Combat and poetry in the Vaucluse

René Char (back, centre) and some of the Resistance fighters he led

Image Credit: vpagnouf on Flickr, used under Creative Commons licence

“In this house lived René Char, alias ‘Captain Alexandre’, département head of the Landing and Parachute Section" (SAP) of the Resistance. From [the commune of] Céreste and throughout [the département of] the Alpes de Haute Provence, he and his companions led the fight for freedom against fascist and Nazi oppression”

René Char (1907-1988) was a native of L’Isle-sur-La-Sorgue (Vaucluse) and a war poet. He spent most of his time as a French Resistance agent close to that town which was well known for its fourteen waterwheels on the river Sorgue. For the duration of the Second World War, he refused to have his poetry published other than surreptitiously in journals such as l’Eternelle Revue where ‘Envoûtement à la Renardière’ first appeared. He had left the Surrealist movement in 1936.

The poem was written in 1941 only to be collected in 1945 in Seuls Demeurent (Alone Remain), the book he dedicated to Raymond Queneau who encouraged its publication by Gallimard.

La Renardière, the Foxhole, is the name of a hamlet in the Vaucluse where Maître Roux, a local lawyer, owned a farm. Once a familiar playground for his children and their friend René Char, it became in June 1940, when the Nazi occupation of France began, and Vaucluse was still in the free zone, emblematic of Beauty, love, youth.  By then, however, Char was also making connections with the opponents of the Vichy Régime.

Fabienne Bonnet (Bye-Fellow, Homerton College 2011-2016) taught French literature for the English Faculty, Cambridge. The first three poems that she translated for Gallimard, the copyright holder of Char’s Oeuvres Complètes, were published in Modern Poetry in Translation (2012). This is the fourth.

Bewitchment at Renardière

Envoûtement à la Renardière

You who knew me as I was, a dissenting pomegranate, a dawn

dispensing pleasure to set an example, ____ may your face remain

forever as I see it now: so completely free that at the slightest touch, the

infinite circle of the air crinkled, your eyes half-opening as I came to

meet you, invested me with all the posh parts of your imagination.

There I remained unknown to myself held in your sun-powered mill,

exulting in a flow of riches released from my heart gripped-vice-tight.

Over our mutual pleasure ensued a gentle flow from that everconsuming

wheel, the initiation period behind us.

On your face (but no one ever noticed it) beauty made simple didn’t

seem a cruel economy. Unerringly we pursued the only way to escape life

as an alternative mystery.

But now as roads of memory are being infested with the

monstrosity of that leprous beast, I take refuge in the innocence of a

man whose dreams never can grow old. Yet who am I to take on the task

of living after you have died? I, who, in this Song of You, can only think

of myself as the one of my doubles who least resembles me.

René Char. Translated by Fabienne Bonnet

from Seuls Demeurent © EditionsGallimard, 1945

Permission by arrangement with Editions Gallimard