|
|
|
|
Translation exercises dedicated to Mallarmé« The white water lily »from the original French by Catherine Wieder
« With nothing else for speech Than a pulsing in the skies Our future verse shall rise From a precious lodging &endash; rich
Messenger winging low This fan if it's the same Through which behind you some Mirror has clearly shone
(Where invisible ash pursued In every tiny grain Is going to fall again ; Hence my disquietude)
May it always thus appear In your busy hands, my dear. »
Stéphane MALLARME
«I had rowed and rowed, with a clean sweeping drowsy motion, my eyes turned inward in utter forgetfulness of the passage as the laughter of the hour was flowing round about. So much motionlessness idled away the time that, brushed off by a dull sound into which my boat half slid, was only able to determine that it had come to a stop by the steady glittering of initials on the bared oars, which recalled me to my mundane identity.
What was happening ? where was I ?
In order to see more clearly into my my adventure, I had to recall to my mind my early departure, on this flaming July day, through its lively opening, banked by dormant foliage, of an ever narrow and meandering stream, in search of waterflowers aiming at reconnoitering an estate belonging to the friend of a friend, to whom I might pay my respects on the spur of the moment. Without having been detained by any blade of grass before any landscape more than any other, each being borne away with its reflection in the water by the same impartial movement of the oars, I had just run ashore in a clump of reeds, the mysterious end of my voyage, in the midst of the river where, suddenly widened into a fluvial grove, it displays the indifference of a pool rippling with the equivocations of a spring on the verge of departure.
A detailed inspection revealed that this obstacle of tapering green in the stream hid the single arch of a bridge that was extended onto land, on both sides, by a hedge enclosing numerous lawns. Then did I realize that it was but Madame's estate… the unknown lady I was to greet.
Such a lovely neighbourhood during the season, the nature of a person who had chosen so watery and impenetrable a retreat for herself could only be in harmony with my own tastes. Surely, from this crystal, had she shaped some kind of an interior mirror meant to shelter her from the dazzling indiscretion of the afternoon ; there she would go and rest and the silvery mist glazing the willows would soon be no more than the clearness of her gaze familiar with every leaf.
Wholly lustral did I conjure her.
Leaning forward in the agile posture in which curiosity held me, as if beneath the wide silence in which the stranger were to announce herself, I smiled at these beginnings of a bondage released by a feminine liability : symbolized quite adequately by the thongs attaching the rower's shoes to the wood of the boat, since we're always atuned with the instruments of our magic spells.
« - It could just as well have been anyone… » was I about to conclude.
When an imperceptible noise compelled me to question whether the dweller of the shore was either haunting my leisure or, unexpectedly, the pond.
The footsteps stopped : why was that ?
Subtle secret of feet to and fro leading the mind wherever she willed, dear shadow buried in cambric and in the lace of a skirt flowing on the ground, as if to surround floatingly from heel to toe any initiative through which walking opens up as a fleeting space both very low and with the folds thrown backwards onto a train, its twofold learned arrow.
Has she a motive, then, for standing so still, being herself the stroller : and I, am I not holding up my head too high if, to question the mystery, I raise it up beyond those reeds and all the mental indolence in which lucidity is veiled.
« -To whichever kind of pattern your features correspond, I sense their precision, Madame, interrupting something settled here by the rustling of an arrival, yea, this instinctive lure of something underneath, which the most authentically fastened sash, with a buckle of diamonds, does not protect against the explorer. So vague a concept is sufficent unto itself and will not transgress against the delight imprinted by a generality that allows and ordains the exclusion of all faces, to the point at which the revelation of one &endash; lo ! do not incline it, confirmed, on the secret threshold where I reign &endash; would drive away my turmoil, with which it has nothing to do. »
With the excuse that I came here by chance, can I try to present myself in such a pirate's outfit.
Separated, we are together : I inveigle myself in her obscure intimacy, in this instant suspended over the water in which my dream delays the undecided one, better than any visit, followed by others, will enable me to do. How many trifling conversations there would have to be, in comparison with this one which I held in order not to be heard, before we could recover as intuitive an understanding as we now have, my ear flat against the mahogany towards the sand which has now fallen entirely silent !
The pause measures itself by the time of my determination.
Counsel me, O my dream : what shall I do ?
Summing up with a glance the virginal absence dispersed in this solitude and, as one gathers, in memory of a site, one of those magical, closed water lilies which spring up all of a sudden, enveloping nothingness with their hollow whiteness, formed from untouched dreams, from a happiness that will never take place, and from the breath that I am now holding in fear of an apparition, depart with it ; steal silently away, rowing little by little, so as not to break the illusion with a shock and so that the rippling of the visible bubble of foam unwinding from my flight does not throw at the feet of the lady who has arrived a transparent semblance to my ravished ideal flower.
If, drawn by an unprecedented feeling, she happened to appear either The Meditative, The Haughty, The cruel or The gay, so much the worse for that ineffable face which I shall never know ! for I carried out the manoeuver according to the rules : disentangled myself, put about and was already skirting a river wave, bearing away, like a noble swan's egg, such as will never burst into flight, my imaginary trophy, which swells with nothing but the exquisite vacancy of self that many a lady loves to pursue in summer, along the paths of her park, as she stops sometimes and lingers, perhaps on the edge of a spring that should be crossed, or of some other body of water. » |
E.mail:
