Robert Desnos, J’AI TANT RÊVÉ DE TOI translated by Dawson Ford Campbell
I HAVE DREAMED OF YOU SO LONG
I have dreamed of you so long now your realness does wane.
Is there time yet to meet that vital body and unto those lips kiss
birth to the voice so dear to me?
I have dreamed of you so long now my arms wont in embracing your
shadow to fold over my breast may not curve, perhaps, to the
contour of your body.
And now surely, before the real apparition of what has haunted and ruled
me all these days and years, I would become a shadow.
O passional scales.
I have dreamed of you so long now the time has surely passed for me to
wake. I sleep on my feet, body exposed to all appearances of life and
of love and you, the only one of worth to me today, I could no more
touch your brow, your lips than the first lips and first brow come.
I have dreamed of you, walked with, talked with, slept with your ghost so
long now all that is left for me perhaps, and yet, is to be a ghost
among ghosts and more shadow by far than the shadow strolling and
which shall stroll with such glee over the sundial of your life.
Commentary:
I’ve tried to retain the musicality of Desnos’ unique syntax in my rendering of J’ai tant revé de toi while also holding onto the lyrical quality of the poem.
I’m for the most part happy with the refrain I’ve chosen: the “now” echoes the temporal motifs throughout the poem and I find that it’s by and large rhythmically satisfying. I don’t, however, love how it reads in the first line. I think this has more to do with the fact that “reality” poses a problem rhythmically—which is why I ultimately decided to opt for “realness.”
The poem arguably doesn’t attach a gender to the dreamed-of figure. “Arguably, » given that “la seule” in “la seule/ Qui compte aujourd’hui pour moi” could refer to a woman. However—and this is where I’ve tried to add more ambiguity in my translation, e.g., by avoiding “who”—it may be that the only thing that still matters to the narrator is the appearance (a feminine noun in French) of this person: “A toutes les apparences de la vie/ Et de l’amour et toi, la seule [des apparence] qui compte aujourd’hui pour moi.” There would be, I believe, significant implications in this latter reading, given that circumventing gender in French is no simple task. I imagine it would have had to be a deliberate choice on the part of Desnos, and therefore worth making apparent in translation.
This poem poses many challenges, the main one being “dormir debout,” which evokes the expression “à dormir debout”—meaning something unbelievable. I thought of rendering this as “I sleep tall…” to evoke the figurative use of “tall” meaning “exaggerated” or “unlikely.” Ultimately, I concluded that the French expression is being used, not so much to create a semantic connection to the idiom, but rather as a way to seamlessly slip the surrealist image into the poem. Desnos evokes this same expression in other poems, such as phonetically in Apparition (1939): “Un bon sommeil de boue.” I decided to go with “on my feet” to reproduce the image while using a common English expression.
I read this poem as the narrator (the poet’s?) abandonment of reality and the physical, and their surrender (perhaps happily, “allégrement”) to dream and the immaterial. The world of dream has given so much to the narrator that they are no longer suited to real life and love, but only to their apparitions/appearances (les appearances de la vie/ Et de l’amour). After so much dreaming, they may now be passed the point of waking and will have to live life apart from the material (the sundial) in an ideal (shadow cast from the sun), but is happy about it alive for it (allègre: joyful, blithe; but also full of life, vivacious). I read something redolent of a paradis artificiel throughout this poem and of Plato’s cave in these last lines especially.
Dawson Ford Campbell
World Poetry Review 