René Char’s “Full of Tears” translated by Stuart Kendall
When the class that, unbeknownst to our age, we continue to attend, truly reaches its end, night falls on the self. What’s the use of clarifying it, full of tears?
The Passing Servant, now weak now strong, whose titular employer remains unknown to us, pierces the shadows, attends to the late fruits.
What makes our face unconcealable: throughout our existence, we’ve held ourselves between the seductive cradle and the doubtful earth. We can learn about things to come, but not their dates. We cannot predict them; they will be received before their time.
The marvelous moment when a man, without need of flint or kindling to start a fire, yet the fire rises up under his steps, making that man a light for all times and a torch of questions.
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Unfolding under the bark,
A crack in the branch.
Folding back toward the branch only with the help of the wind.
Lacrymal dew;
Evening salt.
Listening to the speaker, I held myself back, defending my body and soul, the way one holds onto the edge of a high window without being able to tear oneself away: this suffering has lasted my entire life.
We are divided in our thousand motives.
Tomorrow won’t suffice for us,
Tomorrow must suffice.
Tomorrow will be painful,
Like yesterday.
Quickly, sow, quickly, graft, such is the demand of this great Beanpole, Nature; disgusted, even exhausted, I must sow myself; brow suffering, furrowed, like a blackboard at a communal school.
The brusque alliance of the soul with words up against their enemies. This lifting of a sentence is only a passage.
The secret: would it be not reducing the next day to itself? That which grows seems to be united more and more narrowly with an inspired night as much as for a day given shape.
I see myself as king in so many scenes.
O thistle stalk arranged in my gamebag!
Soul bare; being disheveled.
Staël has left, without a step in the snow, by understanding himself on the floor of the sea, then in the rush of the path.
Is man only a pouch completely filled by an unknown, named god after the fact? Sensed, never touched? Tyrannical and capricious?
Mandelstam had an eye that sifted and brought together the extremes, let them be named. In him, we perceive the shiver of the terrestrial bark, its divisible devotions, privilege of the inspired who unite the central human fire in the damp of multiple meanings.
Why change the slope of a path that leads from the base to the summit and that we
lack the time and the strength to travel completely?
Art is made of oppression, of tragedy, riddled discontinuously by the irruption of a joy that inundates its site, then departs.
Release energy and return energy. The measure of the Times? The spark under the marks of which we appear and disappear in the fable.
The only freedom, the only state of freedom that I have experienced without reserve, is in the poetry that I have been able to attain, in its tears and in the burst of some beings come to me from three distances, that of love multiplying me.
The zone of writing, so difficult to access, bare at the bottom of the abrupt, but withdrawn from it.
One must, at every moment, expel from oneself that which troubles this spring, and lays out rushes and reeds, dear to the Beloved. No place left on the planet, even held close.
Arable land, intelligent and prodigious sleep, worry free, if one wants to escape from oneself.
Now, I’ve left my fate. I’m submerged in myself. At the end of so low a misfortune, I will encounter the pockmarked face of a star in the canal, before dawn.
It’s the same ceaseless struggle, that of ingrates: the name without the thing, so what do they call the thing with the name there. The disturbing absence? I am this absence, never seen twice.
I went to sleep peacefully under a tree; when I awoke, I was surrounded by enemies; a gun pointed at my head, another at my heart; did my heart know it?
To deceive another is to cure him of an illness that he did not think he had, to liberate him. “You will keep your knees up on the wall of your doubt.”
I endure when I hold back and when you go back to sleep. Germination.
The land of respects, no point in believing for long. It must be known that the mourning is almost constant as soon as the festival has ended, dismasted.
Now that the candle is disgusted with living, listen to it redden by the windows.
A combative hourglass flows in an older Age and not without return.
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from René Char, “Riche de larmes,” Éloge d’une soupçonnée (Gallimard, 1988); Char, Oeuvres complètes (Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1995), pp. 839-842.
The village of Bories near Gordes, a photograph by the translator.
L'effacement du peuplier by René Char
