Stone Lyre: Poems of René Char
BY René Char
TRANSLATED FROM THE FRENCH
BY Nancy Naomi Carlson
(Tupelo Press, 2010)

The sepia photograph on the cover of Stone Lyre: Poems of René Char is of the underside of a stone spiral staircase as it reaches upward around a small circle of light many floors above. It is reminiscent of the scroll of some instruments, including the lyre, which characteristically has two such features carved in wood. The title of this collection of Char’s poems was chosen by the translator, Nancy Naomi Carlson, who sought “the dynamic quality of a balancing of opposites” and juxtaposed two reoccurring symbols. Char did include an oxymoron in the title of his work, À une sérénité crispée (1951), which would seem to support this choice, even though the image of a heavy, lifeless lyre — a symbol of the muse and poetry — might be a ponderous description of Char’s work.

The choice of over forty poems offers the reader a rich insight into Char’s thinking on love, life, landscape, and human nature, such as in the poem “Inebriation” with its portent of death:

Carlson’s translations flow easily, rhythmically, and are a pleasure to read. They are a reflection of Char’s energy and complexity and the literary register is just. An excellent example is the prose poem “Magdalene Keeping Watch,” in which the poet finds the highest sensibilities of human experience in the chance meeting with a young woman in the metro:

Translation, however, has its issues, and the author in her introduction discusses some of the more salient. In “Lightning Victory,” the poet describes a moment in a relationship when, with the cooling of love, “alone. / Insane and deaf” in the “season of shade,” the lovers become gradually deformed: “Lepers descend with the slow snow” (p. 7). The translator describes this line as “mysterious and puzzling,” saying that she did not make any attempt to make it “more understandable.” The discussion might have benefited from an exploration of why she did not seek a personal understanding of this line before translating it, and to what extent understanding is a necessary aspect of translation.

Carlson’s translations flow easily, rhythmically, and are a pleasure to read. They are a reflection of Char’s energy and complexity and the literary register is just.

In “Allegiance,” Char once said that he wrote about the experience of the poet in delivering a finished poem to the public. The poet, the lover of the poem, having let it go, suffers as the poem knows not its creator and risks being misunderstood. The poet is alive in the poem always, unbeknown to the creation: “I live in her depths — blissful sunken wreck — my aloneness her unknown treasure” (p. 17). Carlson has chosen to translate the abstracted “poet’s love (which is the poem he has let go),” which Char refers to as “il” (love is masculine in French), as “she,” as if there were a female object of the poet’s love, positioning the poem as a love poem between the poet and a woman. The poem works as a heterosexual love poem; but only in Char’s meaning, or in the case of homosexual love, does the “il” make sense.

Working towards reconciling the “dilemma of having to choose between meaning and music” in her translation of Char’s poems, Carlson also hopes to bring an awareness of the stress of syllables and of poetic rhythms to her work. In her introduction, she offers as an example the poem “Congé au vent,” of which the first line, for example, illustrates this aim in retaining the “f” alliteration and assuring that the sentence ends “with a stressed syllable,” in keeping with the original:

A concentration on sound, however, means that the translator at times loses important layers of meaning in a poem. In this poem, the word “Congé” — in its sense of “taking leave of” — has been dropped, resulting in a translation in which the writer’s moment of breathlessness and fascinated oblivion to the wind as the perfumed young woman passes by is absent. Further, the line “Il serait sacrilège de lui adresser la parole” or “It would be a sacrilege to speak to her” is translated as “Sacrilege to utter a single word”; the imagined connection between the writer and the subject has not been retained and the impact of the poem is diminished as a result.

In “Yvonne,” Char seems to touch upon bisexuality in describing a woman who “could drink and survive forty rounds” and “From waking to sunset used tactics of men.” Carlson has modestly translated “coucher” as “sunset,” but the word also means “bedtime,” “putting to bed,” or even “the bed” itself. She has also translated “manoeuvre” as “tactics.” A closer translation of the line “De l’éveil au couchant sa manoeuvre était mâle” might be “From waking to bedtime her moves were male.” The last lines in Carlson’s translation are:

Char, however, uses “puits”— which means “well” — and not shaft; he also uses “dans l’écart de ses mains” in the last line, which means “in the gap between her hands.” This more literal translation retains the notion of bisexuality in a woman who at times “digs a well” and at others engages in “raising water,” the result being that she risks having a heart divided, holding it in the gap between her hands.

To conclude, Char’s writings often describe specific moments. In “Proclaiming One’s Name,” the poet deals with an experience of coming of age when he was ten; it was an instant of grief, of transformation: “But what wheel in the wary child’s heart turned harder and faster than that of the mill, churning its white fire?” (p. 55). Indeed, Char remains optimistic: these moments can be survived. Gaining vitality by looking at the “stars… shadowed and hard” in the “sky of men,” as evoked in “Combatants,” the poet left behind a memorable line, representative of his spirits and visions, “I collected their golden sweat, and the earth, through me, ceased to die” (p. 43).