from La Nuit Mathématique (1976) [“Mathematical Night”]
Translated from the French by Hilary Clark
A charming hint of witch!
She is always accompanied by a child:
love threatening total ruin.
Whether it be love silent as the magnesium flash
at the heart of a hedge of wild pigeons.
Troubles or laughter, my day is soldered
in a dazzle of white coral.
I excavate to the root the stairs of sand
that spreads the burning.
I am the waterer of my taloned nights.
I am the salamander with the blue beak of time,
seeking the big flowers,
persistent-immobile, at the cabaret of the wind.
The center of a beloved life, enclosed in all my esteem,
surrounds a bush of mirror-flowers.
With small ebony fingers, I’m the very first to sign up
for the dazzling life with a smile that explodes,
stopping our hearts.
May this life grasp by its dry hooves
everything that is not it, throw it to the ardent laundry.
A romantic swing of bees
climbs no higher than my adolescent ear.
To go into the vigor of the night
clinging to the masts of infant ships:
dark circles under the eyes grow larger with white shadow
while wild without measure
the blind beast lays its head at the northern end of the bed.
We had clear winds throughout the voyage:
not a single one has yet returned
scarcely this one with the long periwinkle look that fans out,
shines on the hand that speaks only blue
this look that takes the flawless Queen by the throat.
But to become the children of the worst!
When on a signal from a tender look
the great door of the never-allowed
crashes down on our hearts — shadowy and mad!
Here there is an extraordinary flow
of unlimited rooms, where a crowd of people
kill themselves non-stop, to be continually reborn.
As for me, I smoke the pipe of despair.
But I am the Cossack master of the house,
with the meditative eyes that one sees me with in pictures.
This white bottle, which is my den,
reopens eternally.
A luminous sadness, an insidious light
these are my privilege, in the hindsight of deluded years.
The snow decrystallizes under my steps
a carpet of spidery coldness.
Oh! — You think you’ve opened a bed of hemp for me.
The bib of my friendships is still full
of the milk of childhood.
This shell where you wanted me to be
the miracle: I am opening it.
I call for the ropes to be pulled from it.
Yes, I can laugh and command a hundred fire horses
that obey me from afar, without even raising their nostrils.
A tattered dress, would it be enough to crack open
the gates of locks to radiant fanfare?
Higher are the desires,
torn from their missing limbs.
We need a most disturbing star,
at the forehead of our dismal days.
This house is our own, to destroy the good
gods of glass: periplum of rose-madder victories.
Memory that we fling from our windows,
from the back of our young teeth refusing
what doesn’t want to laugh,
doesn’t want to light up the rivers
of liquid coal, running through demented heads.
On the heath, we’ll take a walk
of joyful owls, in feathers of stone.
Kneeling, the child of despairs,
raised by trembling jackals
heavier than life in scraps:
all she deserves is a crossbow, in her warm belly.
Until this, our late hour,
we have had to wait, to know
that there are clouds that are men.
That there are clouds so huge,
we could not extend to them
the slightest hint of our marble fingers.
Iron columns stand guard,
shaped like the snows, as are the lilacs of our hearts.
The wood they were made from bears the trace
of the face carved by the magi of obscure eternity.
From a little cap escape the heads
of crowned children, speaking like kings.
Without the tender look, the marvellous goodness
of their bird profile leaving us.
Before the red morning.
Before it rains big burning minutes,
embracing our arms and our hands bitten
by the teeth of mutinous priests.
All of space still missing is contained
in the head of one of those children.
Marianne Van Hirtum was born in Namur, Belgium, in 1935 and died in Paris in 1988. In Paris, she exhibited art (paintings, drawings, and sculptures) and wrote lyrical, often hilarious poems with bizarre imagery. She was associated with André Breton and the Surrealist group of Paris, with which she identified wholeheartedly, claiming: “I was born into the big bear skin of surrealism. Even before my birth it was incorporated into my cells, my spine.” La Nuit mathématique (Rougerie, 1976) has been celebrated as the book of a “voyant” in the tradition of Arthur Rimbaud. Her other volumes include Les insolites (Gallimard, 1956), Le Trépied des algèbres (Rougerie, 1980), and Le Papillon mental (Rougerie, 1982).
Hilary Clark is originally from Vancouver, BC, Canada. She received her PhD in comparative literature from the University of BC in 1985, and taught English at the University of Saskatchewan until 2015. Since retiring, she has been working on poetry projects and translating French-language Surrealist and Oulipian poetry. Recent poems appeared in Best Canadian Poetry 2024. Other translations from Mathematical Night appeared in the Surrealist journal ‘Patastrophe! (2022) and in Asymptote (2024).
World Poetry Review 