FOR AS FAR AS THE EYE CAN SEE
Biblioasis International Translation Series
General Editor: Stephen Henighan
I Wrote Stone: The Selected Poetry of Ryszard Kapuscinski (Poland)
Translated by Diana Kuprel and Marek Kusiba
Good Morning Comrades by Ondjaki (Angola)
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Kahn & Engelmann by Hans Eichner (Austria-Canada)
Translated by Jean M. Snook
Dance With Snakes by Horacio Castellanos Moya (El Salvador)
Translated by Lee Paula Springer
Black Alley by Mauricio Segura (Quebec)
Translated by Dawn M. Cornelio
The Accident by Mihail Sebastian (Romania)
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Love Poems by Jaime Sabines (Mexico)
Translated by Colin Carberry
The End of the Story by Liliana Heker (Argentina)
Translated by Andrea G. Labinger
The Tuner of Silences by Mia Couto (Mozambique)
Translated by David Brookshaw
For as Far as the Eye Can See by Robert Melançon (Quebec)
Translated by Judith Cowan
Robert Melançon
Translated from the French by
Judith Cowan
BIBLIOASIS
Copyright © Robert Melançon, 2013
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher or a licence from The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For an Access Copyright licence, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free to 1-800-893-5777.
Originally published as Le Paradis des apparences. Essai de poemes réalistes by Éditions du Noroît, Montreal, Quebec, 2004.
FIRST EDITION
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Melançon, Robert, 1947-
[Paradis des apparences. English]
For as far as the eye can see [electronic resource] / Robert Melançon ; translated by Judith Cowan.
(Biblioasis international translation series)
Translation of: Le paradis des apparences : essai de poèmes réalistes.
Poems.
Electronic monograph issued in EPUB format.
Also issued in print format.
ISBN 978-1-92742-819-1
I. Cowan, Judith II. Title. III. Title: Paradis des apparences.
English. IV. Series: Biblioasis international translation series
PS8576.E455P3713 2013 C841’.54 C2012-907686-4
Edited by Stephen Henighan
Copy-edited by Dan Wells
Typeset by Chris Andrechek
Biblioasis acknowledges the ongoing financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Council for the Arts, Canadian Heritage, the Canada Book Fund; and the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Arts Council. We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada, through the National Translation Program for Book Publishing for out translation activities
For Charlotte
Contents
FOR AS FAR AS THE EYE CAN SEE
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR
Snow, over roofs, and trees, and the ground,
in answer to the wash-tint that stands for sky,
is brighter than this inky light of day.
Between the post office chimney and
the radio tower, a pigeon’s tracing
a hyberbole, erased behind him as he flies.
A wire-running squirrel has followed
the telephone line across to the maple tree,
of which he’s exploring the ramifications.
One might search in vain for any other event
in this theatre reduced to almost nothing,
enclosed by mounting tiers of brick houses.
Between the buildings a bloated sun wanders
from window to window through a multi-storeyed
sky ruled off in glass and metal squares.
Sometimes a bird will hit this hardened
space, through which the far-off clouds parade.
The street sinks deeper into evening; cars
inch ahead in compact lines, stopping
at red lights that mirror the setting sun,
then beginning again their endless
caterpillar crawl. On the sidewalks,
the crowd trudges past under the sightless
gaze of mannequins in shop windows.
A cloud of newsprint birds flies up and off
across the square where night drifts down.
Soon waves of workers will be pouring out
in a swelling rush, more and more of them
from the subway station on the southeast corner.
A man wrapped in rags and crouching close
by the entrance to a tower built in a single block
of glass and metal, looks out of place with it all.
He sets a cardboard sign in front of him.
Cars pass, and a bus. Sunlight rinses down
over the cornices, runs from floor to floor and
reaches this man, weighed down by all of space.
A flock of pigeons sweeps down on the snow,
pecks at bread. This morning the park
is a rippled expanse over which the sun
sparkles too brightly for the eye to bear. Does
the soul retain such a blaze of whiteness? The
soul evolves into all that it has known; everything,
for the soul, is substance and accretion
as soon as a semblance of order appears.
Thus the trees become columns, holding aloft
the dome of heaven between walls of wind,
yet this temple collapses immediately
in a rush of unanimous wings.
Three birds you have no time to identify
fly through the leafless branches of the trees
against a backdrop of blue, of clouds, of sun.
The bells of a church summon you to noble
thoughts, but you do not pause for those.
A silent Buddha, sitting under a maple tree,
smokes meditatively while watching traffic.
A red dog pauses at the base of a trash can, sniffs,
leaves a few drops of urine and resumes his round.
You exchange a look with the contemplative
sitting on his bench. No doubt these tiny happenings
are written in him as well, and will be erased.
The books set out on the shelves, the sun
outlining squares on the table,
the bouquet of pens in a glass, a few pages
covered with a writing difficult to read,
crossed out. Beyond the windowpane,
the tracery of branches, the ranks of roofs
covered with snow, some brick walls, then
blue space for as far as the eye can see.
From time to time the wind lifts the red-
and-white flag on the post office. Some pigeons
go wheeling through the air. A squirrel runs
along the telephone wire, then disappears.
Above the streets, where there’s nothing
but deserted space, the rising moon might
as well be an aspirin tablet, awash
in the sweep where the stars dissolve.
The stretch of roadway is covered in dust
with, here and there, some patches of ice.
It all seems hard a
nd tight. How many can
be out at this late hour, and in such cold?
Only those few whose task it is:
policemen, ambulance and taxi drivers,
and others with nowhere to go, to be seen,
motionless, in the recesses of buildings.
We hear the cries of seagulls, which give
the city an ocean-front air, such a long
long way from the sea. Streaky clouds roll
through the blue expanse of foamy crests.
Missing are the whiff of iodine, the scent of seaweed,
but the wind’s blowing from the northwest
insistently. If it were to rain, all this
would take on a thick layer of humidity
which would make the difference. We’d close
our eyes, we’d draw in deep breaths,
and that would do it; turning to face
the wind, we’d think we smelt the open sea.
At times there’s a glimpse, down the channel of a street,
and wedged between two rows of houses,
of a bit of the river, like a fragment of sky
broken off and fallen out there below the horizon.
Some mornings, there’s a lancing glint
or fiery gleam where the daylight’s reflected
in its blazing mirror. It might kindle its flame
in anyone lost from afar to its contemplation,
but we do not stop for that; one glance
is enough to light up the heart, and those
whom we meet, a few steps farther along,
will not know where this joy comes from.
The old man stares at a fixed point in the midst
of space, where the rest of us see nothing.
The valley rolls to the foot of the nearby hill
which the autumn climbs in stages, a view we praise,
predictably, year after year. We’re right, just the
same, to applaud all these yellows, these reds and
pinks contrasted with the pines’ green, we’re right
to come all this way to marvel. Above the grass
that looks almost painted and varnished, we seem to see
the air’s transparency, washed by the wind last night.
Abruptly, the old man turns his back on
what he alone has seen, that we can never know.
Patches of light punctuate the landscape:
street lights, traffic signals, neon signs,
shop windows, reflections. Night envelops all of space:
housefronts engulfed in the dark, intersections
looking like islands, the air that seems
laden with soot. Above the buildings floats
a narrow crescent moon and a few stars stray
in the smoky sky’s immensity.
Taxis drive slowly past, and other cars which
seem to be going nowhere, coming from nowhere.
A man sets down a vague bag of stuff in the doorway
of a shop, and stretches out in his weariness.
We walked along the river’s edge to see
the night streaming, time rushing past
between the shores drowned in darkness.
The wind flowed, the air flowed,
the black that was all the immensity
of space flowed from every side.
We heard only the water, and felt as if
the whole of the dark was enlarging,
rising like a fountain and pouring back
into itself, into the redundant blackness,
into the rippling air, the fluid night and
into the river lashed with reflections.
A sphere of silence enfolds all
these stores we’re walking past, crossing
by turns through blocks of shadow and puddles
of brightness falling from street lights
and shop windows. It’s as if the air were filling
with vague rustlings, with fleeting
movements arising from nothing,
from whisperings. The signs blink yellow, pink,
and purple. The eyes of the mannequins
stare into infinity; it’s a point somewhere
out there in space. They’ve been posed in
deliberately banal tableaux vivants.
Nothing is happening in the expanse
of blue, so perfectly blue, that has
stretched its canvas above the streets,
nothing but the event of the light as it
fades towards the horizon, diffusing
into a hemisphere without contours,
built up out of nothing. No sooner does one try
to focus on one point than the eye, lacking
an object, seeking in vain for something
to fix on, at once shifts back down
towards the broken line of buildings,
as if to rest against a parapet.
Night blurs the garden, opening it out
into a space through which one searches
for the geometry of the constellations,
as if some pedagogical heaven were
going to reproduce the illustrations from
an astronomy manual for amateurs.
But the eye cannot distinguish the points
that the mind knows are stars from
those other patches of light projected
by the windows of the waking down there,
twinkling at the rim of the horizon,
out beyond the formless expanse.
Here on this side, pink faces smile
with all their rows of perfect white teeth
from under helmets of blond hair.
Across from them, bloodied bodies are seen,
crowds in black and white brandishing
placards, and refugees lugging bundles.
Then there’s a tank, a missile, an explosion,
or the head of a prime minister. A little to the side:
breasts and buttocks. Elsewhere: cars,
pastoral landscapes and wild animals.
Magazine covers establish the truth of
this world, by categories, for all tastes.
We see rising ranks of roofs, a framework
of branches which the late spring
has not yet edged with leaves,
the criss-crossing of the telephone wires,
some patches of snow … a whitish sky
raises its rampart up behind as in
those naïve paintings which remain superbly
unaware of the techniques of perspective.
We see chimneys outlined against
a pale sun and spills of undecided
shadow. We see the air’s transparency,
and the hazy dusting of the light.
The day draws down. It’s as if the sky
were emptying out and space folding up,
as if the light were crumbling away like
plaster that has never been painted,
that’s neither white nor grey and
that’s casting an overlay of damp.
Seize this hour, or rather this instant,
this passage rather, from grey to blue-black,
as if everything were hollowing out; make
haste to see this, which you will see once only.
Night wafts through the air, which seems
suddenly made of some thick substance.
Just outside the window, a redpoll
perches on a wire, preens for an instant
then vanishes. Sparrows, raccoons,
insects and spiders and squirrels from
the miscellaneous ark of our flood
haunt our streets, gardens and alleys,
although theirs is not the world we know,
our houses playing the role, no doubt,
of hollow rocks we come bounding out of,
dangerous animals whom it’s best to flee;
as soon as we appear, they all f
ly off, scurry,
scarper, melt into the air, the earth and the walls.
Silence rounds itself over this landscape
formed of a patch of pale wall, a hedge,
a rivulet of grass and a few trees.
Windows stand out as yellow rectangles.
The night rises up. It’s as if we could hear
the shadows spreading, little by little overtaking
the expanse studded with street lights.
Soon nothing will be seen but a rampart
of bricked-up blackness, compact and flawless.
Is this the disorder of a world’s end?
The air carries stale perfumes which we quaff down
as if drinking swallows of nothingness.
All the light is radiating from the lemons
in the fruit bowl in the middle of the table,
which some avocadoes, pears and kiwis
enhance with green, copper and velvet patches.
Light falling from the window finds focus there,
everything arranged round this ideal centre:
the china cabinet, the buffet, the empty chairs,
solid walnut pieces, polished, almost black,
striped with reflections. The newspaper and the mail
are white and light-brown rectangular
patches, tossed casually on the corner, where
the cat has come and stretched out on them.
For all that, he’s not so badly dressed,
and he’s shaved this morning, this man
holding out his cap in the bus shelter.
He’s mumbling a few inaudible words,
knowing that these people, whether they give or not,
have no wish to hear what he has to say.
All he needs is to draw their attention,
catch their eye and refuse to look away.
An old woman rummages in her handbag
and places a folded banknote in his cap.
Immediately he stuffs it into his pocket,