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Marceline Desbordes-Valmore was one of the first French poets in the
Romantic school of poetry. She was born in 1786, in Douai, in northern
France. Her poems portray her childhood as idyllic. However, this was
not to last. At the age of fifteen, tragedy struck. Her father’s
profession had disappeared after the French revolution. In 1802, she and
her mother visited a relative in Guadaloupe to ask for money.
Unfortunately they arrived in the middle of an epidemic of yellow fever,
and her mother contracted the disease and died. Further, the relative
was not as rich as they had thought, so could not spare them money.
Marceline Desbordes had to make her way back to France alone. At the age
of sixteen, in need of money, she started a career on the stage as a
singer and actress. This career ended in 1819, when after having
published two successful collections of poetry, she left the stage to
focus on her writing.
She married an actor, Prosper Valmore, in 1817. He remained an actor
after she had left the stage, and as he acted in the provincial theater,
he had to be away from home for long stretches of time. Her life
continued to be punctuated by tragedy; only one of their four children
outlived her. She died in Paris at the age of 73.
While her poetry was widely acclaimed during her lifetime, it was for
the most part forgotten during much of the 20th century. It has now been
rediscovered in France, but relatively little of her work has been
translated into English.
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Peter Shor is a mathematics professor at MIT who occasionally writes and
translates poetry in his spare time. The High Window has previously published six of his translations of poems by Paul Verlaine. You canread them here.
NB: You can listen to all four of the poems below read in the original by clicking on the French titles.
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Some introductory notes
The last two stanzas of ‘Far from the World’ rather subtly play on the expression ‘un flot de souvenirs’ (literally, “a stream of memories”, but with the meaning ‘a flood of memories’). I have changed this section of the poem somewhat in my translation so as to refer to the English version of the metaphor.
I feel certain that the bird in the first stanza of In Summer'”, who starts singing his lament when night falls, is a nightingale.
Finally, Desbordes-Valmore was a poetic technical virtuoso. For example, in ‘Dans l’Été, she alternates seven-syllable and five-syllable lines,something quite difficult to do. And in ‘Trop Tard’, I really like the way she moves the caesura from after the fourth syllable to after the sixth syllable in the repeated line ‘Vous qui savez aimer, ne m’aimez pas’. I believe that in French poetry of the time, moving the caesura like this was virtually never done (or possibly when a poet couldn’t find a reasonable wording with the caesura in the right place). In this poem, I believe that it was quite deliberate, and that it serves to emphasize that line.
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Marceline Desbordes-Valmore: Four Poems
FAR FROM THE WORLD
Come in, my memories, open my solitude!
The world troubles me, being alone scares me, too,
How many storms to come and how much more worry
Before the silence soothes my heart?
I am like a child looking for her mother
Who cries out, and then stops, afraid of her own voice,
But more than a child’s, my memories are bitter:
In her first grief, she has no earlier.
Come in, my memories, even though you’re crying,
For you are my father, my mother, and my heaven!
Your sorrows have never returned without charms;
I smile at you through my tears.
Come back! You as well! Let me see your smiles,
Your long blue skies, your dark shadows, your green glades,
Where the angels laughed in our youthful delirium
While chaste blushes bloomed on our faces.
You return in a flood when my heart dives back in,
O my childhood loves! O the loves of my youth!
Once more, I see you rising like water in a dream!
And once more, your rippling mirrors all look alike!
*
Entrez, mes souvenirs, ouvrez ma solitude !
Le monde m’a troublée ; elle aussi me fait peur.
Que d’orages encore et que d’inquiétude
Avant que son silence assouplisse mon coeur !
Je suis comme l’enfant qui cherche après sa mère,
Qui crie, et qui s’arrête effrayé de sa voix.
J’ai de plus que l’enfant une mémoire amère :
Dans son premier chagrin, lui, n’a pas d’autrefois.
Entrez, mes souvenirs, quand vous seriez en larmes,
Car vous êtes mon père, et ma mère, et mes cieux !
Vos tristesses jamais ne reviennent sans charmes ;
Je vous souris toujours en essuyant mes yeux.
Revenez ! Vous aussi, rendez-moi vos sourires,
Vos longs soleils, votre ombre, et vos vertes fraîcheurs,
Où les anges riaient dans nos vierges délires,
Où nos fronts s’allumaient sous de chastes rougeurs.
Dans vos flots ramenés quand mon coeur se replonge,
Ô mes amours d’enfance ! ô mes jeunes amours !
Je vous revois couler comme l’eau dans un songe,
Ô vous, dont les miroirs se ressemblent toujours !
***
IN SUMMER
Danger lurks in the twilight
With the song of a bird,
Who as night falls, alights
And laments to the reeds.
Soon everything that breathes
Gives itself to dream,
And a hypnotic languor
Settles on the stream.
All over, wings and nests
Quiver quietly,
Betraying the tête-à-têtes
Of doting turtledoves.
Summer burns with mystery
In the flowering beds
Of the only beings who love
Without blame or regrets.
Summer, she is too young still
To run away from danger,
So if the dreamer I love so well
Lingers in the orchard,
Let a stray cloud act in accord
With its cruel nature
And save an unwary soul
From mortal pleasure.
*
Un danger circule à l’ombre,
Au chant de l’oiseau,
Qui descend, dès qu’il fait sombre,
Se plaindre au roseau.
Alors tout ce qui respire
Se prend à rêver ;
Et le ruisseau qui soupire
Semble l’éprouver.
Partout les nids et les ailes
Tremblent doucement,
Dénonçant des tourterelles
L’entretien charmant ;
L’été brûle avec mystère
Dans les lits en fleurs
Des seuls amants de la terre
Sans blâme et sans pleurs.
Été, si trop jeune encore
Pour fuir un danger,
L’enfant rêveur que j’adore
S’attarde au verger,
Laisse dans l’errante nue
Ton charme cruel,
Et sauve l’âme ingénue
Du plaisir mortel !
***
SORROW
If somehow I could find an eternal smile,
I’d hide my misery behind that veil:
My bruised and breaking heart would appear quite whole,
And though my tears were flowing, no one would know;
Forever barricaded in my battered soul,
I’d say, “I’m fine,” to every dreadful trial,
And my grieving face would only show
The calm oblivion of a sleeping child.
But God did not want us to have this marvelous lie:
Our smiles fray when trying to cover true pain up.
This grace was blended in our Savior’s bitter cup —
Dying, He drained it and took it to the sky.
So goodbye, smile! Goodbye, until another life —
So long as, after death, memories don’t survive!
But if the Lord cannot cure us of memory,
Then, O my soul, what use would dying be?
*
Au docteur Veyne
Si je pouvais trouver un éternel sourire,
Voile innocent d’un coeur qui s’ouvre et se déchire,
Je l’étendrais toujours sur mes pleurs mal cachés
Et qui tombent souvent par leur poids épanchés.
Renfermée à jamais dans mon âme abattue,
Je dirais : « Ce n’est rien » à tout ce qui me tue ;
Et mon front orageux, sans nuage et sans pli,
Du calme enfant qui dort peindrait l’heureux oubli.
Dieu n’a pas fait pour nous ce mensonge adorable,
Le sourire défaille à la plaie incurable :
Cette grâce mêlée à la coupe de fiel,
Dieu mourant l’épuisa pour l’emporter au ciel.
Adieu, sourire ! Adieu jusque dans l’autre vie,
Si l’âme, du passé n’y peut être suivie !
Mais si de la mémoire on ne doit pas guérir,
À quoi sert, ô mon âme, à quoi sert de mourir ?
***
TOO LATE
He spoke, in jest, or else clear-sightedly.
His cruel voice, the voice I held so dear,
Pronounced these fateful words so quietly:
“If you can love, don’t fall in love with me!
Don’t love me if you suffer from emotions.
Happiness is for me an abstruse art.
I am inflexible and have strange notions.
Love wants too much: love wants a whole heart.
I hate its tears, its glamour, and its rage;
I will not be imprisoned in its cage.”
He spoke thus, he who knew how to delight me …
If only he had earlier made it clear,
Saying, less flirtatiously, less quietly:
“If you can love, don’t fall in love with me!
Don’t love me! What the soul wants is a soul.
The firefly flashes near the new-blown rose;
He blazes, but remains forever cool;
She feels no warmth, no matter how he glows.
Vain spark cast from the fire, you’d lose your way:
My dazzling spell would lead your steps astray.”
He spoke thus, he who’d seemed so kind to me.
In a vain attempt to make my reason hear,
He said, too late, or perhaps too quietly:
“If you can love, don’t fall in love with me.”
*
Il a parlé. Prévoyante ou légère,
Sa voix cruelle et qui m’était si chère
A dit ces mots qui m’atteignaient tout bas :
“Vous qui savez aimer, ne m’aimez pas !
“Ne m’aimez pas si vous êtes sensible,
“Jamais sur moi n’a plané le bonheur.
“Je suis bizarre et peut-être inflexible ;
“L’amour veut trop : l’amour veut tout un coeur
“Je hais ses pleurs, sa grâce ou sa colère ;
“Ses fers jamais n’entraveront mes pas. “
Il parle ainsi, celui qui m’a su plaire…
Qu’un peu plus tôt cette voix qui m’éclaire
N’a-t-elle dit, moins flatteuse et moins bas :
“Vous qui savez aimer, ne m’aimez pas !
“Ne m’aimez pas ! l’âme demande l’âme.
“L’insecte ardent brille aussi près des fleurs :
“Il éblouit, mais il n’a point de flamme ;
“La rose a froid sous ses froides lueurs.
“Vaine étincelle échappée à la cendre,
“Mon sort qui brille égarerait vos pas.”
Il parle ainsi, lui que j’ai cru si tendre.
Ah ! pour forcer ma raison à l’entendre,
Il dit trop tard, ou bien il dit trop bas :
“Vous qui savez aimer, ne m’aimez pas.
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