone too soon. The Gallows and Scarbo evoke horror which will not let go, but which is hard not to find fascinating because it's so eerie & uncanny.
Note 3: A key to all 3 Bertrand poems chosen by Ravel for his cycle of piano pieces--and to many other Bertrand poems as well: Bertrand's poems are based on fugitive perceptions re things actually seen & heard, or which take on a certain hard-to-deny reality because they are so vividly imagined. In other words, Bertrand's poems focus on fugitive perceptions and phenomena, as undeniable facts. The poems then run improvisations on those facts originally seized from the very edge of perception and sometimes, also the limbo of pure imagination. Bertrand's poems are "fantasies" in ways which aren't entirely fantastic--for example, the way many piano "fantasies" start with relatively simple themes which are later developed into highly inventive variations. As a writer, Bertrand's evocations of symbols of dark forces make him something of a 'Genre' author--his prose poems have things in common with 19th century gothic prose, as well as contemporary horror fiction, fright fiction, etc. Speculation: Perhaps it's the poise of the work, its literary sophistication & economy of phrasing and which makes it seem so decidedly "cool" and contemporary. In any event, it was apparently by first paying a whole lot of attention to Reality that more than a century-&-a-half ago Bertrand's imagination reached realms of what he then termed "Fantasy." Ravel's powerful 'reading' of Bertrand takes all of that and more into account. Footnote: Regrets--Ravel music links at this page are temporarily in limbo. Versions on the web which we preferred when we added music in '03, were by remarkably talented young pianist Sigurd Slattebrekk of Norway. Top of 'About Ravel's Gaspard'
Sorry--Ravel Piano Music temporarily in limbo