THESE three substantial and handsomely produced volumes of poetry from the French are a major undertaking for a relatively small Irish poetry press, and congratulations to John F. Deane, the publisher of Dedalus, are in order and truly well deserved.
No More Me is essentially a selected poems of Alain Bosquet (b. 1919). The translations are by James Laughlin, William Jay Smith, Lawrence Durrell, Samuel Beckett and by the editor himself, Roger Little, Professor of French in Trinity College, Dublin. Through his translators, Bosquet speaks in an engaging and self confident voice mainly about the humanist dilemma of living in an increasingly chaotic world that has lost its belief in the possibility of transcendence or larger meaning.
Bosquet's poems offer no reassuring answers, but neither do they indulge in self pity. Bosquet confronts the void with a wry humour and a stoical acceptance and appreciation of the pleasures and ironies of the here and now. In the end, though, despite having niggling doubts about its validity or efficacy, Bosquet offers the poem - the world of poetry - as a means of consolation to the isolated consciousness of modern humanism.
The century sinks under the burden of doubt.
I write my poem.
Death shouts, pounding at my door.
I write my poem.
("A Tranquil Poet")
Born in 1925 in Transylvania, Lorand Gaspar has lived an interesting life. In the second World War he fought on the Russian front and was interned in a concentration camp from which he escaped and then made his way on foot to Paris. After the war he studied medicine and became a surgeon in a hospital in Tunis.
The Word at Hand is, inter alia, an exploratory discourse on the nature and function of language and its most thoughtful usage, poetry. It is a difficult text, involving, as it does, a good deal of science and philosophy, and it is fragmentary in its structure. That said, it is an intriguing text that attempts to liberate language from its incarceration in the solipsism of modern linguistic theory.
Poetry teaches us perhaps to believe in mental (or quite simply vital) activity ontogenetically and phylogenetically more ancient than that of logico rational thought. Its deeper layers obey rules of the game which are different from those which govern recent cortical structures ... And what scorn is poured from the heights of intelligence on this lower race within us! ... Without that hot ferment of primal colours, thought is but a network of abstract glitterings.
Does Gaspar succeed? At least he makes an impressive effort to show that language, working at its deepest telluric levels, as it sometimes does in poetry, offers an expression of the nature of being human, that is not to be found elsewhere, neither in materialist science (excepting biology, for very strange reasons) nor in "rational" philosophical systems.
Gaspar's poems, as one might expect, do not make for easy reading. And it is not because they are written in accordance with an esoteric theory. They are profound with intelligence. Their landscapes exist in geo temporality, yet are tinted with the colouration of those in the past such as the Greeks, who have seen and experienced them more clearly than ourselves:
Between the haunches and buttocks of the crumbled sea the whistlings of Furies desiccate our souls skeletal sparks scattered by the wind
O Night, my mother, from whose womb I came!
The poetry of Jacques Rancourt, in The Distribution of Bodies, for all its wit, is desperate to make sense of being alive as a human being.
Is this me being beaten in this room is this me being loved
I don't know any longer why I came in here the wind is whistling out the back the rain is shaking the very house
I don't know any longer to whom
I should put that question
("In This Room")
Unlike most of the standing army of contemporary Irish poets, Rancourt is addressing some of the key questions of our time, and is not consumed by the tedious pettiness of self therapeutic outpourings that seem to be acceptable as poems in Ireland today. Maybe the French language has a higher embarrassment threshold than post colonial Hiberno English.