Robert Desnos, J’AI TANT RÊVÉ DE TOI translated by Heather Green
I’VE DREAMED OF YOU SO MUCH
I have dreamed of you so much you’ve begun to seem unreal
Is there still time to reach the living body and to kiss on your mouth the
birth of the voice so dear to me?
I’ve dreamed of you so much that my arms, accustomed to grasping your
shadow, clasped across my chest, might not bend to the contours of
your body
And faced with the actual appearance of the one who has haunted and
governed me for days, for years, I would no doubt become a shadow
O sentimental scales
I’ve dreamed of you so much I doubt there’s time enough for me to wake.
I sleep standing up, my body exposed to all aspects of life and love
and you—the only one who counts today for me—I'm less likely to
touch your forehead and lips than the next lips or the next forehead
that comes along
I have dreamed of you so much, walked and talked and slept so often
with your ghost, perhaps there’s nothing left for me, and yet, to
become a ghost among ghosts, a shadow a hundred times more
shadow than the one that walks and will yet gladly wander across
the sundial of your life
Commentary:
Some Afterlives of the Poem
Around 1989, I bought a copy of Random House Anthology of Twentieth-Century French Poetry, edited by Paul Auster, and opened up a world, first discovering the work of Tristan Tzara, via the translations of Jerome Rothenberg and Lee Harwood and Auster himself, and reading “Georgia” by Philippe Soupault, “Let’s Spit,” “Me, too, Bougie,” and this poem, which I starred, bookmarked with a length of ribbon, and read countless times, carrying the book with me to France and back, and to college and on many subsequent moves until here it is again, falling apart in my hand, in my house in Virginia, after all these years.
In the meantime, I discovered, via PennSound, “samples” of this poem in John Yau’s tremendous “Borrowed Love Poems,” and now for me this poem is always inflected with Yau’s voice: “I have dreamed of you so much, lost as I am in the sky.” And I’ve kept the first part intact here, choosing “I have” over I’ve in most of the iterations in the poem, and keeping “of you” before “so much,” for a sense of informality and intimacy I found in the Yau.
Rereading, and attempting my own translation, I was surprised to hear a tone, a haunted ebullience and playful drama that brought Frank O’Hara to mind. In the opening, the image of the loved one is losing its “reality,” memory becoming shopworn with use, a phantom presence clutched to the chest of the speaker whom we find in a coffin pose, wondering if they could even hold the beloved, given the chance. By the end of the poem, the lover admits he may well kiss the next person who comes along, but he still resolves to linger, to become the shadowiest shadow to stroll the sundial of the beloved’s life. The pain of sleeping upright and cannot not extinguish the feeling for “la mystérieuse,” no matter how spectral she may be, in Desnos evocation of the power of an unfulfilled, or somehow estranged, love.
Recently, I discovered that a fragment of this poem, first published in 1930, was found in Desnos’ pocket when he died in the recently-liberated Terezin concentration camp in 1945. Through a series of obituaries and memorial publications, the poem was translated into Czech and then back into French, where, altered by these translations, it is now carved into the Mémorial des Martyrs de la Déportation, which commemorates the more than 200,000 people deported from Paris and sent to Nazi camps during World War II. The fragment:
j’ai reve tellement fort de toi – j’ai tellement marche tellement parle tellement aime ton ombre qu’il ne me reste plus rien de toi – il me reste d’etre l’ombre entre les ombres l’ombre qui viendra et reviendra dans ta vie ensoleilee
In English:
i’ve dreamed so much of you – i’ve walked so much, talked so much, loved your shadow so much that i have nothing left of you – what’s left for me is to be the shadow between shadows, the shadow that will come and come again into your sunny life.
Unbeknownst to my teenage self, it’s life, not French poetry, that gives the master class in pain and longing, but poetry can offer collective memory, camaraderie, and imagery capacious and fluid enough to hold dreams, including those stolen, diminished, unreal, or intact.
Heather Green
World Poetry Review 