Ils se perdent dans le silence,
Ivres prodigieusement.
L’équilibre de leur balance
Serait tonnerre en se rompant.
S’il y avait un intérêt
Dans la rumeur du ciel en flammes
L’aviateur illuminerait
Et nous laisserait.
*
La troupe qui rit toute vive dans l’ombre
Pour un soir peut boire sans envie . . .
A la bougie que les quarts sont jolis
Et les chansons qui finissent aussi.
Tout le jour des cris sans nombre
Pour une fête très douce à souhaiter
Ont bondi de tous les côtés,
Car ce fut fête de préférés . . .
En accrochant aux murs les couleurs qui le flattent
Demain chacun saura que la joie adorable
Est partie pour toujours. Et tous les gestes nus
Seront accompagnés de mots de bienvenue
Pareils à la pitié qui suit un misérable.
*
La mer qui a tous les bateaux
N’est pas plus grande que l’endroit
Où dansaient, au son d’un roseau,
Les hommes d’un pays moins froid
Que celui-ci, pays de boue et d’eau.
La place nous semblait si grande,
Nous avions tant besoin d’être serrés
Que sans certains—qu’on les défende!—
Les danseurs étaient écrasés
Et nous prenions chaud autour d’eux,
Tout auprès d’eux!
*
Soldats casqués, fleuris, chantant et détruisant.
Toujours, très lentement,
Mi-roues renouvelées dans les blés
Des camions, des canons, des caissons.
Calme attente.
Le soir, le soleil qui se couche
Comme un fardeau glisse d’une épaule.
*
Travaille-tout,
Creuse des trous
Pour des squelettes de rien du tout.
*
Point de tombes en les forêts.
L’ombre attendait ces échappées
Que nous faisons vers la clarté
Tous ensemble, en brisant les branches.
Les troncs qu’au repos l’on tatoue
Ne connaîtront pas nos couteaux.
« Si tu veux, ralentis un peu,
Et c’est tout. »
Quelqu’un sait-il où nous allons?
Allons-nous délivrer la joie
Qui est en nous, que nous cachons
Comme un arbre cache ses racines?
Ou bien suivrons-nous toujours cette voie?
du Devoir
Paul Éluard
Listen to "[The troop that laughs all lively in the shadows]" read in the original French by Silvère Boitel:
These poems, from a chapbook of ten short, self-published poems entitled simply Le devoir (Duty; 1916), deserve translation for both historical and aesthetic reasons. This chapbook of war poems was the first book published under the pseudonym Paul Éluard. Posted to the Somme front in June 1916, at age twenty, pining for his fiancée stuck in Russia, Éluard wrote official letters of condolence to the families of the dead from a field hospital and composed these poems. He experienced the horrors that motivated Dada and, shortly after, Surrealism. He published these war poems in mimeograph in August 1916, and sent the seventeen copies to friends and relatives.
Though Éluard suppressed the poems for decades, perhaps regarding them as juvenilia, he eventually rearranged them, titled them individually, and reprinted them thirty-two years later as part of his Premiers poèmes 1913–1921 (First Poems 1913–1921; Mermod, 1948). While they have been discussed at some length by French critics, and widely praised, they have never been translated into English. They provide a chilling window into the war that scarred a generation, the Lost Generation, in their depiction of the dreariness and dread of the front, the longing for family and happiness amid the trench digging and drinking, the camaraderie and the bedbugs.
Unlike other poets of the First World War period, Éluard juxtaposes “the brutality of conflict with the tranquility and calm he hopes to regain once the weapons have been laid down”.
As in his most famous poem, “Liberté” (Liberty)—about a later war—he writes here “in a sober, unpretentious way, to capture the conflict without intensifying it in any way”—“to demobilize eloquence.”
The challenge in translating these poems is to allow their understated, often conversational tone to reveal the horror of the direct experience of modern war, while being true to the poet’s hope of happiness—all without sentimentality. The poems affirm humanity while revealing its absurdity, pointing to what the surrealists would later do, at their best. They are also haunting evocations of the chilling intimacy of the trenches and tunnels of contemporary wars.
Though Éluard suppressed the poems for decades, perhaps regarding them as juvenilia, he eventually rearranged them, titled them individually, and reprinted them thirty-two years later as part of his Premiers poèmes 1913–1921 (First Poems 1913–1921; Mermod, 1948). While they have been discussed at some length by French critics, and widely praised, they have never been translated into English. They provide a chilling window into the war that scarred a generation, the Lost Generation, in their depiction of the dreariness and dread of the front, the longing for family and happiness amid the trench digging and drinking, the camaraderie and the bedbugs.
Unlike other poets of the First World War period, Éluard juxtaposes “the brutality of conflict with the tranquility and calm he hopes to regain once the weapons have been laid down”.
As in his most famous poem, “Liberté” (Liberty)—about a later war—he writes here “in a sober, unpretentious way, to capture the conflict without intensifying it in any way”—“to demobilize eloquence.”
The challenge in translating these poems is to allow their understated, often conversational tone to reveal the horror of the direct experience of modern war, while being true to the poet’s hope of happiness—all without sentimentality. The poems affirm humanity while revealing its absurdity, pointing to what the surrealists would later do, at their best. They are also haunting evocations of the chilling intimacy of the trenches and tunnels of contemporary wars.
Paul Éluard (1895–1952) is widely regarded as the greatest of the French surrealist poets. Born Eugène-Émile-Paul Grindel, At age seventeen, while being treated in hospital for tuberculosis, Éluard met Gala, his future wife and lifelong muse—even after she left him for Salvador Dalí in 1929. His service on the front in the First World War profoundly marked him, as it did other founders of Dada and Surrealism. During the war he married Gala, and their only child was born the following year. This was also the period in which he published his first two books of poetry, including the first to be written under the pseudonym Éluard. He had a long and distinguished career as a poet and political activist, and was part of a circle that included Picasso, Max Ernst, Lee Miller, and Man Ray. He was active in the French resistance during the Second World War, and thousands of copies of his poem “Liberté” were dropped by the Allies over occupied France, cementing his reputation.
David R. Russell is professor emeritus of English at Iowa State University. He has published more than one hundred books and articles on writing and rhetoric, including four articles in French, and has lectured at five French universities. His interest in early twentieth-century French avant-garde poets, especially Éluard, dates from courses on the Surrealist movement he took in graduate school in the 1970s, taught by the late poet Madison Morrison. Since 1992, Russell has traveled widely in France to visit sites associated with the movement and particularly its antecedents in Dada and the First World War. Russell’s recent retirement has given him time to pursue his long-standing dream of translating Éluard’s early poems, especially those written during and about the First World War.
