Morning light touches his sleeping head And strokes his brow to ensure It is the same man as the day before. With lupine stealth, colours enter through the window In their quiet way: White arrives from Timor having touched Palestine, Et voilà, it leans in and sprawls across the bed; Grey departed from China with regret And is here now on the mirror To give it depth By simply coming near; Yellow rubs itself a little on the armoire; And this black light repaints The health of the man Lying on the bed. Then the soul that knows him speaks, Like an anxious mother who won’t abandon the prostrate body:
Misfortune is not yet upon us Since we continue to breathe In the half-light. It is no great pain To no longer suffer And for the soul to be locked out And made homeless. One day, I will be deprived of this good body, So I like to examine its shape under these sheets, My companion, the blood that flows in his fragile delta And his hand which, sometimes, Stirs a little in a dream That leaves no trace In the body or on the soul. But he is sleeping. Let’s not even think in case this wakes him. May my voice be no louder than the growth of leaves And sweet-briar roses.
Translator’s note: Jules Supervielle (1884—1960) has been described as a poet of the cosmos, and I have tried to retain the often surprising and distinctive way he approaches our relationship to this world, and to the imaginative worlds that might lie beyond ours. The translation project follows the model used by the late Ciaran Carson in From Elsewhere (Gallery Press, 2014), when translating the French poet Jean Follain. In that collection, Carson offers his own translation of a poem by Follain, with a poem by Carson on the facing page that is in response to the original.
Supervielle was nominated three times for the Nobel Prize in Literature, was named Officier de la Legion d'honneur in 1939, and was given the Grand Prix de Littérature by the Académie Française in 1955.His poetry collections include: Débarcadères (1922), Gravitations (1925), Le forçat innocent (1930), Les amis inconnus (1934), La fable du monde (1938), Poèmes: 1939-1945 (1946) and Le corps tragique (1959).
Paul Maddern was born in Bermuda and has lived in Ireland since 2000. He has four publications with Templar Poetry, the latest being The Tipping Line (2018), and he edited Queering the Green: Post-2000 Queer Irish Poetry (Lifeboat Press, 2021). He is the first poet to receive three Bermuda Government Literary Awards and his poem, ‘Effacé’, is studied on the Northern Irish GCSE syllabus. In 2023 he was a James Merrill House Writing Fellow. His next collection is with readers, and he is currently translating, and responding to, the French Uruguayan poet, playwright, and prose writer Jules Supervielle. (https://www.paulmaddern.com/)
