This poem by the French Surrealist poet Paul Éluard wandered into my view earlier this month, and it seems like it, and my work translating it into English, slots right in between my late wife’s poem I performed last time and this Saturday’s planned #NoKings protests planned around America.

I’ve mentioned earlier this year that in my youth I became interested in the French Modernists because I had gotten the impression that they were a key force in English-language Modernism. Later, from my work for the Parlando Project, I came to learn that this is only partially so. I wasn’t far into the Project when I realized that there was in London before WWI (at that time still the center of English-language literature) a “reverse British Invasion” going on as crucial as the 1960’s British Invasion that helped revitalized rock’n’roll music. Americans: Pound, Eliot, H.D., Frost, and even the important British Imagist theorist T. E. Hulme who had spent some expanded-sky time in Canada, were all there shaping up a make-it-new freshness. Now it’s also true that Eliot and Pound were fond of some French poets,* but as I later traced those French poets with the greater resources I could obtain this century, I found that some of those French writers were taken with Whitman and Poe.

Still, the French Symbolists, and the more internationally-sourced but eventually Paris-centered Dada and Surrealist poets were  important. Having only High School French it was hard for me to absorb a great deal of French Modernist poetry, but what I was able to find in translation, or painstakingly translate myself in the 1970s was an important influence on me.

It was soon enough that I came upon Paul Éluard then, who as far as the French were concerned, was a big deal, often rated as the greatest Surrealist poet. Well, ratings are silly – ought to remain so – but his poetry had striking imagery and was often concerned with some combination of erotic love and anti-fascist politics. In the 1970s, the first attracted me primarily, while the latter seemed a noble history lesson.

Ha ha! History, it seems, has jumped out of the past, and the anti-fascist Éluard is due for a revival – and so I welcomed seeing his poem “Bonne Justice”  appear on BlueSky in its original French. I could make out enough of it (my French is even more scant than it was in my 20s) to want to do a translation and possible performance.

I don’t know why his handwritten manuscript uses a circular format. Éluard may be trying to convey the eternal in natural law. Cynics might read “circling the drain.”  Young moderns seeing this would need to start with the translation task of reading cursive.

.

Translation moved quickly. Vocabulary issues are easily handled by computer these days, and online sources help to drill down on a word’s flavors.**   Éluard’s language here is not fancy, there are no obscure or archaic words, and he seems to me to be speaking to a general audience, not artistic theorists or avant-garde cadres. I proceeded as I normally do when translating from a literal gloss: first finding the images and what word choices will most clearly illuminate them, while giving care in preserving the “music of thought” in how the poem introduces the images and sets them off in the context of each other – though then I will take a hand at using a modern English word order and sentence structure that has some new music of sound in its new language. I rarely try to make rhyming translations. This poem’s word-music retains Éluard’s original repetitions, which I think are sufficient.

A chord sheet presented so that others can sing this fresh song created in English from Éluard’s poem.

.

So, my “Beautiful Justice”  keeps all of Éluard’s parallels, though I made one set of considered changes, both for the benefit of myself as the performer of the result, and from my reading of Éluard’s intent. This poem seems to be speaking of qualities and situations of mankind as a whole, but he uses “hommes” (men) for this, and in another case a masculine noun for brothers (“frères”) which I rendered as “family.” I decided these gendered words were outdated conventions that would benefit from translation. Yes, I was thinking too of my late wife’s poem, “In Another Language,”  performed here last time, who in those same 1970’s was dreaming a genderless language.

It’s just a single acoustic guitar and my rough-hewn voice for this performance. If one wanted to remember this poem, now song, when marching on October 18^th, it could be portable that way, though I don’t think my own performance is a stirring march – it’s more a reminiscent prayer. Prayer is focused speech. Song adds intensity of breath and music to speech. Marching and standing together, as simple as that is, adds action from our bodies (even this old man’s body). There may be more going forward that we will be called to do – who can tell with accuracy – but I think it’s not a bad start to be praying in song for those laws old/yet new, those always perfecting laws that protect us, the laws that aren’t capricious decrees to persecute and sever us.

You can hear my song in English made from Paul Éluard’s French poem with the graphical audio player below. No player? This law says you’re permitted to click on the highlighted link and it will open a new tab that will have its own audio player.

.

*Core Imagist F. S. Flint, working-class-born, but a native Londoner, worked hard to promote modern French poetry in this pre-WWI era for one.

**Though an online French dictionary I use for that had a service outage while I was working, and I began to dismay that I’d given away to charity my large old French-English dictionary volume.