Translation of René Bélance : I

For more info about the original author, I hope you can read French and take a peek here. 

This is just one snippet of a whole book, entitled "Épaule D'Ombre" [The Shoulder of Shadow], which I'm working on an English translation of for publication. Keep an eye out for further developments and, in the meantime, sink your teeth into this one and achieve Breton-worthy surrealistic trance...

I. Vertigo

with your awakening to joy

with your ill-considered run

with your emergent smile

like a threat to my chagrin 

i draw out my spark like an iron

with my irritating bursts

with my banishing laughter

that creaks against your ecstatic stupor

and my skeleton exhumed from the boneyard 

to the scandal of fine mistresses

who offer up to me their nude bodies

shaking with a trashy shiver

impassive to the stormy eyes of seismic dawn

i put together a reverie of hell

to brush against your body

to electrify your willing throat

a fixed day of splendor waiting the boarding of a steamship

conveying the exiled escapee of that prison

i will take you by the hair

ah! feverishly

in order to mount you

dangled

slapped

catcalled

panicked

wild-eyed

and... alone.

cynically alone.

handed over to hunger

in the bay of foulness

in front of the whorehouses

where a man fabricates 

the mischief-makers

the galley slaves

the children of the greeting of hunger

by hunger

in rags

in ulcers

and the men to scout out first

the men to go barefoot

the men for "home"

the men for the shanty

and then the women

the women for the boudoir

the women for the smoking room

the women for the brothels

the women to bring about the carnage of bankruptcy

the women for the anxiety of jewelers

women to pity

i will tell you all about the barking of the doleful

the lament of deadened rivulets

innoculated by the first needles of helium

i will recount for you the abortion of every fruit

on the unblinking earth

and the measuring out and hefting up of every corpse

for the manure of their sprawling udder

i will make you ruminate.

one window opened on the shore...

the earth will turn about

to our polar arms

and we will have the vertigo of its gravitation

the privilege of establishing 

the changing of the seasons

the influence of your eyes on tidal waves

the brief slumber of fisherman

the nightmare of sprouting alluvia

you will sing ahead of the ecstasy 

because you will not build up 

upon the disquietude and thirst

the braggart soldier

the messengers of transmissible deserts

they will bow at your porcelain feet

their spires

their riot shields

[June 1944]