Jean SénacTranslated from the French by Justin Vicari
Jean Sénac: An Introduction
Nearly alone among the much-translated French poets of the 20th century, Jean Sénac still waits to be discovered by the English-reading world. Maybe this is, in part, because he wasn't French but Algerian. Like Pablo Neruda--whom Sénac resembles in his stormy and primal lyricism, his political commitments, and his penchant for a certain "native" surrealism--Sénac represents what used to be called the "Third World."
He was born in 1926, into an extremely poor family whom the father promptly abandoned. Growing up with an apparently high-strung and impractical mother seems to have been difficult for Sénac, and the early heartache of being left fatherless stayed with him all his life. His sympathies always lay with those who suffered the pangs of unrequited love, as well as those who had to endure poverty and hunger: for Sénac, both extremities were already twin aspects of the same oppression. It wouldn't take a strict Freudian to argue that, as a result of his fatherless childhood, Sénac's life became a constant, restless search for surrogate father-figures. Happily for him, he found good ones: fellow Algerian Albert Camus took the young Sénac under his wing, as did the French poet René Char. Sénac began to make pilgrimages to Paris (as his great hero Rimbaud had done from Charleville a century before), where Sénac absorbed that extraordinary tradition of verse and revolution which he incorporated in his own writing.
However, Sénac's French is barbed and inward, a language in struggle. In 1950, he wrote to Char about an early morning stroll through the capital that had lured him: "Maybe it was my nerves just letting go, madness, something else, or simply one of those bouts of euphoria which Paris should reserve--malicious defense--for those who happen to grow up here? Nonetheless, chances are, on the contrary, this REMAINS, THIS essential part: 'I was present in the world.' ... I stopped at Notre-Dame (attended 7 o'clock Mass. Slipped far away from the liturgies' still water toward a more apt Perception)." It was an irony of Sénac's life that the identity which he sought, and which often seemed to elude him, came to him most strongly in a place where he did not exactly "belong."
On the one hand, Sénac's abiding love for French culture, and on the other hand, his deep misgivings about French imperial power: as a result of this internal struggle, Sénac entered the French language as a deliberate outsider, from the beginning mixing in polyglot words pell-mell from Spanish, Arabic, and English, while inventing many bold neologisms of his own. Later, Sénac actively joined the resistance against French colonialism in Algeria, fighting as a soldier for that cause: yet, one feels that Sénac was fighting only against the France who conquered with armies, not the same nation who conquered with images. France was still the country Sénac thought of when he thought of poetry, French was the language he thought poetry in, and moreover, France was where his books were published. There were many of these, including Poemes Iliaques (Iliac Poems, 1966); Avant-Corps (Pre-Body, 1966); and La Mythe de la Sperme-Méditeranée (The Myth of the Mediterranean Sperm, 1967), a cycle of poems in which Sénac comes closest to the rousing spirit of Rimbaud. He also founded three literary reviews and wrote radio plays. Sénac was often dogmatic in his quest for truth, a participant in that explosion of radical consciousness that took place across the world in the 1960's. Indeed, it was in that decade when Sénac began to feel a certain solidarity with the American beats, especially Allen Ginsberg. "Ginsberg, come on," he writes in The Myth of the Mediterranean Sperm, "let's braid our beards as one."
Throughout his life, writing was Sénac's great refuge. A cancer survivor who was often in frail health, Sénac found in writing that better, imperishable body that he needed. One of his constant motifs is the "Total Body," an ideal compound of body and soul that he felt was realizable only in poetry (and, by flashes, in the experience of profound love). As if to affirm this vital connection between writing and the body, writing and physical health, Sénac worked furiously, seemingly under the gun of sensing that his life would not be a long one; and in fact it wasn't: he was murdered under unknown circumstances in 1972. His last collections, Les Désordres (Disorders) and Corpoème (Poem-Body), were published only posthumously. But today, Sénac still sings to us in his passionate, earnest, and vehement voice.
--Justin Vicari
So What Are You Spain
to Hermann Braun
So what are you Spain if not this rustling of hawks through the heart if not the night Dressed in pointy coals she circles the oracle she runs through temples in the cactus aureole drunk with sunspots Me I am there by words alone as one lets a she-dog conjure her own faithful prairie until the birds are buried again inside our blood from her to our fingertips the span of a bite from her to my fingertips the unbearable time of her lucidity So what are you Spain in a rifle's barrel not a carnation still less a cry With her long scatterbrained arms my mother tried to stop the din of the submachine guns the water spout of castanets, writing-machines and the golden shears in my gypsies' fingers O citizeness of the sunflowers what useless melodrama hurled you to the shipyard what horn-voyeur deleted your brassy mane from the order of things? The racket we've got in our veins now is made by a thousand miners and children held prisoner in a crumbling hopscotch by springtime Perhaps one day at the precipice's edge the heart will miss us, wings wide as motherly tenderness, shuddering with the resolve of an athlete, will make us as big as the foam I will handle your pebbles o continents and all the gold of Peru will flow across my lips but what? It won't help the one who has no roots and where are mine? vines and fire I have nothing left but a bitter fame There, there is no longer mother nor lies nor the desert keeping watch at the edge of a fingernail To bruise space for us the gazelle is waking up So what are you Spain in my crime of stone a name I have risked my father's heavy breathing and his singing like a downpour of amorous crows In those risky times a black child washed his tongue three times a day Europe let loose its neon she-wolves propped on their elbows the gangs of entrepreneurs executed the doves nude soldiers punched horses in the head Buried beneath a heap of blacklists a woman noble-faced and full of patience cried "Honor to all the camps!" Misery, stronger than she, hurled the night into her hair for the children of sunburn only gravel is left to whet their appetite And as for me what would I be Spain if not the wound if not perpetual summer if not you who starts fires when I push open my voice.
Guitars
Solemn and blazing like a great empty ode I bivouac where the dogs are getting sheared my father waits for me there The bad guys have crowned us with raw matter from the height of their black brow twenty-eight saints warned me the kings of Notre-Dame are the same age as my life But I'm lost Soul let's run away the cold like love damns me to hell spellbinds me immense mercy sleeps beneath the wool don't touch the heart that rakes its wild embers Keep waiting keep waiting like I'm waiting for my father My mother told me: He lives under the springtime my mother told me As I always say knock wood I carry a green apple tree in my heart I cut my gums with the gravel of his name Tuesday will start with sea water misery with my oaths the gypsies will come to stitch up my vertebrae In Spain death is burning the saffron.
The Absurd
This ball in the throat it's earth it's death it's love like a barley pearl hit by a lump of coal The thousand names assail us an octopus of seasons arms around the waist disorder worn on the brow I call to you I call to you what innocent shall respond who will tear me out by the roots the shovel the red earth of sheets? In the tomb I repeat the gesture of an unknown vigilant after the bombing a grass blade under bare foot Ah difficult misery that always comes back under the ribs this cancer is it a void or the absolute In the blue of chance where hornets battle the poem strikes its balance saying yes and saying no.
Justin Vicari was born in New York City. In 2005 he received the Third Coast Poetry Prize and the New Millennium Writings Poetry Prize. He is the author of the chapbooks In a Garden of Eden (Plan B Press, 2005) and Woman Bathing Light to Dark (Toad Press, 2006). His work has appeared in Rhino, Interim, Eclipse, Slant, Spillway, Disquieting Muses Quarterly, Gin Bender Poetry Review, Poetry Motel, Stirring, Memorious, Black Rock & Sage, and other reviews. This is his first appearance in American Poetry Review.
