Despair Has Wings

by Pierre Jean Jouve, David Gascoyne (Translator)

In 1937 the twenty-year-old David Gascoyne, later to be one of the most significant English writers of the twentieth century, found in Paris a copy of Poèmes de la folie de Hölderlin by the eminent French poet and novelist Pierre Jean Jouve (1887-1976). The following year he was introduced to Jouve, whose influence would be crucial to the development of his own poetry and philosophy. Gascoyne began translating Jouve's poems at the end of the 1930s when Jouve’s wife Blanche, a Freudian psychiatrist, became his analyst. Roger Scott provides a scholarly preface to Section One which includes all Gascoyne's published and uncollected translations of poems by his mentor. In addition, Scott has retrieved a surprising number of unpublished drafts and worksheets of other versions. Section Two of Despair Has Wings reprints Gascoyne's translations of two significant essays by Jouve together with Groethuysen's preface to Poèmes de la folie de Hölderlin. The Appendix comprises letters in facsimile, unpublished poems by Gascoyne, and three of his articles on Jouve.

Genres: Poetry

222 pages, Paperback

First published November 1, 2007

About the author

Pierre Charles Jean Jouve a eu « plusieurs vies ». Avant 1914, il est un des écrivains de l'unanimisme, ce mouvement créé par Jules Romains, puis un membre actif du mouvement pacifiste animé par Romain Rolland pendant la Première Guerre mondiale.
À partir de 1921, une profonde rupture a lieu grâce à sa seconde épouse, la psychanalyste Blanche Reverchon, traductrice de Sigmund Freud (1923) et amie de Jacques Lacan. Elle fait de lui l'un des premiers écrivains à affronter la psychanalyse et à montrer l'importance de l'inconscient dans la création artistique — et cela dès le milieu des années 1920. On peut citer parmi les œuvres de cette époque ses recueils de poèmes : Les Noces (1925-1931), Sueur de Sang (1933-1935), Matière céleste (1937), et ses romans : Le Monde désert (1927), Hécate (1928), Vagadu (1931), La Scène capitale (1935), et le plus connu Paulina 1880, paru en 1925 (adapté au cinéma en 1972 par Jean-Louis Bertucelli).
Il a été aussi, dès 1938 et pendant son exil en Suisse, un important acteur de la résistance intellectuelle contre le nazisme, avec ses poèmes apocalyptiques de Gloire et de La Vierge de Paris.
Jouve a été le compagnon de route de nombreux artistes, d'écrivains (Romain Rolland, Stefan Zweig, Joë Bousquet, Jean Paulhan, Henry Bauchau), …), de peintres (André Masson, Balthus, Joseph Sima, …), de philosophes (Jean Wahl, Jacques Lacan, …) et de musiciens (Michel Fano, …) : il a d'ailleurs beaucoup écrit sur l'art et la musique.
Cet écrivain souvent perçu comme un marginal hautain, refusant les embrigadements des "mouvements" a su toucher beaucoup d'écrivains et d'artistes dont certains peuvent être considérés comme ses disciples, par exemple les poètes Pierre Emmanuel, Salah Stétié ou Yves Bonnefoy.

Reviews

[M.W.P.M. · Rating 4 out of 5]

There are moths shut-in below
Moths pink and black and plump
Such moths are warm with an inhuman glow
Their wings are faults of memory
These creatures have the accent of two faces marked by fate
When they are hanging strictly folded-up below.
When the moths of the flash below are called
Up from the shadows where they wait
They rise up pink and plump
They rise up but they flap
They flap but soon are swollen tight
With odour, blindness, nudity and weight.

- The Moths, pg. 81

* * *

Austere nudity of the erotic Helen
Thou my prayer in stone and wind
Smile and insult through the rending veil
Woman too greatly beautiful beyond the passing years
Mourning memory green grass.

- Nul N'En Etait Témoin/Austère nudité de l'érotique Hélène, pg. 90

* * *

Write now only for the sky
Write for the curved arc of the sky
And to no black letter of lead
Resort to wrap thy writing in
Write for the odour and the breath
Write for the sheet of silver leaf
Let no unlovely human face

Have glimpsed or knowledge of rumour thereof
Write for the god and for the fire
Write for the sake of a beloved place
And may nothing to do with man intrude.

- To Himself, pg. 98

* * *

Sobbing bleeding smiling thunderclap
And the cherubim's swords enflamed therein
Here lies at rest a song of stark perfection
Genius! Unfolds a love vaster than incense is
More beautiful even than the universe
More sensitive than God who first created Himself.

- In the Common Grave, pg. 106

* * *

A cup stands silent on the table
Manuscripts lie signifying rings
The walls are as chaste as are white walls
Here the prisoner draws his hourly breath

Nothing would be prisoner is all
Were dead under his hand and the whole desert sky
Around him always were other than the way
[last line missing]

- Nuit des Saints, pg. 119