Robert Desnos, J’AI TANT RÊVÉ DE TOI translated by Kate Deimling
I’ve dreamed so much of you that you lose your reality.
Is there still time to attain this living body and kiss on this mouth
the birth of the voice I cherish?
I’ve dreamed so much of you that my arms accustomed when
embracing your shadow to cross over my chest would not curve to
the shape of your body, perhaps.
And that, facing the real appearance of what haunts and governs
me all these days and years I would surely become a shadow,
O scales of sentiment.
I’ve dreamed so much of you that it’s surely too late for me
to wake. I’m asleep on my feet, my body exposed to all the
appearances of life and love—and you, the only one who counts
for me now, I could less touch your forehead and your lips than the
first lips and the first forehead to come along.
I’ve dreamed so much of you, so often walked, spoken, slept with your
ghost that there is nothing left for me perhaps, and yet, than to be a
ghost among ghosts and one hundred times more shadow than the
shadow that strolls and will stroll lightheartedly on the sundial of
your life.
Commentary:
I think the biggest challenge here is word order. I have the sense that the words in the poem are tracking the perception of the speaker, so it feels important to respect the word order as closely as possible. Although “I’ve dreamed of you so much” is more natural in English, it feels right to me to say “I’ve dreamed so much of you,” so that “dreamed” and “so much” remain close together. Similarly, “perhaps” needs to maintain its place hanging onto the end of the sentence. But I did not keep “surely” at the end of the next block of text: I felt I had to yield to the English rhythm of “surely become a shadow.” I also wrote “one hundred times more shadow” instead of “more shadow one hundred times,” which I thought would trip up readers. I considered “more shadow onehundredfold,” which I kind of liked, but the word felt too archaic for this poem (when searching for uses of it online, I found a lot of biblical stuff and an essay on the Nibelungenlied).
Time is so important in this poem that I really wanted to keep the present tense of the verbs “haunt” and “govern” instead of using the present perfect, and I think I found a way to do so that works.
I added a dash to avoid the likelihood in English that “you” would be read as another object of the preposition “of” following “appearances.” In French, the syntax itself, with the repetition of “de” in “de la vie et de l’amour,” avoids this misreading. So my idea is that the dash can serve the same function in English. I don’t want to lose the reader in this lengthy sentence that may be harder to follow in English than in French.
Kate Deimling
World Poetry Review 