Drawing by Béatrice Douvre
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Béatrice Douvre (1967-1994) was a French poet and artist. At the time of her death, she had published only a few poems in literary reviews, but some three hundred poems were found among her papers, as well as a remarkable diary, Journal de Belfort. During her last years, she was encouraged by several important French poets, including Gabrielle Althen, Philippe Jaccottet, Yves Bonnefoy, and Jean-Yves Masson who, like Althen, played a key role in publishing Douvre’s work and calling critical attention to it. In English, her collected poems have just been published, in John Taylor’s translation, as Inhabit the Brief Halt (The Bitter Oleander Press).
Further details can be found here: website of The Bitter Oleander Press: https://www.bitteroleander.com
*****
Introduction
Now more than three decades after Béatrice Douvre’s death in 1994, her poetry continues to be passed from hand to hand. She is not a household name, but her name remains well-known to poets and readers of French poetry. She is a poet’s poet. By this I mean, alongside the strictly lexical, syntactic, and semantic aspects distinguishing her poetics, that her short life of twenty-seven years seems to have been fully given over to what Alain Blanc, the French publisher of her collected poems, Oeuvre poétique, calls “the incandescent exercise of writing poems.” He adds that she was a “meteor avid for the absolute, burned with a lucid blindness, embodying poetry itself in her own way by accomplishing one of its highest missions.” And what is this mission? Blanc cites a sentence from Douvre’s prose work, Journal de Belfort: “I baptized the foliage, my hands placed on ephemeral perfections.”
Douvre indeed exemplifies a no-holds-barred dedication to the art and, as Philippe Jaccottet suggests in his preface to my translation of her collected poems, Inhabit the Brief Halt, such a commitment has its dangers. Her first poems are dated 1986, when she was nineteen. From that year on, and despite much suffering from the anorexia which had afflicted her by the age of thirteen and which she never vanquished, she wrote relentlessly. As the writer Jean-Yves Masson, who knew Douvre well and later became the publisher of Journal de Belfort at the Éditions de la Coopérative, has put it: “Language was the body that she lacked.” The poet Gabrielle Althen, who was Douvre’s professor, observes that “all of Douvre’s poetry is characterized, indeed raised up, by the swirling of the visible and the invisible, of torment and silence, of precise imagery and its transparency. [. . .] One believes that an inner landscape is at stake, but it is the world that emerges. [. . .] Douvre’s great force was to stand, to this extent, at the intersection where death and what is best [in life] meet. She placed herself with a kind of determination, as well as restraint, at this crossroads.”
In one of her early poems, Douvre herself writes: “May the word be nourishment here,” adding significantly “and death of the image.” The remark points vividly to the potential antagonism between “concepts” or “imagery,” on the one hand, and, on the other, the fulfilling experience of the “evidentness” (évidence) or “presence” (as Yves Bonnefoy, who encouraged Douvre, repeatedly formulated it) of ordinary reality, the “rugged reality” which Rimbaud, after calling himself “a magus or an angel,” desired to “embrace” at the end of A Season in Hell. In Douvre’s case, these realities are often signaled by the “spark-like presence(s),” as she puts it in her very first poem, of the Other.
Among other key terms, the reader of Douvre’s poems will ponder the mystery and possible meanings of her omnipresent “lamps,” a word used some seventy-six times in her poetry, not to forget the frequent occurrence of words such as “clair” (which I tend to translate as “bright”), “éclairer” (“illumine,” “illuminate”), and their synonyms, alongside “jour” with its double meaning of “day” and “daylight.” There is much darkness in her poems and the poet’s “lodgings” can hover on a mere “escarpment of happy days” (as she envisioned it in one of her Last Poems, eight days before she suddenly died), but Douvre’s quest, somewhat recalling Diogenes seeking to find a human being by holding out his lamp in broad daylight, can perhaps best be summed up as searching not only for that Other who sometimes approaches or is literally within hand’s reach and then moves off, but also for those moments when she can let herself be infused by that non-substance par excellence that is also somehow our most substantial and nourishing certainty: being in the world brings us into the light.
John Taylor
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Béatrice Douvre: Eight poems from Inhabit the Brief Halt
The Weight of Hope
(in memory of a deep moment)
Spark-like presence
Soon fled
Tremulous
And passing on
Soon
Sensed while waiting
It withdrew and this I knew
Lamp
Forever
Treasure of being, and together to love,
And I will learn your faith in continuing
*
Poids d’espérance
(en mémoire d’un moment de profondeur)
Présence d’étincelle
Bientôt fuie
Tremblée
Et passe
Bientôt
Ressentie dans l’attente
Elle s’est retirée et je l’ai sue
Lampe
À jamais
Trésor d’être et ensemble à aimer
Et j’apprendrai ta foi de poursuivre
***
The Call of the Bright Hour
to Marina P.
That your smile flowed out in early morning
Over eternal rowanberries
In the slow grass almost the fruit
The white embrace
And our blood spoke the same hoarfrost
Move off O move off
Further away where I can make out
Almost your voice, torn apart alive
To our resemblance
Become distant through silence,
And your nape was leaning out of April windows
Yet I saw you smiling, original
It seemed
That yesterday undid the bowl of bright fruit
An excess now of naked light
Overwhelms me
It seemed to be your smile
An aggravation of brittle
Dawn
One same hoarfrost
*
L’appel de l’heure claire
à Marina P.
Que ton sourire s’écoulait matinal
Sur d’éternelles sorbes
Dans l’herbe lente presque le fruit
L’étreinte blanche
Et notre sang parlait un même givre
Éloigne-toi Ô éloigne-toi
À distance encore où je devine
Presque ta voix
Déchirée vive à notre ressemblance
Lointaine par silence
Ta nuque se penchait aux fenêtres d’avril
Pourtant je te voyais sourire originale
On eût dit
Qu’hier dénouait la vasque des fruits clairs
Un surcroît maintenant de lumière nue
M’accable
On eût dit ton sourire
Une aggravation de l’aube
Cassante
Un même givre
***
She Who Goes Beyond
to René Char
Inhabit the brief halt
The shore before the crossing
The fascinated distance that bleeds
And the green stone at the arch of bridges
In the endless night of splendid love
Bring onto the shadow and destroy it
Our lava voices, suddenly warlike,
The upstream tremulous with our pincers
Far down the stream
A frozen threshold is gleaming
A stone nest on the tables
And the red bread of the hammer
The earth
Will afterwards honor our furors
O its sparkles from brief lamps
Noons
Hammered by our haste
*
L’outrepassante
à René Char
Habiter la halte brève
La rive avant la traversée
La distance fascinée qui saigne
Et la pierre verte à l’anse des ponts
Dans la nuit sans fin du splendide amour
Porter sur l’ombre et la détruire
Nos voix de lave soudain belliqueuses
L’amont tremblé de nos tenailles
Il y a loin au ruisseau
Un seuil gelé qui brille
Un nid de pierres sur les tables
Et le pain rouge du marteau
La terre
Après la terre honora nos fureurs
Ô ses éclats de lampes brèves
Midis
Martelés de nos hâtes
***
Face, Major Voice
to Yves Bonnefoy
Coming
Between patience and the word
The face
In the hollow of the daylight
And the embrace the hand
Seeking
The hand of daylight
A face that is breath wandering
In ripe words
And the voice
Seemingly borne
Towards more than the earth
Rummaging the acute slopes
Despite death
Which stirs
Dizzyingly
A song
Rebounding
Among the stones
*
Visage, voix majeure
à Yves Bonnefoy
Il vient
Entre le mot et la patience
Le visage
Au creux du jour
Et l’étreinte la main
Cherchant
La main du jour
Visage souffle qui erre
En paroles mûres
Et la voix
On eût dit portée
Vers plus que la terre
Fouillant l’acuité des pentes
Malgré la mort
Qui remue
Vertigineuse
Un chant
Au rebond
Parmi les pierres
***
The Passerby’s Dwelling
And we went so far
Barely moving
Dawns washed
By the most ancient lamps
We were weightless
Lost
Not shareable here
O without desire
Inside us
Pure motionless waiting
For a path an expanse of grass
Being of the very beginning
Because we remain
*
Demeure du passant
Et nous allions si loin
Bougeant à peine
Aubes lavées
Des plus anciennes lampes
Étions légers
Perdus
Ici impartageables
Ô n’ayant pas désiré
En nous attente pure
Immobile
Pour chemin toute une herbe
Être du commencement
Puisqu’on demeure
***
Vision
to Philippe Jaccottet
Simple
At the end of harmony’s walkway
The evening
In the heat of the shadow
Sings a happiness stronger
Than the world
The air would be in flames
The air in leaves
Where we would play no matter what we wished
At losing, our eyes closed,
And until we caught fire.
*
Vision
à Philippe Jaccottet
Simple
Au bout de l’allée d’harmonie
Le soir
Dans le brûlant de l’ombre
Chante un bonheur plus fort
Que le monde
Il y aurait l’air en feu
L’air en feuilles
Où l’on jouerait quoi qu’on veuille
À perdre les yeux clos
Et jusqu’à prendre flamme.
***
[Untitled]
Night so that it will illumine you
You linger
But for nothing
Already the meadows are dark
And the glimmer
In the distance
That your gaze
Perhaps
Damages
*
[Sans titre]
La nuit pour qu’elle t’éclaire
Tu t’attardes
Mais pour rien
Déjà sont les prés sombres
Et la lueur
Au loin
Que ton regard
Peut-être
Abîme
[Untitled]
Precipice of the footstep
Postponing the warm
Ardent stone
Ascend
In acts of naming
Embracing and dying
*
[Sans titre]
Précipice du pas
Ajournant la pierre chaude
Ardente
Gravir
En l’acte de nommer
D’étreindre et de mourir
Béatrice Douvre (1967-1994) was a French poet and artist. At the time of her death, she had published only a few poems in literary reviews, but some three hundred poems were found among her papers, as well as a remarkable diary, Journal de Belfort. During her last years, she was encouraged by several important French poets, including Gabrielle Althen, Philippe Jaccottet, Yves Bonnefoy, and Jean-Yves Masson who, like Althen, played a key role in publishing Douvre’s work and calling critical attention to it. In English, her collected poems have just been published, in John Taylor’s translation, as Inhabit the Brief Halt (The Bitter Oleander Press).
Further details will be found here: website of The Bitter Oleander Press: https://www.bitteroleander.com
John Taylor (b. 1952) is an American poet, critic, and translator who has long lived in France. As a translator from three languages (French, Italian, and Modern Greek), he has brought the work of several European poets into English for the first time. His recent translations include books by Pascal Quignard, Philippe Jaccottet, Charline Lambert, Franca Mancinelli, and Veroniki Dalakoura. His latest volume of poetry is What Comes from the Night (Coyote Arts Press).
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