CocteauJean - Tempest of Stars

First published in 1992 by the Enitharmon Press 36 St Georges Avenue London N7 oHD Distributed in the UK and Ireland by Password (Books) Ltd 23 New Mount Street Manchester M4 4DE Distributed in the USA by Dufour Editions Inc. PO Box 449, Chester Springs PA 1942; Jean Cocteau poems Edouard Dermit English translations Jeremy Reed 1992 Drawings David Austen 1992 ISBN 1 870612 12 4 The text of Tempest of Stars is set in Garamond (156) by Gloucester Typesetting Services, Stonehouse, Gloucestershire, and is printed by Expression Printers Ltd, London N7

The translator and publisher wish to express their warm gratitude to M. Edouard Dermit for permission to reproduce Jean Cocteaus poems in this edition. They also wish to record their thanks to David Austen, Leon Livingstone and Gareth Winters. Tempest of Stars is also published in a large format de luxe limited edition of 85 copies (ISBN 1 870612 17 5), the text pages of each copy typeset and printed by Gloucester Typesetting Services, and laid into a box made by the Fine Bindery, Wellingborough, Northamptonshire. My intentions throughout, although less extreme than in the work I publish as imitations or re-creations, have been in the interests of poetry at the expense of literal translation. My intentions throughout, although less extreme than in the work I publish as imitations or re-creations, have been in the interests of poetry at the expense of literal translation.

The latter often seems to me to represent a genre intent on reversing words into inaccessible parking spaces. The poems which follow take liberties, but unlike my Montale versions are not inventions. I have wherever possible retained Cocteaus language, and compromised only where the original seemed opaque or too intractable to sit comfortably in English. My choice of poems is idiosyncratic. Poetry, which was once indicative of trends in social revolution, reached an experimental peak with the publication in 1918 of Apollinaires Calligrammes, with the invasion of Paris in 1920 by the Dada movement, and with the appearance in the same year of Breton and Soupaults automatic text Les Champs magntiques. While Cocteau belongs to neither the Dadaist nor Surrealist modes of poetic expression, his more innovative work was written in the period between 1916 and 1923, and it is pre-dominantly to the splinter language, sense dissociations and syntactical disjunctions that characterise his early poetry, that I have drawn attention. Jeremy Reed

Un coup de couteau vaut bien une rose.Laisse-moi te tuer lentement,Expertement; votre amantEn morte vous mtamorphose,Vous change en bte, en encrier,Jusqu vous lentendre crier. The twist of a knife is well worth a rose.

Let me kill you slowly, expertly; your lover changes you into a dead woman, metamorphoses you into a beast, an inkpot, until you shout it.

Jhabite les Thermes UrbainsOn my donne douches et bainsPour ter de moi lopiumQue ne peut prendre un honnte homme.Or sans opium je voltigeEt nai plus les pieds sur terre:Du pavot Jai coup la tige. La clart voil mon mystre. I stay at the Thermes Urbains, they give me showers, jacuzzi, to help kick my opium need that no self-respecting person can take. Without the drug Im dissociated and my feet arent on the ground. I have cut the poppys stem. Me voici maintenant au milieu de mon ge,Je me tiens cheval sur ma belle maison;Des deux cts je vois le mme paysage,Mais il nest pas vtu de la mme saison.Ici la terre rouge est de vigne encorneComme un jeune chevreuil.Me voici maintenant au milieu de mon ge,Je me tiens cheval sur ma belle maison;Des deux cts je vois le mme paysage,Mais il nest pas vtu de la mme saison.Ici la terre rouge est de vigne encorneComme un jeune chevreuil.

Le linge suspendu,De rires, de signaux, accueille la journe;L se montre lhiver et lhonneur qui mest d.Je veux bien, tu me dis encore que tu maimes,Vnus. Si je navais pourtant parl de toi,Si ma maison ntait faite avec mes pomes,Je sentirais le vide et tomberais du toit.

Here I am in the middle of my life, I am sitting astride my beautiful house; on both sides the landscape repeats itself, but fails to duplicate the same season. Here, the red earth is antlered with vines like a young roe-deer. The hung linen breezily signals, welcomes the day. There, appears winter, and the honour due me. Im prepared to believe you still love me, Venus.

But if I hadnt written about you, if my house wasnt built of my poems, I would feel the void and fall from the roof.

(Route de lolienne) Comme lclair, le tir des picesde marine: un grand liseronple aux vitres,ma chambre bouge.Pour une fois que je couchedans un lit en pleine mer,cest lorage!Les talons de lhorizontapent du pied dans les paroisde lcurie.Du reste les parois scroulentde gauche droite.Dans les veilleuses du tlgraphe,toute la nuit brle un chant triste.Braise de son. Le vent lattise.Sur la route de lolienne.Sur la route de lolienne,sous une tempte dtoiles,une quipe dIrlandaisrpare le tlgraphe.Autour dun camion (troupede nains vtus de peaux de btes)les petits fous du roi Learaccordent le vent du nord,les cordes casses de sa harpe.(Route de Iolienne) Like a flash of lightning, a gun detonates the sea: a large white convolvulus outside the window of my pitching room. The one time that I sleep in a bed in the middle of the sea it thunders. The stallions of the horizon drum with their feet against the walls of their stalls. And then these walls collapse from left to right.

All night in the flicker of telegraph wires, a sad song burns. Embers of sound fanned by the wind on the road to the wind-tower. On the road to the wind-tower, under a tempest of stars, an Irish crew repair the wires. Around a truck, a troop of midgets dressed in animal skins, the little fools of King Lear, tune up the broken strings of the north winds harp.

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