The Landscape

Robert Desnos (1900-1945)

The Landscape (Le Paysage)
 

I had dreamt of loving. I go on loving but love

Is no longer that bouquet of lilacs and roses

Charging the forest with their fragrance where

A flame rests at the end of branchless pathways.

I had dreamt of loving. I go on loving but love

Is no longer that storm whose lightning imposes

Its funeral pyres on castles, disturbs, distorts,

Lights in departing the parting of the ways.

It’s the flint sparking under my feet at night

The word no dictionary in the world’s translated

The foam in the sea, that cloud there in the sky.

In ageing all becomes rigid and luminous

Avenues without names ropes without knots.

I feel myself grow inflexible with the landscape.

Reclining (Couchée)
 

On the right, the sky, on the left, the sea.

In front of your eyes, the grass with its flowers.

A cloud, it’s the track, pursues its vertical way

Parallel to the horizon’s plumb-line,

Parallel to the rider.

The horse gallops towards its imminent fall

While the other climbs interminably.

How simple and strange it all is.

Reclining on my left side

I am detached from the landscape

And only think of things extremely vague,

Extremely vague and pleasant,

Like the weary gaze promenaded

Through this lovely summer afternoon

On the right, the left,

Here, and there,

In the delirium of the useless.