Sentry of the Speechless

René Char

Translated from the French

The stones pressed against one another in the ramparts; off the moss of these stones men existed. Night carried a rifle and women would no longer give birth. Ignominy looked like a glass of water.
I am bound to the courage of several people; I’ve lived violently, without aging, my mystery among them. I have shuddered at the existence of all others like an incontinent boat about the segmented depths.

Faction du Muet

Les pierres se serrèrent dans le rempart et les hommes vécurent de la mousse des pierres. La pleine nuit portait fusil et les femmes n’accouchaient plus. L’ignominie avait l’aspet d’un verre d’eau.
Je me suis uni au courage de quelques êtres, j’ai vécu violemment, sans vieillir, mon mystère au milieu d’eux, j’ai frissonné de l’existence de tous les autres, comme une barque incontinente au-dessus des fonds cloisonnés.

Read Jody Gladding's essay on René Char's "The Brittle Age and Returning Upland."

Feature Date

July 3, 2023

Series

Translation, What Sparks Poetry

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“Sentry of the Speechless” from THE BRITTLE AGE AND RETURNING UPLAND: by René Char.
Published by Counterpath Press in 2009.
English Copyright © 2009 by Gustaf Sobin.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.

Featured Poet

René Char (1907-1988) is widely considered one of the most important French poets of the twentieth century. His work is grounded in the “tender and severe” landscape of his native Provence, where he was a commander with the French Resistance during World War II and a militant anti-nuclear protester in the 1960s. His poems range widely in style, content, and philosophical depths, from aphorism to dramatic lyricism. Connected to Surrealism for a time, associated with artists such as Braque, Giacometti, and Picasso, admired by the philosopher Heidegger, Char’s poetry is at once cosmic and local, prefiguring the ecopoetry movement. His work is available in French in Gallimard’s Pléiade collection and in many English translations.

Featured Translator

Gustaf Sobin (1935-2005) was born in Boston but lived most of his life in France. After graduating from Brown University, he moved to Provence at the suggestion of René Char where he wrote poetry, fiction, and essays. His Collected Poems (Talisman House 2010) compiles his many books of poetry, including such volumes as Voyaging Portraits and Breath’s Burials (New Directions 1988, 1995). Luminous Debris (University of California Press, 1999), his essays on archeological vestiges discovered on his walks through the Luberon, has just been translated into French and is forthcoming from Éditions Le Pommier.

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PUBLISHER

The Brittle Age and Returning Upland

Counterpath Press

Denver, Colorado

Featured book

When Gustaf Sobin arrived in France at the age of twenty-seven in 1963, he befriended the poet René Char, who, as Sobin writes, “taught me my trade.” “René Char taught me, first, to read particulars: that the meticulously observed detail, drawn from nature, could provide the key to the deepest reaches of the imaginary. One and the other, the visible and the invisible, were but the interface of a single, singular, vibratory surface: that of the poem itself.” The Brittle Age and Returning Upland are two volumes from Char’s work of the mid to late 1960’s that Sobin chose to translate in full. Here, side by side with Char’s French text, it is possible to see Sobin building his poetic vocabulary within and as a result of the practice of his mentor, “scrupulously tracking the very trajectories of desire, [leading] one onto the sonorous landscapes of the revelatory.” The book includes a Foreword by noted Char translator and critic, Mary Ann Caws.

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