Jean Cocteautranslated, from the French, by Charles Guenther
L'Ange Heurtebise
I Angel Heurtebise on the steps Beats me with his wings Of watered silk, refreshes my memory, The rascal, motionless And alone with me on the agate Which breaks, ass, your supernatural Pack-saddle.II Angel Heurtebise with incredible Brutality jumps on me. Please Don't jump so hard, Beastly fellow, flower of tall Stature. You've laid me up. That's Bad manners. I hold the ace, see? What do you have?
III Angel Heurtebise pushes me; And you, Lord Jesus, mercy, Lift me, raise me to the corner Of your pointed knees; Undiluted pleasure. Thumb, untie The rope! I die.
IV Angel Heurtebise and angel Cegeste killed in the war--what a wondrous Name--play The role of scarecrows Whose gesture no frightens The cherries on the heavenly cherry trees Under the church's folding door Accustomed to the gesture yes.
V My guardian angel, Heurtebise, I guard you, I hit you, I break you, I change Your guard every hour. On guard, summer! I challenge You, if you're a man. Admit Your beauty, angel of white lead, Caught in a photograph by an Explosion of magnesium.
Charles Guenther
A Note on Jean Cocteau and "L'Ange Heurtebise"
Jean Cocteau (18891963) was among the most versatile, talented, and prolific figures in twentieth-century French arts and letters--yet one of the most enigmatic. He produced work in many fields, including nearly thirty books of poetry, plus works in the "poetry" (as he termed it) of fiction, criticism, drama, film, painting, and illustration. His personality and his circle of famous friends and celebrants in all the arts were legendary.Cocteau made his first public appearance in 1907, at the age of 17, in the entourage of the actor Edouard de Max. A longtime friend of Picasso, Cocteau worked with him and with Eric Satie in 1917 on Diaghalev's ballet Parade, then considered scandalous. He was exposed to the most advanced artistic movements of his time, yet he remained uniquely independent of them, and in later life was alienated by passing fads and isms. These included, as he wrote in his journals, Cubism, Futurism, Purism, Orphism, Expressionism, Dadaism, Surrealism, "and an avalanche of exposed secrets." He decided, he wrote, to put his secrets within himself and not to display them.
Having served honorably in the ambulance corps in Belgium during World War I, Cocteau chose to remain in Paris--where he was born and lived all his life--during the German occupation in World War II. Although somewhat alienated by poets of the new postwar generation, he continued to produce important work, especially poetry, criticism, and memoirs, including the film Orpheus (1950) based on his earlier play (1927).
Honors came to Cocteau late in life: in 1955, a seat in the Belgian Royal Academy of Arts and Letters; in 1956, an honorary doctorate of letters from Oxford; and in 1960 the title Prince of Poets (an informal laureateship), succeeding Jules Supervielle, who died only two weeks after receiving that title. But the crowning point had been Cocteau's election to the French Academy in 1955.
Jean Cocteau has long been best known for his plays, including Les Enfants terribles (1929), based on his novel, and for his films adapted from his novels and plays. But his poetry has received increased critical acclaim. As critic Wallace Fowlie observed, poetry to Cocteau was an "immemorial rite" as mysterious to the reader as religious mysteries appear obscure to the believer. Cocteau, he added, protected his speech with short, tense and elliptical lines which formed a barrier between himself and the reader. Yet Cocteau made "the noblest and most exalted claims" for poets, and the poet's immortality is very special and real.
In "L'Ange Heurtebise," both the character and the poem have been variously explained by critics, most notably perhaps by Jean-Pierre Millecam, whose exegesis Jean Cocteau denounced in his journals. Any work, Cocteau notes, may have a thousand different allegories, and Millecam "attributes his own feelings to me." Cocteau explains the birth of the poem elsewhere in his journals.
Heurtebise originally appeared in Cocteau's play Orphee (Orpheus) in 1927, a play destined to be a story of the Virgin and Joseph. The angel was a carpenter's aide (a glazier); but the plot became so intricate that Cocteau substituted the Orphic theme in which "the inexplicable birth of poems would replace that of the Holy Child." But he didn't write the act until later, when he "felt free enough to discuss the angel with blue overalls and wings of pane-glass on his back." Even later, Cocteau adds, Heurtebise "stopped being an angel and became a nondescript young man who had died, a chauffeur of the princess in my film," which appeared in 1950. But in 1928 Cocteau recalled how the angel appeared in the play (written in 1925).
Cocteau reveals that he found the name on the brass plate of a control lever in an elevator, "Elevator Heurtebise," one day when he visited Picasso. The elevator episode disturbed him day and night and the perturbation grew worse. "The angel was living in me without my realizing it, and I needed the name Heurtebise, which gradually grew into an obsession." For a week, the fabulous creature became unbearable, even diabolical, and forced the poet to write against his will.
At 7 p.m. on the seventh day, Cocteau adds, "Angel Heurtebise became a poem and freed me. I was still groggy and looked at the form he had assumed. He was distant, proud, totally indifferent to anything outside himself. A monster of egotism, a mass of invisibility."
Cocteau maintained that Heurtebise will always remain invisible, since his earthly form "did not have the same meaning for him as for us. Since then, people have written about him. But then he hides under the exegeses." Remarkably, to Cocteau, "the angel has me speak of him as if I had known him for a long time and in the first person. This proves that, without my vehicle...he could only inhabit the vase of my body." Heurtebise remained invisible and formless.
Long afterwards Cocteau described "L'Ange Heurtebise," with typical willful enthusiasm, as "a beautiful object, a flawless poem. It's so pure, so beautiful, that any thief intending to imitate it would simply circle it and never find a way to get in. Not to be imitated, a miracle like that just can't be imitated!"
Selected References
Brown, Frederick. An Impersonation of Angels: A Biography of Jean Cocteau. New York: Viking Press, 1968.
Cocteau, Jean. Poemes 19161955. Paris: Librairie Gallimard, 1956.
Fowlie, Wallace, ed. and tr. The Journals of Jean Cocteau. New York: Criterion Books, 1956.
Howard, Richard, tr. Past Tense: The Cocteau Diaries, Volume I. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1957.
Knapp, Bettina L. Jean Cocteau. Updated Edition. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1989.
Oxenhandler, Neal. Scandal and Parade: The Theater of Jean Cocteau. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1957.These are but a few of hundreds of excellent sources on Cocteau's poetry, plays, and films, including Orphee and "L'Ange Heurtebise." Another recommended volume dealing with Cocteau's angelism is Lydia Crowson's The Esthetic of Jean Cocteau (University Press of New England, 1978).
Charles Guenther's poetry and translations have appeared in many anthologies and magazines. His translation of Jean Cocteau's long poem "La Crucifixion" was published in Webster Review (fall 1979) and New Directions 40; and his "Sixteen Poems of Jean Cocteau" appeared in APR (September/October 1991). The author of ten small press books, he lives in St. Louis.
