I first became aware of Robert Desnos’ poetry, as well as many of the works of the surrealists, in The Random House Book of Twentieth Century French Poetry edited by Paul Auster. The poem that was central to me in that volume was “No, Love Is Not Dead,” translated by Bill Zavatsky, with that memorable last line, “Just me Robert Desnos who, for loving you, / Doesn’t want to be remembered for anything else on this despicable earth.” This was not surrealism as I had come to know it, but something else. It was a poem with a lyrical intensity that my romantic 17-year-old self could find a kinship with. I remember enclosing it in a letter I wrote to someone in High School! Many years later this anthology, the spine of the book split and taped together many times, the pages vaguely yellow with age, holds a special place on my shelf and I never forgot the importance of Desnos’ poem for that time in my life. So, I was excited to read this translation of Night of Loveless Nights by Lewis Warsh recently published by Winter Editions.
Desnos’ poem opens with a dark note, reminiscent of a broken world: “Hideous night, putrid and glacial, / Night of disabled ghosts and rotting plants, / Incandescent night, flame and fire in the pits, / Shade of darkness without lightning, duplicity and lies.” This is a world right out of Dante’s Inferno; I am reminded of the present time, where the lies and duplicity of the government and the media rule the day, where darkness hangs over our fragile democracy, threatening to engulf us all; nothing is alive in Desnos’ hell, nature is rotting, ghosts are not at peace; it resembles a nightmare from which perhaps only lovers have the chance to break free. Desnos gives us hope that “Only the unique man rules love and its sorrows, / Only him possessing a passionate spirit / The ones who submitted to the laws of unhappiness / Have known only a hangman for many years.” In our present time we have seen the effects of late capitalism: the growing poor who struggle to maintain their lives with no help from the government, an increasing threat on the freedoms of those on the margins of our society, a social media composed of talking heads who seem only interested in the grift, indeed, a world that has become a spectacle causing despair and confusion with no relief in sight. Here I think of “Punk Capitalism,” a poem by Tom Savage:
Everybody talks about the environment
But nobody does anything about it.
What has posterity ever done for us?
Equality was a great word, wasn’t it?
This is not a generous society, buster.
We have abandoned a zeal, our special attention.
Individualism is a pejorative in French.
What happened to our small town socialism
Used to raise barns and build schools?
Television has happened to language.
The use of adjectives for everything
Poisons the minds of small children.
There really seems no way out from the chaos of our present world.
In Night of Loveless Nights, Desnos writes of a time when “we sang with vibrant voices…where the echo answered lovers’ questions / with words whose sense was familiar to us” but “night collapses on our heads.” This is the familiar echo of years past, when hope was still possible, when love was in its prime, alive, and enthusiastic and held us in its sway. We have come far over the years and some of us have rejected their youthful reveries, to assume a way of life more in line with greed and power. Of course, the lover is always at a disadvantage in relation to the beloved. The ideal is shown to be illusory, as in Proust. But we must never forget the beloved in “No, Love Is Not Dead”: “Your voice and how it sounds, your gaze and how it shines, / the smell of you and of your hair and many other things will still go on living in me.” The echo are “words whose sense was familiar to us.” In extreme pain and mental distress, the lover can become free of the self. It is this blurring of identities, in pain; it is the movement from lover to beloved, and the unifying of them in a movement of yearning, a dance. The problem is that we don’t listen to the call of our hearts.
For Desnos, “The season of love, sad and still, hangs over this solitude.” But how can we have known in advance what would have prevented the sense of failure or regret. The script is a lie. And that goes for any script. We hold back more than we bring to light. Then all the words return to the void from which they came. Then there is only silence; the silence will remain after everything is gone. But perhaps regret too will pass, as it gets darker outside, and you can hear the wind howling in the branches, casting the snow on the open fields. Perhaps there will be silence in the end and the feeling that one is alone: “I will never be able to go beyond the border of larches and fir trees, to scale the baroque rocks, in order to reach the white road where she passes at certain hours. The road where the shadows do not always fall in the same direction.” But the lover must not lose hope even though the road to her is seemingly blocked. It is as if the heart of the world is on fire. But there is hope that, like a phoenix, this world will emerge from its pain, from the dust and ashes, transformed into something new.
As I was reading Desnos’ poem, I thought of the poetry of the 12th century troubadours. For Desnos:
To sleep with her
So as to prove and to prove truly
That never has there weighed on the souls and bodies of lovers
The lie of original sin
From the 11th to the 12th warrior virtues and harsh language (part of the Feudal system) gave way to Courtly attributes (service to amour) and lyrical articulations of love’s constant sorrow and rare bliss. Causes of this change were economic, political, cultural; by the 11th century life occurred outside Church circles and was often in opposition to their narrow views of human love and asceticism. There was constant contact with Muslim Spain and the development of commerce with the East. Crusaders discovered the luxurious East through Spain and Sicily, worlds that were not Christian, that had a positive attitude towards life on earth, gave free expression to love and sensual pleasure, and did not dwell on sin and repentance. This led to the formation of aristocratic courts outside the Church where a new code was developed by ladies and troubadours. This led to the development of a code of secular ethics, that emphasized the sinless joy of living. And so, “to sleep with her” has nothing to do with “original sin,”; it is an idea that has roots in the poetry of the Troubadours.
The lover in Desnos’ poem is not ascetic nor puritanical but more in line with a pagan sensibility:
The sincerest lover is capable of the strongest love
Neither chaste nor ascetic nor puritanical
And if he tries the bodies of others more beautiful
It is because he knows well the most beautiful is that of his love
For the most sincere lover if he isn’t loved by the one he loves
It’s not important, he will love
Eternally desiring to be loved
And from loving without hope will become pure like a diamond.
There was a kind of pagan sensibility in Provence. Provençal song was never disjunct with the pagan rites of May Day and the spirit in Provence was Hellenic. The Troubadours’ main sources were Ovid and Virgil’s Eclogues. Provence was also less disturbed than the rest in the North during the Dark Ages. Also, the suggestion of “adultery” in the first excerpt was also part of the Troubadour code. The mode of love of the Troubadours was purely secular. When they invoke God it is not in sin or remorse but to ask his aid and God is often on the side of the adulterous troubadours! Conjugal relations were considered merely contractual. Between lover and married lady, the latter is his lord and he her servant; the Troubadour poet, Guillem de Peiteus writes, “I surrender and give myself to her and she can inscribe me in her charter.” And finally, C.S. Lewis writes: “Any idealization of sexual love, in a society where marriage is purely Utilitarian, must begin by being an idealization of adultery.”
So, the Tragic end is not a result of sin and divine punishment but of a consuming passion and the lack of a psychological-social balance. The word in provençal is mezura which signifies a sense of balance between emotion and reason, and between social and individual considerations:
To die after her
Is the role given to the lover
To him alone is given the supreme right
To engrave a name on the perishable stone
And the erotic, sensual aspect, the body of the beloved, the lack of constraint is present:
Pure like the great love for her
In my heart alone it flows without constraint
No mind ever touches my image of her
The only beloved in the heart of the lover.
I am reminded of the troubadour poet Bernart Marti words: “She seems to me so delicate, fleshy and plump, beneath her gown of fine cloth, that, by my faith, when I see her, I envy neither king nor count, nor anyone else, for I satisfy better my desire when I hold her undressed beneath the embroidered bedcover.”
Toward the end of the poem the lover is subject to extreme emotions and the misunderstanding of the beloved:
I am tired of fighting the destiny which conceals me
Tired of trying to forget, tired of remembering
The slightest perfume which rises from your dress,
Tired of hating you and blessing you.
I was better than that but you misunderstood me.
One day among the sunny days on the rocks
Do you remember the love whose heart was hurt
And who knew to serve you without fear and without reproval?
In “No, Love Is Not Dead,” we read: “Tell yourself, I summon your familiar ghost, that I was the only one to love you more and what a pity it was you didn’t know it.” To long for someone, to suffer, is like a fire that blurs one’s reflection in a mirror; it is a fever, that melts the ego. It is the annihilation of the self. But finally, there is a rift in the eternal, and we are time-bound, painfully aware of our own mortality in this fallen world. Our only option if we “are unable to sleep” is to “Like a knight of stone who smiles / To see no god in the sky and hell without suffering” and to “Revolt!” This is the revolt of love. One must love without relying on a god and to exist in a hell without suffering. It is a sobering experience rather than the dizzy, disoriented feeling of ecstasy. Let us hope that all the anger and division in the world is transformed in a collective song of hope and love. Robert Desnos’ Night of Loveless Nights reaffirms my belief that change is possible through love, especially now when there are so many who are suffering with any hope in the future. It is a transformative light in the growing darkness.
Night of Loveless Nights, by Robert Desnos. Translated by Lewis Warsh. Brooklyn, New York: Winter Editions, May 2023. 80 pages. $20.00, paper.
Peter Valente is a writer, translator, and filmmaker. He is the author of twelve full length books. His most recent books are a collection of essays on Werner Schroeter, A Credible Utopia (Punctum, 2022), and his translation of Nerval, The Illuminated (Wakefield, 2022). Forthcoming is his translation of Antonin Artaud, The True Story of Jesus-Christ (Infinity Land Press, 2022), a collection of essays on Artaud, Obliteration of the World: A Guide to the Occult Belief System of Antonin Artaud (Infinity Land Press, 2022), and his translation of Nicolas pages by Guillaume Dustan (Semiotext(e), 2023).
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