Robert Desnos, J’AI TANT RÊVÉ DE TOI translated by Damion Searls
I’VE DREAMED OF YOU SO MANY TIMES
I’ve dreamed of you so many times that you’ve stopped being real.
Can I still reach out and touch your living body? kiss on your lips the birthplace of the voice I so love?
I’ve dreamed of you so many times that my arms, used to being crossed on my chest as I hug your shadow, may no longer be able to reach around your firm body.
That faced in real life with what haunts me, ruling over my days and years, I can only become a shadow myself—
Alas, the balancing act of the heart.
I’ve dreamed of you so many times that I can’t wake up anymore. Even standing I’m asleep, my body exposed to everything life and love puts before me, while as for you—the only woman I care about now—I can more easily touch the first brow I see, the first lips, than your brow, your lips.
I’ve dreamed of you so many times—walked, talked, slept with your ghost—that maybe, and yet, there is nothing left for me to do but turn into a ghost among all the other ghosts, a hundred times darker than the shadow that makes its way and will slowly keep making its way across the sundial of your life.
Commentary:
I tend in translating to try to bring the text all the way into English and let the poetry take care of itself, rather than hoping to preserve the original’s poetry by matching another language. By “all the way into English” I mean that I try to be aware of ways that English can express things but naturally wouldn’t, for instance using abstract nouns instead of vigorous verbs and adjectives. We can say that something “is losing its reality,” but we’d more likely say it “stops being real”; “all the appearances of life” is less natural than “everything life puts before me”; “without a doubt” (or even “doubtless”) is used relatively rarely in English, especially twice within three lines. Reality and appearances and a doubt tend not to be nouns in English. I prefer concrete language over abstractions: dreaming “so many times,” countably, instead of “so much”; we can’t really kiss a birth but we can kiss a birthplace. I use active verbs: I love a voice, not a voice is dear to me. With French in particular, the cognates or dictionary translations are often flowery or filigreed in English but I try to go for direct language, monosyllabic if possible: étreindre can be “embrace” but I prefer “hug,” leaving “reach around” as an option instead of “enfold” for plier; fantôme is “ghost” instead of “phantom”; gouverner is “rule over” instead of “govern” or “dominate”; promener is “make its way” instead of “promenade,” “proceed,” or “wander”; something sentimental is “of the heart” rather than sentimental, emotional, with respect to the feelings. The gains in directness outweigh, I feel, the loss of melodiousness, or rather give the text an English melody of its own.
Damion Searls
World Poetry Review 