In an earlier post, I mentioned a Pound translation, deformation of an O.V. de L. Milosz’ poem, where he converted the French poet’s “Symphonie de Novembre” into “Strophes”:

Strophes
It will be as it is in this life, the same room,
Yes, the same! and at daybreak, the bird of time in the leafage,
Pale as a dead woman’s face; and the servants
Moving; and the icy, hollow noise of the fountain-taps,
Terrible, terrible youth; and the heart empty.
Oh! it will be as it is in this life; the poor voices,
The winter voices in the worn-out suburbs;
And the window-mender’s cracked street-cry;
The dirty bonnet, with an old woman under it
Howling a catalogue of stale fish, and the blue-apron’d fellow
Spitting on his chapped hands
And bellowing like an angel of judgement,
It will be exactly as here and in this life, and the table,
The bible, Goethe, the ink with the same temporal odor,
Paper, pale; woman, white thought-reader!
Pen, the portrait,
It will be the same,
My child, as in this life, the same garden,
Long, long, tufted, darkish, and, at lunch-time,
Pleasure of being together; that is—
People unacquainted, having only in common
A knowledge of their unacquaintance—
And that one must put on one’s best clothes
To go into the night—at the end of things,
Loveless and lampless;
It will be the same as in this life,
The same lane in the forest; and at mid-day, in mid-autumn
When the clean road turns like a weeping woman
To gather the valley flowers,
We will cross in our walks,
As in the yesterday you have forgotten,
In the gown whose color you have forgotten.
[from The Random House Book of 20th Century French Poetry, edited by Paul Auster]

The original:

Symphonie de Novembre
Ce sera tout à fait comme dans cette vie. La même chambre.
—Oui, mon enfant, la même. Au petit jour, l’oiseau des temps dans la feuillée
Pâle comme une morte: alors les servantes se lèvent
Et l’on entend le bruit glacé et creux des seaux
A la fontaine. O terrible, terrible jeunesse! Coeur vide!
Ce sera tout à fait comme dans cette vie. Il y aura
Les voix pauvres, les voix d’hiver des vieux faubourgs,
Le vitrier avec sa chanson alternée,
La grand-mère cassée qui sous le bonnet sale
Crie des noms de poissons, I’homme au tablier bleu
Qui crache dans sa main usée par le brancard
Et hurle on ne salt quoi, comme I’Ange du jugement.
Ce sera tout à fait comme dans cette vie. La même table,
La Bible, Goethe, l’encre et son odeur de temps,
Le papier, femme blanche qui lit dans la pensée,
La plume, le portrait. Mon enfant, mon enfant!
Ce sera tout à fait comme dans cette vie!—Le même jardin,
Profond, profond, touffu, obscur. Et vers midi
Des gens se réjouiront d’être réunis là
Qui ne se sons jamais connus et qui ne savent
Les uns des autres que ceci: qu’il faudra s’habiller
Comore pour une fête et aller dans la nuit
Des disparus, tout seul, sans amour et sans lampe.
Ce sera tout à fait comme dans cette vie. La même allée:
Et (dans I’après-midi d’automne), au détour de I’allée,
Là où le beau chemin descend peureusement, comme la femme
Qui va cueillir les fleurs de la convalescence—écoute, mon enfant,—
Nous nous rencontrerons, comme jadis ici;
Et tu as oublié, toi, la couleur d’alors de ta robe;
Mais moi, je n’ai connu que peu d’instants heureux.
Tu seras vêtu de violet pâle, beau chagrin!
Et les fleurs de ton chapeau seront tristes et petites
Et je ne saurai pas leur nom: car je n’ai connu dans la vie
Que le nom d’une seule fleur petite et triste, le myosotis,
Vieux dormeur des ravins au pays Cache-Cache, fleur
Orpheline. Oui, oui, coeur profond! comme dans cette vie.
Et le sentier obscur sera là, tout humide
D’un écho de cascades. Et je te parlerai
De la cité sur l’eau et du Rabbi de Bacharach
Et des Nuits de Florence. Il y aura aussi
Le mur croulant et bas où somnolait l’odeur
Des vieilles, vieilles pluies, et une herbe lépreuse
Froide et grasse secouera la ses fleurs creuses
Dans le ruisseau muet.

As you can see, Pound ignores the last three stanzas, with their echoing waterfalls, Rabbi of Bacharach, Florentine nights, city on water and forget-me-not. All of Milosz’ gustier moments, the profound heart, beautiful sorrow and double-pumped my child, my child, are also blunted or hacked away, symphonic melodrama hushed into the intimacy of chamber music. A hauntingly beautiful passage in Pound’s (extraordinary) rendition, with its killer “Loveless and lampless” isolated:

And that one must put on one’s best clothes

To go into the night—at the end of things,

Loveless and lampless;

Is almost Night of the Living Dead cute in the original, with “go into the night / Of the disappeared, all alone, without love and without lamp”:

Les uns des autres que ceci: qu’il faudra s’habiller

Comore pour une fête et aller dans la nuit

Des disparus, tout seul, sans amour et sans lampe.

Pound may tweak Milosz’ tone, but he isn’t messing with the other man’s basic premise, that of a fatherly figure, likely the big G, giving us a preview of the afterlife, which will be just like this goddam life, it turns out. We’re entering Swedenborgian territory. Let’s ask Oscar’s nephew, Czeslaw, for a briefing:

During the first half of [the 20th] century much attention was paid to so-called symbolism in poetry. It seems strange that, in spite of this preoccupation, Swedenborg was little known. After all, Baudelaire’s sonnet “Les Correspondences”–a poem crucial to sympolist poetics–took its title and its contents from Swedenborg. Curiosity alone should have directed critics to explore the original concept, not just its derivatives. The truth is that every epoch has dusty storage rooms of its own where disreputable relics of the past are preserved. Swedenborg was there together with the quacks, miracle workers, and clairvoyants so typical of the not-so-reasonable Age of Reason [...] The risk of taking Swedenborg seriously was so great; besides, nobody seemed to know what to think of him.[from "Dostoevsky and Swedenborg," included in Emperor of the Earth--Modes of Eccentric Vision (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977)]

If anything, Emanuel Swedenborg’s matter-of-fact descriptions of the beyond sound even weirder today:

Some hells present an appearance like the ruins of houses and cities after conflagrations, in which infernal spirits dwell and hide themselves. In the milder hells there is an appearance of rude huts, in some cases continguous in the form of a city with lanes and streets, and within the houses are infernal spirits engaged in unceasing quarrels, enmities, fightings, and brutalities; while in the streets and lanes robberies and depredations are committed. In some of the hells there are nothing but brothels, disgusting to the sight and filled with every kind of filth and excrement [from Heaven and its Wonders and Hell, first published in Latin, London, 1758, translated into English by J.C. Ager]

Sound exactly like my neighborhood, so I’m in hell already, except that, if Swedenborg is correct, I’ll be forced to live there forever, unless I go to a heaven. I don’t think most poets will be able to squeeze in sideway:

Each one is insane according to his own lusts, and these are various [...] Those that have loved themselves above everything, and in their occupations and employments have looked to their own honor, and have performed uses and found delight in them not for the use’s sake but for the sake of reputation, that they might because of them be esteemed more worthy than others, and have thus been fascinated by their reputation for honor, are more stupid [...] than others [ibid.]

Who wants to go to heaven anyway? This Milosz/Pound poem is also resonant for its tragic, resigned summation of human life on earth. It has the pathos of Ivan Ivanych’s rant in Chekov’s “Gooseberries,” here translated by Ronald Wilks:

Just take a look at this life of ours and you will see the arrogance and idleness of the strong, the ignorance and bestiality of the weak. Everywhere there’s unspeakable poverty, overcrowding, degeneracy, drunkenness, hypocrisy and stupid lies… And yet peace and quiet reign in every house and street. Out of fifty thousand people you won’t find one who is prepared to shout out loud and make a strong protest. We see people buying food in the market, eating during the day, sleeping at night-time, talking nonsense, marrying, growing old and then contentedly carting their dead off to the cemetery.

Stuck in hell, the best we can do is compose nonsense until misfortune shuts us up for good.

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