'VOLUMES,' JEAN-JOSPEH RABEARIVELO

A bilingual translation of the 1928 collection by the national poet of Madagascar.

BRIEF NOTE
Rabearivelo's poems, especially in the early phase represented by Volumes, are odd in a not-unpleasant way, like a pinch of salt in coffee. His style is not yet completely formed and this collection represents his juvenilia and adolescent work, before he moved on to other projects. Because of this oddness I've chosen to go for a very literal mode for translating his poems. The rendering in English will always (I hope) be grammatically correct, but often unidiomatic on the level of (English) word order and grammar, although I try to go for idiomatic translation when it comes to entire phrases. I like to hope that this is a good way to get across the slightly odd flavour of his poems, which is difficult to render in English otherwise, since French sentence construction is often so different. All these poems can be very readily rendered slightly differently: change a 'the' for a 'that,' and it won't sound as weird in English, but I've generally opted for a mix of literality and French-ness in the English which I hope preserves a little bit of that weirdness, and I hope a little bit of the Malagasy-ness in the originals.

This translation is taken from the free archives of the Bibliothèque malgache électronique, from the edition arranged by François Morand, with thanks. Thanks also to Pierre Maury, who I believe is the primary publisher of most of the free French-language Rabearivelo material online. I don’t believe that copyright applies, but if it does, then I hope that the Bibliothèque malgache électronique or whoever holds the copyright will realise that my aim is the same as theirs—to promote the free access to Rabearivelo’s poems for as many people as possible. My only goal with these translations is to facilitate casual and scholarly reading of his work for people whose French isn’t up to it otherwise. Nonetheless I think that translation is sufficiently transformative that copyright doesn’t apply anyway. Except for Almost-dreams and Translated from the Night in Leonard Fox’s out-of-print translation, almost none of Rabearivelo’s work is available easily in English and I thought this needed to be addressed. If you want to read those collections and don’t have £200 handy to get the book (out-of-print books tend to be on the dear side), it is available from two UK libraries according to WorldCat: the British Library, where you can set up a free account and access it in the reading room, or the University of St Andrews’s library, where I doubt you can access it unless you’re a(n) (ex-)student or -staff. I’m considering translating those texts too eventually and publishing them here so that there will be a free resource, but I’m planning to get to them last as they’re his last major collections chronologically. In the meantime if you like these poems you can read them free of charge at the British Library.

‘Volumes’ was published in 1928 via the Imprimerie de l’Imerina, Antananarivo. This has been a big project—the goal is to make Rabearivelo’s work freely available to as wide an audience as possible, but nonetheless is takes a lot of time and effort so I’d appreciate consideration of a subscription. Enjoy.

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Jean-Joseph Rabearivelo
Volumes



VERS LE BONHEUR
à G. Henri de Brugada.

VERS LE BONHEUR
Fuyons la plage d’Elseneur,
cœur las de rêve inachevé
et las de rêve non rêvé,
ô cœur avide de bonheur !

Débris épars et vain de palme :
le seul butin de l’aventure !
Pourquoi ce signe en la mâture
d’aucun voyage en golfe calme ?

J’ai découvert un nouveau port
où souffle un vent heureux et pur.
Une embellie est en l’azur
où ne s’annonce nulle mort.

Voici, des portes de l’aurore
natale, notre âme première :
inondons-nous de sa lumière
où notre entité s’élabore.—

C’est toi, regard de mon enfant,
c’est vous, mes livres, et c’est toi,
soleil qui danses sur mon toit,
guerrier de l’ombre triomphant.

Ah ! faut-il plus pour que j’aborde
en ton port, Bonheur, ô mirage,
sans qu’en chemin quelque naufrage
rompe mes voiles et les torde ?

N’importe ! Qu’un plus beau steamer
parte parmi l’or du matin !
Nous ferons plus riche butin
aux rives claires du Bonheur !

Fuyons la plage d’Elseneur.

TOWARDS HAPPINESS
Let us flee the beach of Elsinore,
heart weary of unfulfilled dreams
and weary of dreams undreamt,
O heart eager for happiness!

Scattered debris and vain laurels:
the only spoils of adventure!
Why this sign in the masting
of no voyage in the still gulf?

I found a new port
where a happy and pure wind blows.
A good omen is in the azure sky,
where no sign of death is.

Look here, from the gates of the natal
dawn, comes our first soul:
let us bathe in its light
where our essence blossoms.—

It's you, my child's gaze,
it's you, my books, and it's you,
sunlight dancing on my roof,
triumphant warrior against the shadows.

Ah! what more must I do to land
in your port, Happiness, oh mirage,
without some shipwreck on the way
cutting down my sails and wringing them?

Nevermind! Let a finer steamer
set sail among the gold of the morning!
We'll find richer treasures
on the bright shores of Happiness!

Let us flee the beach of Elsinore.

NOTES ON TRANSLATION¹

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1 MEDITATIONS

I—D’UN MATIN
Ton coq rouge a troublé le sommeil de l’aurore
qui, jeune fille aux yeux lourds encore de songe,
verse l’or de son front, verse sa toison blonde
sur la toiture rose.

Belle ! et vous êtes seuls à demeurer au lit
où l’ombre atténuée estompe son ton bleu !
Est-ce pour mieux jouir de l’amour absolu,
est-ce la peur de voir votre rêve exilé ?

Sortez de la torpeur des sens, du sang, de l’âme
et venez avec moi résoudre le dilemme
du bonheur à choisir.

Lequel : ce vent de fleurs qui nous vient du cœur sombre
des bois et des vallons ? ou bien, sans s’interrompre,
la naissance et la mort du nuage en l’azur ?

I—OF A MORNING

Your red rooster has disturbed the sleep of the dawn
which, like a young girl whose eyes are still heavy with dreams,
pours out the gold of its countenance, pours its blond fleece
onto the pink roof.

Beautiful! and you are the only ones to demur in bed,
where the attenuated shadow blurs its blue tone!
Is it better to enjoy absolute love,
is that the fear of seeing your dream banished?

Escape the torpor of the senses, of the blood and the soul
and come with me to resolve the dilemma
of which happiness to choose.

Which one: this wind of flowers that comes to us from the enshadowed heart
of the woods and valleys? Or indeed, without interruption,
the birth and death of the cloud in the firmament?

NOTES ON TRANSLATION²

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2
II—D’UN SOIR
Salut, – qui sait ? adieu ! – front que le crépuscule
révèle dans son songe ardent à ma pensée,
lauré de fleurs en panicule
pour enchanter l’ennui de mon âme lassée !

Ou bien qu’il me dérobe, ombre sur ta lumière,
ô fierté de mon cœur ivre de ta jeunesse,
et me fait pour la fois dernière
entrevoir, sans jouir d’une ultime caresse !

Mais doublons la cloison qui nous tient séparés,
objet de mon bonheur sinon de mes regrets,
décevante apparition,

pour ne point disputer au soleil qui s’éteint
cette heure qui recèle en elle ton destin
et trouble ma décision.

II—OF AN EVENING
Hello,—who knows? adieu!—A face that the twilight
reveals in its fervent dream to my mind,
laden with flowers in a panicle
to charm the boredom of my weary soul!

Or indeed that it steals from me, a shadow on your light,
O pride of my heart drunk with your youth,
and makes me for the last time,
glimpse the face without enjoying a final caress!

But let us double the schism that keeps us separated,
object of my happiness if not of my regrets,
disappointing apparition,

so as not to compete with the fading sun
over this hour that holds within it your fate
and troubles my decision.

NOTES ON TRANSLATION³

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3
CHANT PATERNEL
Tu règles mon humeur à l’égal de mes livres,
ô regard défendu du Sort et de son leurre,
regard de mon enfant, noir ou bleu selon l’heure,
regard qui dans la paix encore te délivres !

Le rythme intérieur qui conduit ta musique
m’enchante, ô cher regard, à tel point, que j’oublie
de rechercher en toi la lumière abolie
que veut y retrouver mon âme nostalgique…

Et j’ai vécu cet âge aussi !.. Mais les seuls charmes
que m’offre le Présent en ses minutes calmes
m’ont fait perdre jusqu’aux notions du Passé !

Je ne cherche pas même à t’entr’ouvrir, ô porte
close entre le Futur obscur et mon penser
couronné ce matin de nulle rose morte !

PATERNAL SONG
You rule my spirit like my books,
O forbidden gaze of Fate and its lure,
gaze of my child, black or blue according to the hour,
gaze which even in peace delivers you!

The inner rhythm that conducts your music
enchants me, O dear gaze, to such an extent, that I forget
to seek in you the abolished light
that my nostalgic soul wants to find there...

And I lived through that age too! But the only charms
that the Present offers me in its quiet moments
have made me lose all notions of the Past!

I don't even try to open you, O closed
door between the obscure Future and my mind
crowned this morning with no dead rose!

NOTES ON TRANSLATION⁴

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4
FETICHE
Débris de glace, ô regard absent
qui fixes la présence du monde
sur ce fétiche nègre au gros sein
détaché de quelque flore blonde,

ne dépendant jamais plus du sort,
à présent, tu règles, selon mainte
crédulité, la vie et la mort
de tes fidèles dans la tourmente ;

quel plaisir snob m’incita pourtant,
sans compter sur toi pour mon destin,
à t’ériger au sein de mes livres

alors que sur cet autel pollu,
regrettant ton règne révolu,
à jamais se sont closes tes lèvres ?

TALISMAN
Debris of ice, O absent gaze,
you who fix the presence of the world
on this negro fetish with a large breast
detached from some blond flora,

never again dependent on fate,
you now rule, according to manifold
credulity, the life and death
of your tormented faithful;

yet what snobbish whim prompted me,
without counting on you for my destiny,
to erect you among my books

when on this polluted altar,
lamenting your bygone reign,
your lips are forever sealed?

NOTES ON TRANSLATION⁵

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5
LIVRES
Nous n’avons nul vaisseau, mais vous y suppléez
pour passer l’océan de notre lassitude,
ô livres de partout sur ma table échoués,
golfe calme paré d’ombre et de solitude.

Cette claire embellie et cet espoir, c’est vrai…
Mais pour quel continent romprons-nous les amarres
sans qu’au terme du voyage quelque regret
ne détourne la proue et la poupe des phares ?

Et puis, voiliers partant, au rythme de l’esprit,
pour le pays de l’âme et par le cœur fleuri,
j’ai peur d’abandonner une part de moi-même

au souffle astucieux et perfide des flots
où le vent, le naufrage et la mort sont enclos,
menaçant d’engloutir ma charge de poème !

BOOKS
We have no ship, but you make up for it
to cross the ocean of our weariness,
oh books from everywhere washed ashore on my table,
a calm bay adorned with shadow and solitude.

This clear lull and this hope, it's true...
But for what continent do we part the moorings
without regret at the end of the voyage
turning away the bow, stern to the lighthouses?

And then, the sailboats setting off, at the pace of the spirit,
for the land of the soul and through the flowering heart,
I'm afraid of abandoning a part of myself

to the cunning and perfidious breath of the waves
where the wind, shipwreck and death are enclosed,
threatening to swallow up my cargo of poems!

NOTES ON TRANSLATION⁶

6
HÉRODIADE
Ô beaux vers plus obscurs que les diamants noirs,
vous exercez sur moi la plus grande attirance
et savez m’enivrer avec votre fragrance
de rose épanouie au front ombreux des soirs !

Des soirs ! mais imprégnés de quelle aube future
ouverte sur mon cœur et promise à mes sens
que désole la mort des jours adolescents
sous un flot de lumière insinuante et dure !

Un rapport fugitif dans mon âme éveillé
du monde le plus feint au monde dépouillé,
envoûte mon esprit qu’il charme et déconcerte,

tandis que s’y prolonge un arrière-matin
dont je te vois languir, nourrice du Destin…
Et c’est pour moi, pour moi, que tu fleuris, déserte ! 

HERODIAD
Oh beautiful verses darker than black diamonds,
you exert on me the greatest attraction
and know how to intoxicate me with your fragrance
of blossoming rose, pink on the evenings’ shadowy brow!

The evenings! but impregnated with which future dawn
opened on my heart and promised to my senses
that torment the death of adolescent days
under a stream of harsh and euphemistic light!

A fleeting relation awakened in my soul
from the most spurious world to the world laid bare,
bewitches my mind, charms and disconcerts it,

while prolonging there a late morning
in which I see you languishing, wetnurse of Destiny...
And it is for me, for me, that you bloom, desert!

NOTES ON TRANSLATION⁷

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7
VILLE MORTE
Plongeant éperdument mon vaste front de cuivre
dans ton immensité de silence et de sable,
ô paysage bleu, triste et doux, je m’enivre
mais, me sachant plus vain, me crois plus périssable !

Leçon d’humilité, leçon de modestie
ton néant surpeuplé d’autant d’oublis que d’ombres,
et jusqu’à ta ruine elle-même engloutie
sous un flot grandissant de sauvages concombres,

tout dit, en ta rechute au sein de la nature,
la destinée ancienne, et présente, et future
de l’œuvre suscité par l’homme et son esprit !

Et le peu qui te fait survivre en ma pensée
n’est que ma piété pour ce qui a péri,
liane en fleur au ras d’une tombe enlacée !

DEAD CITY
Madly plunging my vast copper forehead
into your immensity of silence and sand,
oh blue landscape, sad and sweet, I get drunk
but, knowing myself more vain, I believe myself to be more ephemeral!

A lesson in humility, a lesson in modesty,
your nothingness overpopulated by as many omissions as shadows,
and even your own ruin is swallowed up
under a growing flood of wild cucumbers,

everything in your relapse into the bosom of nature,
speaks of the ancient, present and future destiny
of the work enkindled by man and his spirit!

And all that keeps you alive in my mind
is no more than my piety for what has perished,
a flowering creeper at the edge of a root-wrapped grave!

NOTES ON TRANSLATION⁸

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8
SAGESSE
Croy-moi, vivons au gré de nos désirs. 
Maynard.

I
Tâche de prendre garde à la douceur des choses,
jeune homme qui relis l’amer P.-J. Toulet
devant un vieux tombeau couvert d’ombre de roses,
et ne suis que le fil du rêve qui te plaît.

Ce rêve entretenu pour oublier la vie,
qui sait exorciser ta crainte de mourir
et te libère ainsi de la mélancolie
de penser à ta chair destinée à périr.

L’âme seule survit : le battement intense
de ton cœur qui te trouble au fond de ce silence
vibrant des chants éteints de nos oiseaux de feu,

ni l’éclat de ce ciel dont séduit la jeunesse,
n’offre d’être éternel l’assurante promesse,
et la vie, en ses fards et plaisirs, n’est qu’un jeu !


9
II
Plaisirs, mes chers plaisirs, pâture pour l’Oubli
mais que dispute encor la volonté de vivre,
avant que votre règne ardent soit aboli
et, désertant mon cœur fougueux, me désenivre ;

avant que, décimant l’arbre de ma vigueur,
la force des ans souffle au cœur de ma jeunesse ;
avant de ne plus voir se nouer que le chœur
des Ombres dont le front est marqué de sagesse,

cueillons la fleur du temps pour l’offrir au Destin
— pureté de rosée immolée au matin —
et savourons les fruits mûrissants qui se cueillent.

qu’importe à Salomon l’atteinte de la mort ?
aux dépouilles du lys, les vents qui les effeuillent ?
puisqu’ils peuvent mourir heureux et sans remord !

WISDOM
Believe me, let us live according to the whim of our desires. 
Maynard.

I
Try to take care of the sweetness of things,
young man who rereads the bitter P.-J. Toulet
before an old tomb covered with the shadow of roses,
and follow only the thread of the dream that pleases you.

This dream, nurtured to forget life,
which exorcises your fear of death
and thus frees you from the melancholy
of thinking of your flesh destined to perish.

The soul alone survives: the intense beating
of your heart that disturbs you in the depths of this vibrant
silence of the extinguished songs of our firebirds,

nor does the brightness of the sky that seduces youth,
offer the sure promise of eternity,
and life, in all its glamour and pleasures, is just a game!

II
Pleasures, my dear pleasures, pabulum for oblivion,
but let the will to live contend yet,
before your fiery reign is abolished
and, deserting my fiery heart, sober me;

before which, decimating the tree of my vigour,
the strength of the years blows at the heart of my youth;
before seeing develop only the chorus
of Shadows whose forehead is lined with wisdom,

let us pluck the flower of time to offer it to Fate
—purity of dew immolated in the morning—
and let us savour the ripening fruits that are picked.

What does it matter to Solomon when death arrives?
What does it matter to the remains of the lily when the wind blows them away?
for they can die happy and without remorse!

NOTES ON TRANSLATION⁹

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LA GUIRLANDE A L’AMITE
(envois de 'Sylves').

THE GARLAND OF FRIENDSHIP
(from the 'Sylves').


POUR UNE OMBRE
In memoriam Samuel Ratany

O toi qui l’aurais lu pour sa grande tendresse
et qui l’aurais aimé pour le noble dédain
qu’il a devant les fleurs motres  de ma jeunesse
et les fanes couvrant le cœur de mon jardin ;

toi vers qui mon regard s’élance en pure perte,
interrogeant en vain l’espace élysien,
et revient égaré, chargé d’ombre et d’alerte,
nef ayant fait naufrage et perdu corps et bien ;

force, force, ce soir, la porte épouvantable
qui te garde captif d’un sort désenchantant !
Entretiens le silence et le deuil de ma table
où ce livre d’amour et de fierté t’attend !

Que ton ombre s’abreuve, en parcourant ses pages,
du sang jailli d’un rythme en commun cultivé
avant que fût ravi par les ombreux rivages,
ton cœur qui de musique neuve a tant rêvé.

Mais, si le sentiment, l’image et l’eurythmie
t’en decoivent  s’ils portent le signe d’avoir
trahi de notre race éteinte le génie :
de ta voix souterraine, ami, daigne émouvoir

la promesse de chants dont vibre encor ma vie
et ce qui peut rester de ferveur en mon cœur !
Qu’aux tombeaux des aïeux ma voix se purifie
pour y puiser une autre et nouvelle vigueur !

FOR A SHADOW
In memoriam Samuel Ratany

O you who would have read it for its great tenderness
and who would have loved it for the noble disdain
it has for the dead blossoms of my youth
and the leaves covering the heart of my garden ;

you towards whom my gaze darts in pure loss,
vainly searches the Elysian space,
and returns distorted, laden with shadows and omens,
the ship is wrecked, lost body and soul;

force, force, tonight, the dreadful door
that holds you captive in a disillusioning fate!
Maintain the silence and the grief of my table
where this book of love and pride awaits you!

That your shadow might imbibe, while leafing through its pages,
the blood that spurted with a sympathetic rhythm
before your heart was thrilled by the shady shores,
your heart, which has dreamt so much of new music.

But if the feeling, the image and the eurhythmics
disappoint you if they bear the sign of having
betrayed the genius of our extinct race:
with your subterranean voice, friend, deign to move

the promise of songs my life still vibrates with
and what fervour might remain in my heart!
May my voice be purified in the tombs of my forebears,
so that it may draw another, new strength from them!

NOTES ON TRANSLATION¹⁰

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A SAHONDRA
D’un âge ingrat fleuri par la belle amitié
et par une commune ardeur désabusée,
ni de leur scène au feu des couchants exposée :
je n’ai rien encore oublié.

Et ce livre où j’ai mis le meilleur de moi-même,
—âme, formes et cœur détachés de l’Oubli,
et piété vouée au temps hova aboli,—
ce sera mon plus beau poème

jusqu’aux jours dessillants et transfigurateurs
qui m’apprendront que rien ne dépasse les roses
en durée et beauté ! Que les Métamorphoses
peuvent aigrir aussi nos cœurs !

Mais qu’au moins, aujourd’hui, fier encor de ce livre,
je t’invite à nouer son orgueil à ton front,
et, sans appréhender les jours noirs qui viendront,
puisse souhaiter qu’il t’enivre.

Ainsi, Sahondra, ainsi, notre belle amitié,
l’ardeur qui l’anima, pure et désabusée,
ni leur scène aux splendeurs des couchants exposée :
tu n’auras pas tout oublié !

TO SAHONDRA
Of an ungrateful age flowered by beautiful friendship
and by a common disabused ardour,
nor of their marvel exposed in the fire of sunsets:
I have forgotten nothing yet.

And this book, where I have put the best of myself,
—soul, forms and heart detached from Oblivion,
and piety devoted to the bygone days of the Hova—
will be my most beautiful poem

until the transfiguring days when the scales fall from my eyes
that will teach me that nothing surpasses roses
in duration and beauty! That the Metamorphoses
can also embitter our hearts!

But let me at least, today, still proud of this book,
invite you to tie its pride to your forehead,
and, without dreading the dark days to come,
may I hope that it intoxicates you.

So, Sahondra, so, our beautiful friendship,
the ardour that animated it, pure and disabused,
nor their marvel in the splendours of the sunsets exposed:
you will not have forgotten everything!

NOTES ON TRANSLATION¹¹

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A PIERRE CAMO
Du signe de vieillir, du signe de la mort,
est-il marqué, ce livre où j’ai mis ma jeunesse ?
Et le son qu’il rendra, sera-t-il d’allégresse,
sera-t-il de remord ?

Ah ! laissez moi n’y point penser au propylée
du temple intérieur à présent déserté !
Et, vous offrant ces chants d’un accent emprunté,
et l’âme consolée,

oublier les périls par la ruine offerts
de la part éternelle et vive de moi-même :
périls que peut courir l’âme de mon poème
avant les lauriers verts !

Nulle mort n’est, d’ailleurs, le terme de la vie :
en sa métamorphose est rénové le sang ;
et la force qu’elle offre à son adolescent
est plus inassouvie !

TO PIERRE CAMO
With the sign of age, with the sign of death,
is it marked? This book where I have put my youth?
And will the sound it makes be one of joy,
or will it be one of remorse?

Oh, let me not think about it in the propylaion
of the inner temple, now deserted!
And, offering you these songs in a borrowed accent,
and the soul consoled,

forget the perils offered by ruin
by the eternal and living part of myself:
perils that may hasten the soul of my poem
before the green laurels!

No death is, moreover, the end of life:
in its metamorphosis blood is renewed;
and the strength it offers to its adolescent
is yet unassuaged!

NOTES ON TRANSLATION¹²

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A TRISTAN DEREME
Ce livre comment imprimé
renferme-t-il quelques poèmes
qu vous puissiez en France aimer,
cher poète Derème ?

—Mais, las des grands soleils de feu
qui brûlent les monts d’Iarive ;
las de nos lunes, or gris-bleu
dans la forge tardive

de notre azur de pourpre ; las
de voir le même paysage
fait de ficus et de lilas,
et de touffes sauvages, –

vers l’Occident j’ai fait voguer
mon âme ardente et nostalgique
ainsi que mon cœur fatigué
d’entendre la musique

toujours la même des aïeux,
pensant avoir ainsi plus belle
la voix dont enchanter les dieux,
et plus pure et nouvelle.

Insensé ! Les voici-t-ils pas
revenus ? Pour toute fortune,
ils ne m’offrent que le trépas
de leur force commune ?

Ah ! puissent-ils se retremper
dans l’air de la terre ancestrale
et recouvrer leur entité
sous la lumière australe !

TO TRISTAN DEREME
Does this book, as printed,
contain any poems
that you in France might like,
dear poet Derème?

—But, tired of the great suns of fire
which burn the mountains of Iarive;
tired of our moons, grey-blue gold
in the late forge

of our sky of purple azure;
tired of seeing the same landscape
made of fig trees and lilac,
and wild thickets,—

towards the West I set sail
with my ardent and nostalgic soul
since my heart was tired
of hearing the music

of the same old ancestors,
thinking to gain a more beautiful
voice with which to enchant the gods,
and a purer, newer voice.

Fool! Have they not
returned? For all their fortune,
they offer me only the death
of their common strength?

Ah! may they reimmerse themselves
in the air of the ancestral land
and recover their essence
under the southern light!

NOTES ON TRANSLATION¹³

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A MARCEL ORMOY
Un miracle trompeur m’amène aux carrefours,
comme vous, des visages,
et je suis étranger à tous les paysages
qui me proposent leurs amours.

Ah ! quand pourrai-je, Ormoy, me parant d’autres grâces,
dire les sentiments
que m’auront suscités mes éblouissements
par la voix seule de ma race,

afin d’être mieux digne et fier de l’amitié
que m’accorde votre âme ;
afin, surtout, afin d’entretenir la flamme
qui meurt dans mon âtre oublié ?

Qu’est-ce, sinon le sang qui coule dans mes veines, 
et ma charte, et mon fonds,
et les morts qu’on oublie au siècle où nous vivons
dans leur déroute souterraine ?

Ah ! puisse tout cela briller à l’avenir
sur le front de ma muse !
Elle mériterait de vous, ma voix confuse,
laquelle aurait pu s’affermir

TO MARCEL ORMOY
A deceptive miracle brings me to the crossroads
like you, of faces,
and I am a stranger to all the landscapes
which offer me their love.

Ah! when will I be allowed, Ormoy, to adorn myself with other graces,
to express the feelings
aroused in my by my marvels
by the lonely voice of my race,

in order to be more worthy and proud of the friendship
that your soul grants me;
in order, above all, to preserve the flame
that is dying in my forgotten hearth?

What is it, if not the blood that flows in my veins,
and my charter, and my founts,
and the dead who are forgotten in the century we live in
in their subterranean rout?

Ah! may all this shine in the future
on the face of my muse!
My confused voice would be worthy of you,
it could have grown stronger

NOTES ON TRANSLATION¹⁴

---

A JEAN LEBRAU
Jean Lebrau, j’ai cueilli pour vous les jeunes fleurs
qui paraient mon verger de joie et de douleur.

Des lilas du pays offrant leurs grappes mauves
au cœur de notre azur grillé de soleils fauves,
ni des ficus perdus au flanc de nos coteaux,
—nids bruissant du maint ébat de nos oiseaux
couleur d’yeux ou de ciels,—ni les chansons plaintives
des filles du Regret aux grâces primitives :
je n’ai rien oublié, sauf l’âme et la rumeur…

Et je tremble d’offrir quelque chose qui meurt !

TO JEAN LEBRAU
Jean Lebrau, I have gathered for you the young flowers
that adorn my orchard of joy and sorrow.

Neither the lilacs of the country offering up their mauve bunches
in the heart of our azure sky seared by wild suns,
nor the fig tree lost on the flank of our hills,
—nests rustling with the manifold frolicking of our birds
the colour of eyes or skies,—nor the plaintive songs
of the daughters of Regret with their primitive graces:
I have forgotten nothing, except the soul and the rumour...

And I tremble to offer up something mortal!

NOTES ON TRANSLATION¹⁵

---

A PHILIPPE CHABANEIX
Mission du poète ?

Insolence, Philippe !—
Lisant tous les aînés et fumant dans leur pipe,
je n’ai pu me gorger des lumières torrides
qui dévorent nos monts et nos landes arides,
ni baigner mon regard de lune et de rosée !
J’ai négligé nos nuits d’étoiles irisées,
nos matins, Adonis éternels dans leur gloire
de se voir refletés dans l’innombrable moire
de nos fleuves ; nos soirs, rois trahis par les ombres,
qui, de leur palais d’or, gisent sous les décombres
tandis qu’ascend au ciel, vibrant de nostalgie,
le cœur auquel l’Amour a donné sa magie
des filles d’Iarive au front couleur de sable…

Demain, plus tard, ma voix sera moins périssable
pour s’être éperdument aux tombeaux affutée,
et, s’étant du sang vif de mes morts suscitée,
pour avoir su puiser sa cadence et sa grâce
dans le fonds poétique éternel de ma race.

TO PHILIPPE CHABANEIX
A poet's mission?

Insolence, Philippe!—
Reading the works of the elders and smoking their pipes,
I have not been able to gorge myself on the torrid light
that devours our mountains and arid moors,
nor to bathe my gaze in moonlight and dew!
I have neglected our nights of iridescent stars,
our mornings, eternal Adonises in their glory
seeing themselves reflected in the countless shimmering
of our rivers; our evenings, kings betrayed by shadows,
who, in their palaces of gold, lie under the rubble,
while the heart to which Love has given its magic
rises to the sky, vibrating with nostalgia,

the magic of the daughters of Iarive with their sand-coloured brows...

Tomorrow, later, my voice will be less ephemeral
for having been so desperately whetted in the tombs,
aroused by the living blood
of my dead, able to draw its cadence and its grace
from the eternal poetic fount of my race.

NOTES ON TRANSLATION¹⁶

---

A ROBERT-EDWARD HART
Donner un sens plus pur aux mots de la tribu
et l’imprégner du sang de mes morts que nos combes
ombreuses et nos monts ensoleillés ont bu :
mission périlleuse et double qui m’incombe !

Qui donc me donnera de pouvoir fiancer
l’esprit de mes aïeux à la langue adoptive,
et mon cœur naturel, calme et fier au penser
pervers et sombre de l’Europe maladive,

pour susciter des chants où ma pure entité
se précise selon le rythme et la cadence
de l’Intuition, et de toute influence
s’affranchit, changée ainsi par l’éternité ?

TO ROBERT-EDWARD HART
To give a purer meaning to the words of the tribe
and to impregnate it with the blood of my dead that our shadowy
valleys and sunny mountains have drunk:
a perilous and ambiguous mission that falls to me!

Who then will give me the power to bethrothe
the spirit of my ancestors to my adoptive language,
and my natural, calm, proud heart with the perverse,
dark thoughts of the sickly Europe?

to give rise to songs in which my pure essence
is set according to the rhythm and cadence
of Intuition, and frees itself
from all influence, thus changed by eternity?

NOTES ON TRANSLATIONS¹⁷

---

A G.HENRI DE BRUGADA
La grâce flexueuse et fragile de l’eau,
l’éclat évanescent des éclairs dans la nuit,
et ce que pour charmer insinue un sanglot
musical, mal d’amour en fleur épanoui –

c’est le jeu de mon âme en vous offrant ce livre
où raille et se lamente une jeunesse morte…
Qui va lui déchirer avec un coup d’aile ivre
le dur lac oublié sur le trésor qu’il porte ?

Insolence !
Pourtant, son inutile exil
lui propose l’essor des vols qui n’ont pas fui
et le retour au fond d’un monde plus subtil
où le cygne ancien lui dira que c’est lui !

TO G.HENRI OF BRUGADA
The flexuous and fragile grace of water,
the evanescent brilliance of lightning in the night,
and that which an insinuating, musical sob 
charms, lovesickness blooming like a flower—

it is my soul's game to offer you this book
in which a dead youth mocks and laments...
Who will tear it apart with a stroke of a drunken wing
the hard lake where the treasure lies forgotten?

Insolence!
Yet, his useless exile
offers him the flight of flights that have not fled
and a return to the depths of a subtler world
where the ancient swan will tell him that it is he!

NOTES ON TRANSLATION¹⁸

---

A RAMILIJAONA
Le vent pourra souffler, Ramily, dans ce livre
et, dispersant ses fleurs, saccager tous ses fruits ;
comme des tours restant de quels palais détruits,
vous y verrez encore, avec la paix de vivre,

les souvenirs heureux de la belle amitié
qui sait nous consoler de tant d’âmes perverses
pour qui n’est que poussière et cendres le commerce
de nos grands morts royaux et leur âge oublié !

Ainsi, le cœur plus clair que celui du printemps
et plus bleu qu’un verger qui se gorge de lune,
en vous offrant ces chants de notre ardeur commune,
je n’appréhende pas pour eux l’œuvre du temps !

TO RAMILIJAONA
The wind may blow, Ramily, through this book
and, scattering its flowers, ransack all its fruits;
like the remaining towers of some ruined palace,
you will still see there, among the peace of life,

the happy memories of the beautiful friendship
that can give us solace from such perverse souls
for whom the intrigues of our great royal dead and their forgotten age
are only dust and ashes!

So, with a heart brighter than spring
and bluer than a moonlit orchard,
as I offer you these songs of our shared ardour,
I do not dread the passing of time!

NOTES ON TRANSLATION¹⁹

---

A J.-H. RABEKOTO
De mon cœur qu’ont dépossédé
de ses biens l’exil ou la mort,
et qui , trésor dilapidé,
s’épuise au gré mouvant du Sort,

éclos par le Rythme et le Nombre,
jaillit ce chant dont le postlude
dit, en l’honneur d’un peuple d’ombres,
mon calme et mon inquiétude.

Ah ! puisse-t-il avoir, là-bas,
dans ton val sombre et désolé,
les accents qui ne meurent pas,
vibrant des beaux jours en-allés

et réveillant en ta pensée
de nos passions tout le charme,—
escarpolette balancée,
mais par le vent de quelle alarme !

TO J.-H. RABEKOTO
From my heart robbed
of its possessions by exile or death,
and which, a squandered treasure,
is exhausted at the moving whim of Fate,

hatched by Rhythm and Number,
there springs this song whose coda
speaks of, in honour of a people of shadows,
my calm and my anxiety.

Ah! let them be there,
in your dark and desolate valley,
the accents that do not die,
vibrating from the beautiful bygone days

and awakening in your thoughts
all the charm of our passions,—
a swinging pendulum,
but what ominous wind makes it swing!

NOTES ON TRANSLATION²⁰

---

INTERLUDE RYTHMIQUE/RHYTHMIC INTERLUDE
à André Fontainas.


1
LEVANT
Souffle, ô vent, dans la conque embaumée
des daturas et de leurs hybrides,
enchantement des terres arides
de ma vieille Emyrne décimée,

souffle au cœur de la tiède verdure
où la nuit pesante entrave encore
un pur chant d’oiseaux couleur d’aurore
désolés par la grande froidure ;

et, comme pour délivrer du songe
fallacieux de l’aube en-allée
quelque paupière trop flagellée
de sommeil, souffle, souffle et prolonge

ta voix parmi le retour du monde
à sa destinée éphémère et profonde.

RISING
Blow, O wind, into the embalmed conch
of the daturas and their hybrids,
delight of the arid lands
of my old decimated Emyrne,

blow into the heart of the tepid verdure
where the heavy night still hinders
a pure song of dawn-coloured birds
desolated by the great cold ;

and, as if to deliver from a spurious
dream of the tidal dawn
some too-flogged eyelid
from sleep, breathe, breathe and prolong

your voice among the return of the world
to its ephemeral and deep destiny.

NOTES ON TRANSLATION²¹

---

2
DESERT
Joie unie et chaude du désert !
Nulle part, l’azur n’est aussi bleu
que sur ces monts de sable et de feu
sillonnés de vol puissant et clair.

Rare en verdure comme mon cœur
d’homme mûri par des temps mauvais
leurrés par vous, ô bonheurs rêvés
en l’abri de la seule langueur !

Ici, devant ton aridité
ton silence, et ta soif, et ta faim,
paysage apparemment sans fin,
comme l’effroi de l’éternité,

tempérant ma joie et mon émoi,
je rêve d’un art dépouillé comme toi,

DESERT
The hot, unified joy of the desert!
Nowhere is the sky so azure-blue
as on these mountains of sand and fire
furrowed by powerful, clear flight.

Scarce with verdure like my human
heart ripened by evil times
lured by you, oh dreamed-of happiness
under the shelter of the lonely languor!

Here, before your aridity
your silence, and your thirst, and your hunger,
a seemingly endless landscape,
like the dread of eternity,

tempering my joy and my emotion,
I dream of a bare art like you,

NOTES ON TRANSLATION²²

---

3
DZORAH
Dzorah,—enfant de sultans défunts,
dès longtemps, à l’archipel natal,—
tu veux venir avec tes parfums
de vanille et de bois de santal.

Venir si loin, et sans défenseur !
O Dzorah, rose que fanerait
le plus beau soleil en sa douceur
étendu sur le parc azuré !

Et prétendre à jamais conserver,
sous d’autres lois et de nouveaux cieux,
dans toute sa vierge pureté, la foi si chaude de tes aïeux !

Mais brûlant d’amour pour un des miens,
je crains que ton cœur ne devienne chrétien !

DZORAH
Dzorah,—child of long-dead sultans,
in the archipelago of your birth,—
you want to come with your perfumes
of vanilla and sandalwood.

To come so far away, and without a guardian!
O Dzorah, rose that would fade
the most beautiful sunshine in its sweetness
spread over the bleached field!

And pretend forever to preserve,
under other laws and new skies,
in all its virgin purity,
the hot faith of your forefathers!

But burning with love for one of my own,
I fear your heart will become Christian!

NOTES ON TRANSLATION²³

---

4
CLAIR DE LUNE
Sans rossignol autre que des songes
effeuillés au cœur de la nuit bleue,
ta tristesse de reine exilée,
clair de lune qui mon front inondes,

enchantera de quelles musiques
sa nostalgie et ses sourdes peines,
sœurs en l’ennui, sœurs adultérines
de mes insidieuses fatigues ?

A ton intention sont ouvertes
mes fenêtres où bruit encore
le chœur du soir pacifique et rose
élevé dans le calme des herbes

comme à la rupture de tes charmes
le triomphe obscur de l’aube dans les palmes.

MOONLIGHT
With no nightingale except from dreams
plucked in the heart of the blue night,
the sadness of your exiled queen,
the moonlight that floods my brow,

will enchant—but with what music?
her nostalgia and her deaf sorrows,
sisters in boredom, adulterous sisters
of my insidious fatigues.

To your intent are open
my windows where the choir
still sings of the peaceful, pink evening
lifted in the calm of the grasses

like the breaking of your spell,
the dark triumph of dawn in the palms.

NOTES ON TRANSLATION²⁴

---

5
LYS
Fils de la terre et des vivants,
des morts et de la Nature,
je te préfère au parfum qui dure,
ô lys que balancent les vents.

Comme mes jours passe ta gerbe,
fille étrange de la nuit,
qui répand son éclat inouï
jusques à sa chute sur l’herbe ;

héritière sans lendemain
du royaume de la lune
elle dépense en paix sa fortune
pour le plaisir des yeux humains,

ta gerbe sans lendemain
qu’a tressée en silence la lune.

LILY
Son of the earth and of the living,
of the dead and of Nature,
I prefer you to the perfume that lasts,
O lily swaying in the wind.

Like my days does your wreath pass,
strange daughter of the night,
that spreads its arcane brilliance
until it falls on the grass;

heiress without posterity
from the kingdom of the moon,
she spends her fortune in peace
for the pleasure of human eyes,

your wreath without posterity
that the moon has woven in silence.

NOTES ON TRANSLATION²⁵

---

6
REGARD
Sur quel monde englouti sans retour
te fermes-tu pour bientôt t’ouvrir
aux astuces vaines de l’Amour
sinon au piège amer du Mourir,

ô regard où pèsent divers poids ?
—Celui-ci, s’interrogeant au cœur
d’un miroir, ne voit que désarroi
où jamais ne s’est vu que de fleurs.

Cet autre qui s’attendait à voir
descendre la nuit sur son destin,
sent que jusqu’à la fuite du soir
prolonge l’éclat de son matin,

ô regard, innombrable tombeau
où gisent à la fois le laid et le beau.

GAZE
Against what world, swallowed up irretrievably,
do you close yourself only to open yourself
to the vain tricks of Love,
if not to the bitter trap of Dying,

O gaze where many burdens weigh?
—This one, questioning itself in the heart
of a mirror, sees only confusion
where it has never seen anything but flowers.

Another, who expected
night to fall on its destiny,
senses that until evening's flight
the brightness of its morning extends,

O gaze, innumerable tomb
where together lie the ugly and the beautiful.

NOTES ON TRANSLATION²⁶

---

7
HORLOGE
Absence pure, ô l’insoupçonnée
serve sœur des ténébreuses Parques,
tous les jeux de notre destinée,
jalons sur ta route et nos cœurs, tu les marques.

Mais loin de faire de toi l’augure
inviolé, notre suffisance
veut exercer quelle dictature
sur le temps où s’oublie un peu ta présence !

Et ce n’est que lorsque le Narcisse
qui s’ignore au fond de nous encore
voit au bord d’un sombre précipice
—source vive autrefois—l’infernale aurore

parer de fleurs sa jeunesse morte,
que nous entendons se fermer une porte !

CLOCK
Pure absence, O unexpected
serf-sister of the shadowy Fates,
all the games of our destiny,
milestones on your road and our hearts, mark them.

But far from making you the inviolate
augur, our smugness
wants to exercise some dictatorship
over the time when your presence will begin to be forgotten!

And it's only when the Narcissus
of whom we are ignorant deep within us
sees at the edge of a sombre precipice
—once a living spring—the infernal dawn

adorning his dead youth with flowers,
that we hear a door closing!

NOTES ON TRANSLATION²⁷

---

SEPT QUATRAINS/SEVEN QUATRAINS
à Fernand Mazade.

TENTATION
Belle d’une beauté plus sombre que la nuit,
l’amante au front de cuivre ancien est venue
avec l’intention d’effeuiller mon ennui
sur sa poitrine nue.

TEMPTATION
Beauty of beauties darker than the night,
the lover with a face of ancient copper has come
with the intention of stripping my boredom
from her naked breast.

ROSSIGNOL DE MON CŒUR…
Quels rêves attardés aux rives du Réveil ?
Tu chantes ! qui jamais n’élevas ton chant pur
après la floraison visible de l’azur
et le rutilement fluide du soleil !

NIGHTINGALE OF MY HEART...
What dreams lingered on the shores of the Awakening?
You sing! you who never lifted your pure song
after the visible blossoming of the azure sky
and the fluid glistening of the sun!

OFFRANDE ILLUSOIRE
Je t’apporte un cœur neuf, œuvre d’un rêve immense,
promesse de fleur née à la mort des semences,
ô Muse, et pure image où déplorent leur ombre
encore les jours morts et vains que je dénombre !

ILLUSORY OFFERING
I bring you a new heart, the work of an immense dream,
the promise of a flower born at the death of seeds,
O Muse, and a pure image where their shadow still
aments the dead and vain days that I count!

VENT
Sois Ganymède et verse un peu de ton amphore
dans le cœur de ces fleurs qui parent la terrasse
après avoir forcé les portes de l’Aurore,
coureur aérien, ô vainqueur de l’espace !

WIND
Be Ganymede and pour a little of your amphora
into the heart of the flowers that adorn the terrace
after forcing open the gates of Aurora,
aerial runner, O conqueror of space!

ANGOISSE DU DEPART
Est-ce un beau jour d’avril ou de mai commençant,
ô printemps de mon cœur, que te viendra l’automne
marin, et que, cueillant des fleurs pour Abéone,
tu les parfumeras avec ton propre sang ?

THE ANGUISH OF DEPARTURE
Is it a beautiful day in April or May beginning,
O Springtime of my heart, when the autumn of the sea will come
to you, and that, picking flowers for Abeone,
you will perfume them with your own blood?

AUTOMNE AUSTRAL
Lorsque les bancouliers tresseront leur couronne
de neige soleilleuse au cœur sombre et profond,
ta désolation sera moins vaste, automne,
et sur ton front en deuil des oiseaux chanteront.

AUSTRAL AUTUMN
When the snowdrops weave their crowns
of sunlit snow around your deep, dark heart,
your desolation will be less vast, autumn,
and on your mourning brow birds will sing.

HERPES
O barque aventureuse aujourd’hui bien vétuste
et de qui l’océan a rongé la carène,
où sont tes matelots séduits par la Sirène
tandis qu’ils s’adonnaient au jeu de la flibuste ? Arbres à Henri de Régnier.

FLOTSAM
O adventurous little boat, now quite dilapidated
and whose hull has been eaten away by the ocean,
where are your sailors who were seduced by the Siren
while they were playing at pirates?

NOTES ON TRANSLATIONS²⁸

---

ARBRES/TREES
à Henri de Régnier.

Arbres de la cité, depuis combien d’années
Nous nous parlons tout bas !
Jean Moréas.

Trees of the city, for how many years
have we spoken to each other in hushed tones!
Jean Moréas.

AUX ARBRES
Arbres sur la colline où reposent nos morts
dont l’histoire n’est plus, pour ma race oublieuse,
que fable, et toi, vent né des zones soleilleuses
qui ranimes leur sein d’ombre humide et le mords,

ce soir, je vous contemple et mon cœur vous écoute :
votre rumeur me dit l’âme de mes aïeux
tandis que l’horizon tragique et radieux
annonce d’un beau jour la gloire et la déroute.

L’insidieuse nuit qui vient anéantir
le navire paisible et bleu de vos ramures
riche d’un chargement de quelles pulpes mûres
et de quels beaux palmiers qui pourraient reverdir,

ainsi que le silence, esclave des ténèbres,
qui prêtera son aide à son œuvre pervers :
ah ! tout m’incitera qu’à vos mystères verts
j’offre des chants ardents, et tristes et funèbres !

Car, déjà, vous attend la cognée ou le feu,
vous qui n’avez jamais connu la grise automne
et qui ceignez encor d’admirables couronnes
le front des monts royaux, frères de l’azur bleu !

TO THE TREES
Trees on the hill where our dead lie,
whose history is no more to my forgetful race,
than a fable, and you, wind born of the sunny places
that resurrects their bosom of damp shadow and bites it,

this evening I contemplate you and my heart listens to you:
your rumour tells me of the soul of my ancestors
while the tragic and radiant horizon
announces the glory and defeat of a beautiful day.

The insidious night that comes to annihilate
the peaceful, blue ship of your boughs
rich with a load of ripe fruit
and what beautiful palm trees that could turn green again,

as well as the silence, slave of shadows,
that will lend its aid to its perverse work:
ah! everything incites me to offer
ardent, sad and funereal songs to your green mysteries!

Because already the axe or the fire is waiting for you,
you who have never known the grey autumn
and who still adorn with admirable crowns
the brow of the royal mountains, brothers of the sky of blue azure!

NOTES ON TRANSLATION²⁹

---

1
AVIAVY
Arbre qui prends racine aux pierres des tombeaux
et dont la sève vive est peut-être le sang
de ceux qui furent les flambeaux
de mon Emyrne et de son esprit finissant,

tu dresses dans l’azur ton palais ténébreux
qui ne fait retentir dans le front du matin
que les appels silencieux
de nos morts contre les astuces du Destin !

Et tu nous dis, bel arbre isolé, de rester
nous-mêmes et d’avoir ta suprême fierté
d’épouser nos seuls paysages.

Ah ! qu’à te voir, ficus aux feuillages légers,
bien que naissant parmi des rythmes étrangers,
mon chant s’inspire de nos sages !

AVIAVY
Tree that takes root in the stones of the tombs
and whose living sap is perhaps the blood
of those who are the torchbearers
of my Emyrne and of its expiring spirit,

you erect in the azure sky your shadowy palace
which makes nothing resound on the face of the morning
but the silent calls
of our dead despite the tricks of Fate!

And you tell us, beautiful lonely tree, to remain
ourselves and to have your supreme pride
in embracing our landscapes alone.

Ah, to see you, fig tree with light foliage,
although born among foreign rhythms,
my song is inspired by our sages!

NOTES ON TRANSLATION³⁰

---

2
ZAHANA
Ce n’est pas au jeu vain de nos vieux amoureux
qui s’écrivaient, jadis, sur tes feuilles naissantes
et, se rendant le soir en ton sein ténébreux,
saccageaient les rosiers sauvages de nos sentes,

ni même à la saveur de tes fruits succulents
où jutent les soleils de notre terre chaude,
que ton nom inconnu se doit d’être en mes chants
et d’y répandre tes purs frissons d’émeraude !

Mais, exilé des lieux d’où nous sommes natifs,
tu n’as plus dans nos champs que des jets maladifs
qu’une terre inclémente et stérile harasse !

Comme le mien ton front n’offre plus au matin
que les dernières fleurs d’un arbre qui s’éteint,
et ta défaite est sœur de celle de ma race !

ZAHANA
It is not for the vain game of our old lovers
who used to write to each other on your budding leaves
and, going to your shadowy bosom in the evening,
ransacked the wild rosebushes along our path,

nor even for the flavour of your succulent fruits
where the suns of our hot earth ejaculate,
that your unknown name must be in my songs
and spread there your pure shivers of emerald!

But, exiled from the places where we are native,
you have nothing left in our field but sickly spurts
that an inclement and barren earth harasses!

Like mine, your face now offers no more
than the last flowers of a dying tree,
and your defeat is a sister to that of my race!

NOTES ON TRANSLATION³¹

---

3
HASINA
Fiançons aujourd’hui nos graves destinées
et qu’en l’azur nos chants aient une voix égale :
nos âmes sont pareillement infortunées
car nous avons perdu notre force ancestrale !

La terre qui nourrit tes vivaces racines,
les ramiers dont l’amour élit ta touffe sombre,
ni l’air bu ne sont pas ceux de tes origines,
et ta présence ici n’est que celle d’une ombre !

Quant à moi, fils des Rois d’une époque abolie,
reposant au rebord d’un tombeau qu’on oublie,
je chante d’une voix qui n’est pas de mes morts !

Mais, nous savons, palmier, vivant notre nouvelle
vie, avoir le front ceint de nos fleurs les plus belles
et nous jouer ainsi des rigueurs de nos sorts !

HASINA
Let us join together today our grave destinies
and let our songs have an equal voice in the azure sky:
our souls are equally unfortunate
for we have lost our ancestral strength!

Neither the earth that nourishes your perennial roots,
the wood pigeons whose love chooses your dark tuft,
nor the air you drink, they are not those of your origins,
and your presence here is but that of a shadow!

As for me, son of the Kings of a bygone epoch,
resting on the edge of a forgotten tomb,
I sing with a voice that does not belong to my dead!

But we know how, palm tree, living our new
life, to adorn our foreheads with our most beautiful flowers
and thus we make light of the rigours of our fates!

NOTES ON TRANSLATION³²

---

4
BOUGAINVILLEA
Je te vois au tourment de l’azur bleu livrée,
liane arborescente, ardente bongainville
qui couronnes le cœur et le front de la Ville
de ta flore empourprée.

Tu résistes au temps : l’ardeur de la froidure
ni celle des soleils ne tarit ton essence,
et les ans successifs rencontrent ta puissance
où la sève perdure.

Puisse ta splendeur sombre, apparemment éteinte
quand de l’automne austral tu subis les atteintes,
aviver dans mon cœur

la piété qu’on doit aux morts que l’on oublie
et mon ferme désir de vivre en le génie
de l’Emyrne qui meurt !

BOUGAINVILLEA
I see you in the torment of the azure-blue sky’s livery,
arborescent liana, ardent bougainvillea
which crowns the heart and brow of the City
with your empurpled flora

You stand the test of time: neither the ardour of cold
nor that of sunlight dries up your essence,
and successive years meet your power
where the sap endures.

May your sombre splendour, seemingly extinguished
when the austral autumn hits you,
kindle in my heart

the piety we owe to the forgotten dead
and my firm desire to live in the genius
of the Emyrne that is dying!

NOTES ON TRANSLATION³³

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5
MANGUIER
A qui goûte ta pulpe où le soleil austral,
suscitant de la sève une douce saveur,
s’est tant de fois penché dans toute sa splendeur,
ô gardien du village ancestral,

ou, passant éphémère, enchantant sa langueur
loin des bruits d’Iarive, au pied du mont royal,
à qui va pénétrant le palais végétal
qu’ouvre au soir majestueux ton cœur,

dis, oh ! dis, beau manguier, qu’en tes rameaux puissants,
il est d’autres attraits que tes fruits mûrissants
ou que l’ombre où vibre la lumière !

Entr’ouvre-les parmi les pâleurs de l’azur
et que se montre aux yeux le mausolée obscur
sous lequel dort la race première !

MANGO TREE
To whoever tastes your pulp where the austral sun,
eliciting a sweet flavour from the sap,
has so many times inclined in all its splendour,
O guardian of the ancestral village,

or, a fleeting passer-by, enchanting his languor
far from the noise of Iarive, at the foot of the royal mountain,
to whoever goes deep into the vegetal palace
that opens your heart to the majestic evening,

say, oh! say, beautiful mango tree, that among your powerful branches
there are other charms than your ripening fruit
or the shade where the light vibrates!

Open them amid the sky of pale azure
and to your eyes let the dark mausoleum be revealed
under which the first race sleeps!

NOTES ON TRANSLATION³⁴

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6
ORANGER
Incessant renouveau d’un arbre qui vieillit,
fruit gonflé du soleil des zones les plus calmes,
ô source aérienne, ô source au cœur des palmes
et dont le jet sucré pour notre soif jaillit,

disputerai-je autant à l’abeille sauvage
qui prépare son miel en ta maturité,
qu’à l’oiseau dont le chant nous annonce l’été,
la clarté, le parfum, le goût de ton breuvage ?

Au moins, lorsque ton ombre accueillera le soir,
je viendrai savourant les Eglogues, m’asseoir
devant le paysage auguste et magnifique,

et vivre sous ton vocable, jusqu’à la nuit,
fiançant, oranger nuptial, mon ennui
aux tristesses d’un ciel profond et pacifique !

ORANGE TREE
Unceasing renewal of a tree that grows old,
fruit swollen with the sun of the quietest places,
O aerial spring, O spring in the heart of the palms
and whose sweet spray gushes forth to slake our thirst,

will I argue likewise with the wild bee
that prepares its honey in your ripeness,
with the bird whose song announces summer to us,
the clarity, the perfume, the taste of your beverage?

At least, when your shadow welcomes the evening,
I will come to savour the Eglogues, to sit
before the august and magnificent landscape,

and to live under your patronymic, until nightfall,
betrothing, nuptial orange tree, my boredom
to the sadness of a deep and peaceful sky!

NOTES ON TRANSLATION³⁵

---

7
LILAS
Ce n’est pas seulement l’annonce printanière
en cette terre où l’arbre a toujours sa verdure
et dédie à l’amour fleuri de la lumière
sa cime qui résiste à la grande froidure,

ni l’union au bleu rose des crépuscules
du mauve parfumé qui jaillit de ta sève,
que m’apportent, ce soir, tes primes panicules,
ô lilas où la nuit fait retentir son rêve !

Plus encor, la saison ranime en ma mémoire
les plaisirs que j’avais sous ta frondaison noire
à deviser avec mes amis en-allés !

Et suscitée, hélas ! par ta seule venue,
ma jeunesse surgit, découronnée et nue,
de ton ombre où j’entends quels appels désolés !

LILAS
It is not only the announcement of Spring
in this land where the tree still has its verdure
and dedicates to the flowering love of light
its crown that resists the great chill,

nor the union with the pink blue of twilight
of the fragrant mauve that springs from your sap,
brought to me this evening by your first panicles,
O lilacs where the night makes its dream take hold!

Even more, the season revives in my memory
the pleasures I used to have under your black foliage,
conversing with my friends who had gone away!

And aroused, alas! by your very coming,
my youth emerges, bare and naked,
from your shadow where I hear such desolate cries!

NOTES ON TRANSLATION³⁶

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8
GRENADIER
Fleur mauresque égarée en terre imérinienne
qui te plaisais jadis à parer des sultanes
ivres d’amour et de lune au pied des platanes,
je dirai ta tristesse au seuil des mers indiennes.

A la feinte de marbre et d’or d’une mosquée,
aux briques roses d’un minaret en ruines,
je vois, parmi la nuit et ses froides bruines,
s’enlacer et mourir la jeunesse étriquée

de tes branches qu’épouse une jeunesse vide
de maint grain rubescent au cœur d’un ciel livide
qui n’annonce pour toi nulle faveur d’avril !

Vaine offrande en l’honneur d’une origine obscure :
seule ta sève donatrice est encor pure,
le sol et le soleil attestant quel exil !

POMEGRANATE TREE
Moorish flower lost in the land of Imerina,
who once delighted in adorning the sultans
drunk with love and the moon at the foot of plane trees,
I shall speak of your sadness on the brink of the Indian seas.

In the pretence of marble and gold of a mosque,
on the pink bricks of a minaret in ruins,
I see, amidst the night and its cold drizzle,
intertwining and dying, the diminished youth

of your branches marries a youth devoid
of any rubescent grain in the heart of a livid sky
that announces for you no favour of April!

Vain offering in honour of an obscure origin:
only your giving sap is still pure,
the soil and the sun attesting to that exile!

NOTES ON TRANSLATION³⁷

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9
FILAO
Filao, filao, frère de ma tristesse,
qui nous viens d’un pays lointain et maritime,
le sol imérinien a-t-il pour ta sveltesse
l’élément favorable à sa nature intime ?

Tu sembles regretter les danses sur la plage
des filles de la mer, de la brise et du sable,
et tu revis en songe un matin sans orage
glorieux et fier de ta sève intarissable.

Maintenant que l’exil fait craquer ton écorce,
l’élan de tes rejets défaillants et sans force
ne dédie aux oiseaux qu’un reposoir sans ombre,

tel mon chant qui serait une œuvre folle et vaine
si, né selon un rythme étranger et son nombre,
il ne vivait du sang qui coule dans mes veines !

FILAO
Filao, filao, brother of my sadness,
who comes to us from a faraway and maritime land,
does the soil of Imerina have for your svelteness
the element favourable to its intimate nature?

You seem to miss the dances on the beach
of the daughters of the sea, of the breeze and the sand,
and you relive in your dreams a morning without storms,
glorious and proud of your inexhaustible sap.

Now that exile has made your bark crack,
the impetus of your faltering, strengthless shoots
dedicates nothing to the birds but a shadowless resting place,

like my song, which would be a foolish and vain work
if, born according to a foreign rhythm and its number,
it did not live off the blood that flows in my veins!

NOTES ON TRANSLATION³⁸

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10
LAURIER
Laurier, usurpateur du trône séculaire
où verdissaient jadis les arbres des Tropiques,
et qui plantes partout tes thyrses magnifiques,
dons de sang proposés au cœur crépusculaire,

est-ce pour mieux marquer la chute de ma race
et pour symboliser l’empreinte occidentale
qui souille l’entité de son âme ancestrale,
que tes ardents flambeaux veillent sur nos terrasses ?

Essence d’outre-sylve aux fleurs couleur de lèvre,
emblème de triomphe, objet de mainte fièvre,
laurier, ce n’est pas toi qui vas ceindre mon front !

Je préfère cet arbre aux vivaces racines,
gardien de nos vallons, orgueil de nos collines,
au pied duquel mes sœurs venaient danser en rond !

LAUREL TREE
Laurel, usurper of the age-old throne
on which the trees of the Tropics once grew green,
and who plants your magnificent thyrses everywhere,
gifts of blood offered to the twilight heart,

is it to better mark the fall of my race
and to symbolise the western imprint
that sullies the essence of its ancestral soul,
that your ardent torchbearers watch from our terraces?

Essence of the other side of the valley with its lip-coloured flowers,
emblem of triumph, object of many a fever,
laurel, it is not you who will girdle my brow!

I prefer this tree with its vivacious roots,
guardian of our valleys, pride of our hills,
at the foot of which my sisters used to dance in circles!

NOTES ON TRANSLATION³⁹

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11
AMONTANA
Amontana, la nuit trouble à peine ton cœur
de palmes quand la lune, illuminant ton front
de sa lumière bleue, apaise ta langueur
et te fait oublier les jours noirs qui viendront.

Ni l’aile furieuse et puissante du vent,
ni le feu destructeur ne courbe ta fierté :
ton essor végétal va toujours s’élevant,
indifférent aux coups de la fatalité !

Et ton sang continue, incessant renouveau,
à nourrir de ton ombre ardente le tombeau
désolé d’être seul parmi le paysage.

Amontana, les jours où nous ne serons plus
que les mânes épars des âges révolus,
puisse ton souvenir couronner mon visage !

AMONTANA
Amontana, the night barely disturbs your heart
of palms when the moon, illuminating your brow
with its blue light, soothes your languor
and makes you forget the black days to come.

Neither the furious and powerful wing of the wind,
nor the destructive fire curbs your pride:
your vegetal ascent goes ever upwards,
indifferent to the blows of fate!

And your blood continues, unceasing renewal,
to nourish with your ardent shadow the desolate
tomb alone among the landscape.

Amontana, in the days when we are no more
than the scattered spirits of ages gone by,
may your memory crown my face!

NOTES ON TRANSLATION⁴⁰

---

AU SOLEIL ESTIVAL (FRAGMENT)/TO THE SUMMER SUN (FRAGMENT)
pour Charles Maurras.

1
Tel, du cœur végétal, tu suscites la sève,
la jeunesse de l’arbre et la saveur du fruit,
ô soleil salué par le vent qui se lève
d’une ombre où l’on entend la fuite de la nuit,

tel, pénètre mon sang et mûris ma pensée :
je suis né sous ton signe ardent, et j’ai grandi
ainsi que nos palmiers à la voûte élancée,
dans l’ivresse de la gloire de tes midis ;

et pour que mon chant soit l’enfant de ta lumière,
pour qu’il recouvre l’âme éternelle et première
des chantres d’Iarive ivres de ta splendeur,

nourris-le, nourris-le, dans ta coupe enchantée,
du lait d’une sauvage et nouvelle Amalthée,
et que mon cœur, soleil, vibre de ton ardeur !

1
Just as from the heart of the plant you coax the sap,
the youth of the tree and the flavour of the fruit,
O sun greeted by the wind that rises
from a shadow where we hear the flight of night,

so do you penetrate my blood and ripen my mind:
I was born under your burning sign, and I grew up
like our palms with their soaring arches,
intoxicated by the glory of your noons;

and so that my song may be the child of your light,
so that it may recover the eternal and primeval soul
of the singers of Iarive drunk on your splendour,

nourish it, nourish it, in your enchanted cup,
with the milk of a wild and new Amalthea,
and may my heart, sun, vibrate with your ardour!

NOTES ON TRANSLATION⁴¹

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2
C’est depuis ce matin que je l’ai fiancé
à l’âme des monts bleus nubile dans les palmes,
à celle de l’azur où le soir annoncé
se devine avec son cortège d’heures calmes ;

mais c’est plus tard, parmi l’ivre réveil floral,
la libération des captives de l’ombre,
à l’heure où tu ceindras le front du ciel austral
de ton pampre de flamme et de sa pourpre sombre,

c’est alors que, devant ton exaltation,
je viendrai célébrer leur durable union
et t’en prendre à témoin au sein des paysages.

Je sais un lieu propice à ces amours nouveaux :
un manguier séculaire y garde des tombeaux
et veille au souvenir oublié de nos sages.

2
Since this morning, I have betrothed him
to the soul of the blue mountains, nubile in the palms,
to the soul of the azure sky where the revelation of evening
can be discerned with its cortège of calm hours ;

but it’s later, amidst the drunken floral awakening,
the liberation of the captives of shadow,
that you will gird the brow of the austral sky on time
with your flaming torch and its dark purple,

it is then that, before your exaltation,
I will come to celebrate their lasting union
and take you as a witness it in the bosom of the landscapes.

I know a suitable place for these new loves:
an age-old mango tree guards the tombs there
and watches over the forgotten memory of our wise men.

NOTES ON TRANSLATION⁴²

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3
Nous arrivons devant l’enceinte désolée.
Le ciel d’octobre est lourd de signes pluvieux
et de la terre chaude, emplissant les allées,
s’élèvent quels parfums de sauges capiteux.

Le flot aérien déferlera, paisible ;
mais la tristesse intérieure de l’azur,
tu la rendras, soleil vivant, imperceptible
et la revêtiras d’un enchantement pur.

Insensible à l’averse et tout à sa pensée,
étreignant du regard sa jeune fiancée,
l’enfant de nos amours latentes attendra

que d’Imanga, colline anciennement royale,
vienne nous entourer l’âme immémoriale
de l’orgueil de l’Emyrne et du passé des Rois.

3
We come before the desolate wall.
The October sky is heavy with signs of rain
and of the warm earth, filling the alleys,
wafting up with heady perfumes of sage.

The flood of air will wash over it, peacefully;
but the inner sadness of the azure sky,
you, the living sun, will make it imperceptible
and clothe it in a pure enchantment.

Unaffected by the downpour and all within his mind,
hugging with his eyes his young fiancée,
the child of our latent love will wait

for when from Imanga, an ancient royal hill,
the immemorial soul comes to surround us
with the pride of Emyrne and the past of the Kings.

NOTES ON TRANSLATION⁴³

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4
Profitons, profitons de la claire embellie !
Les euphorbes, déjà, sont sortis de leur songe
bien que dans leurs faisceaux encore se prolonge
l’ivresse crépitante et fraîche de la pluie.

Mais profitons surtout de la fin de ton règne :
la fontaine a perdu ton apparence double
et son miroir plaintif n’a plus qu’un reflet trouble
où l’ombre de la lune et de la nuit s’imprègne !

Réalisons ce vœu qu’avant tes funérailles
qui seront, ce soir, ton ultime apothéose,
se tressent dans l’azur des couronnes de roses.—

Nous en consacrerons, soleil, les fiançailles
de mon Chant amoureux de votre âme en-allée,
ô race finissante, ô cité dépeuplée !

4
Let us enjoy, let us enjoy the bright spell!
The euphorbias have already emerged from their dream,
even though in their clusters the crackling,
fresh intoxication of the rain still lingers.

But let's make the most of the end of your reign:
the fountain has lost your double appearance
and its plaintive mirror now has only a blurred reflection
where the shadow of the moon and the night is imprinted!

Let us make our wish come true that before your funeral,
which will be, this evening, your final apotheosis,
wreathes of roses may be woven in the azure sky.—

We shall consecrate them, the sun, the betrothal
of my Song in love with your departed soul,
O vanishing race, O depopulated city!

NOTES ON TRANSLATION⁴⁴

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5
La sagesse des morts, l’esprit imérinien,
source fraîche où mon cœur vient se désaltérer,
disent de voir mourir l’Aujourd’hui sans regret,
les jours suivants pouvant nous donner d’autres biens.

Et tu me dis : « Ce jour disputé par la nuit
n’est pas le seul présent de la Vie en tes mains !
Entretiens l’espérance et charme ton ennui
en l’attente d’avoir les fleurs des lendemains !

« Accueille donc, accueille, en souriant, le Sort.
si le front de la vie est marqué par la mort,
tout est contre l’espoir vaine calamité !

« Et demain, revenus des gouffres de la mer
et du pays trompeur de ton sommeil amer,
nous renaîtrons, enfant, couronnés de clarté ! »

5
The wisdom of the dead, the spirit of Imerina,
fresh spring where my heart comes to slake its thirst,
they say that we should see Today die without regret,
because the days that follow can give us other good things.

And you say to me: ‘This day fought over by night
is not the only gift of Life in your hands!
Hold on to your hope and charm your boredom
waiting to receive the flowers of tomorrow!

‘Welcome then, welcome, smiling, the Spell
if the face of life is marked by death,
everything is against hope—vain calamity!

‘And tomorrow, returned from the abysses of the sea
and the deceitful land of your bitter sleep,
we shall be reborn, child, crowned with light!’

NOTES ON TRANSLATION⁴⁵

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6
Le vent t’annonce, le doux vent
qui rompt notre torpeur humaine
et le sommeil si décevant,
ô soleil anadyomène !

O pur symbole de l’espoir
de cette belle matinée,
tombant aux embûches du soir
et de la lune déjà née,

tu reviens des vagues marines
parmi les roses purpurines
écloses sur les monts lointains,

proposant dans la neuve amphore
que nous figure cette aurore
quel ferme défi au destin !

6
The wind announces you, the gentle wind
that breaks our human torpor
and sleep so disappointing,
O sun rising from the sea!

O pure symbol of the hope
of this beautiful morning,
falling to the ambushes of evening
and the moon already born,

you return from the waves of the sea
among the purpurine roses
blooming on the distant mountains,

proposing in the new amphora
that this dawn represents to us
what a firm challenge to destiny!

NOTES ON TRANSLATION⁴⁶

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7
Une légende obscure et vaine nous rallie,
race éteinte d’Emyrne au bois découronné,
à l’archipel lointain de la Polynésie
dont le passé floral n’est pas plus fortuné.

Au vague souvenir que tu viens de ces terres
et qu’elles t’ont vu naître en leur azur marin,
je revis dans mon cœur l’exode de mes pères
parmi le glorieux triomphe du matin.

Et je vois, vers le golfe où l’ombre végétale
approfondit le ton bleu d’une mer étale,
des pirogues voguer, souples comme le vent.

Leur chargement est fait de pulpes savoureuses,
mûres sous les climats des îles bienheureuses
qui s’estompent sous les brumes de l’Océan.

7
An obscure and vain legend links us,
the extinct race of Emyrne with dethroned wood,
to the distant archipelago of Polynesia
whose floral past is no more fortunate.

Through the vague memory that you come from these lands
and that they saw you born in their marine azure,
I relive in my heart the exodus of my fathers
amid the glorious triumph of the morning.

And I see, towards the gulf where the vegetal shade
deepens the blue tone of a wide sea,
pirogues sailing, supple as the wind.

Their cargo consists of tasty pulps,
ripened in the climes of the blessed islands
that fade under the mists of the ocean.

NOTES ON TRANSLATION⁴⁷

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8
O soleil, est-ce ainsi qu’a fini l’aventure
des nomades venus du continent lointain ?
Ou bien, un vent mauvais, soufflant dans leur mâture
et jetant dans les flots leur plus riche butin,

lourd de l’odeur humide et chaude de l’orage,
implacable comme la volonté des dieux,
a-t-il fait chavirer le gros de l’équipage
et prospérer les survivants sous d’autres cieux ?

Mais qui nous le dira sans la science vaine
d’interroger le sol muet des Hauts-Plateaux
qui séparent des mers la terre imérinienne ?

Perdus parmi les bois détruits et la poussière
des âges, des tombeaux, qui sont deux fois tombeaux,
renferment à jamais l’originel mystère !

8
O sun, is this how the adventure ended
of the nomads come from that distant continent?
Or yet, did an ill wind, blowing through their masting
and throwing their richest treasures into the waves,

heavy with the hot, damp smell of the storm,
implacable as the will of the gods,
did it capsize the bulk of the crew
and let the survivors prosper under other skies?

But who can tell us without the futile science
of interrogating the mute soil of the Highlands
that separate the land of Imerina from the seas?

Lost among the destroyed woods and the dust
of ages, the tombs, which are twice tombs
will hold forever the original mystery!

NOTES ON TRANSLATION⁴⁸

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CŒUR ET CIEL D’IARIVE/HEART AND SKY OF IARIVE
à Robert-Jules Allain.

1
« Mangataka amy nao, Rasoalao, fa zavatra mba tia’ko, lalao ko… » T. ny A. .

O princesse exilée, ô reine devenue,
diane au front paré de pauvres fleurs d’automne,
la déesse des bois que le temps découronne
et la gardienne jalouse des landes nues,

j’ai vu ce qui restait des pieuses offrandes
promises à ton âme errante et désolée :
le sang d’un taureau pourpre à la nuque étoilée
du signe rituel et de belles guirlandes…

Bien que mon cœur accepte et que mon âme écoute
la voix seule des jours renégats et modernes,
veuille, veuille sortir du fond des Six Imernes
oublieuses jusqu’aux traces de ta déroute !

Je ne demande ni tes grands troupeaux sauvages
dispérsés aujourd’hui dans les bois désertiques,
ni le filon perdu de tes pierres magiques,
mais seulement la paix ancienne des villages !

Qu’en sorte pour m’emplir l’âme immémoriale
de ma terre qui meurt et de ma race éteinte,
afin que, subissant le sort et son atteinte,
en ajoutant au poids de la cendre royale,

ma jeunesse dernière ait pour orgueil suprême
d’avoir pur refleurir des tombes désolées
et d’avoir, ô mon sang, accordé ta coulée
au rythme intérieur, au chant de mon Poème !

1
‘I’m asking you, Rasoalao, because I love something, my game...’ T ny. A..

O exiled princess, O queen who has become,
the Diana whose brow is adorned with poor autumn flowers,
the goddess of the woods that time dethrones
and the jealous guardian of the bare moors,

I have seen what remained of the pious offerings
promised to your wandering and desolate soul:
the blood of a purple bull with a neck starred
with the ritual sign and beautiful garlands...

Although my heart accepts and my soul listens
to the lonely voice of apostate and modern days,
I wish, I wish I could emerge from the depths of the Six Forgetful Imerinas
to the traces of your rout!

I ask for neither your great savage herds
scattered today in the deserted woods,
nor the lost seam of your magic stones,
but only the ancient peace of the villages!

Let it come forth to fill me—the immemorial soul
of my dying land and my extinct race,
so that, enduring this doom and its harms,
adding to the weight of the royal ashes,

my bygone youth to its supreme pride
could alone make the desolate tombs bloom again
and had, O my blood, tuned your flow
to the inner rhythm, to the song of my Poem!

NOTES ON TRANSLATION⁴⁹

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2
Iarive, Iarive, Iarive la morte,
depuis longtemps déjà tu m’as fermé la porte
destinée à donner sur le soir de ma race !

En vain, parmi le jour qui naît sur la terrasse
couronnée autrefois de gerbes corallines,
je te cherche au milieu de nos douze collines ;
en vain, et dans l’espoir de retrouver en elles
les meilleures de tes grâces simples et belles,
je prends part à la ronde ardemment enroulée
de tes filles, mes sœurs, ô mère désolée :
de leur perversion qui me trouble et m’étonne,
je ne sais que tresser des fleurs de quel automne
en l’honneur ténébreux de ta mémoire vaine
vers qui seules s’en vont ma tristesse et ma peine !

2
Iarive, Iarive, Iarive the dead,
long ago you closed the door to me
destined to open on the evening of my race!

In vain, amid the day that dawns on the terrace
once crowned with sheafs of coralline,
I seek you among our twelve hills;
in vain, and in hope of finding among them
the best of your simple and beautiful graces,
I take part in the passionately coiled ronda
of your daughters, my sisters, O desolate mother:
of their perversion which troubles and shocks me,
I know only how to weave the flowers of Autumn
in the shadowy honour of your vain memory
to which go my sadness and my sorrow alone!

NOTES ON TRANSLATION⁵⁰

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3
O mon cœur amoureux de trois zones du monde :
l’Europe froide où va le meilleur de toi-même,
l’Inde au ciel aussi rose et bleu que ton poème,
et l’Afrique, ta source et limpide et profonde,

nul arbre n’a plongé ses vivaces racines
dans le sol différent de trois vergers contraires !
Fixe ton choix sur l’une ou l’autre de ces terres,
bien que toutes, dis-tu, gardent tes origines !

3
O my heart in love with three regions of the world:
cold Europe where the best of yourself goes,
India with a sky as pink and blue as your poem,
and Africa, your source, limpid and profound,

no tree has sunk its perennial roots
into the different earth of three contrary orchards!
Choose one or other of these lands,
although all of them, you say, hold your origins!

NOTES ON TRANSLATION⁵¹

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4
Si le monde a changé, si ma voix elle-même
renonce à ta musique, ô parler ancestral,
et que, sous le sillon du clair Navire-Austral,
elle chante selon une langue que j’aime,

le sang héréditaire et l’âme de mes morts,
sève toujours vivante en l’arbre qui décline,
m’animent à jamais comme, sur la colline,
le vent du sud qui souffle au cœur des ficus tors ;

et je te suis semblable, ô beau rosier de France
qui, fleurissant au flanc d’un tombeau de chez nous,
fiances aux églantiers au feuillage roux
la pureté perdue, hélas ! de ton essence !

4
If the world has changed, if my voice itself
renounces your music, O ancestral language,
and if, under the lines of the clear Austral-Ship,
it sings in a language that I love,

the hereditary blood and the soul of my dead,
sap still alive in the dying tree,
animate me forever like, on the hill,
the south wind that blows in the heart of the twisted fig tree ;

And I am like you, O beautiful rose of France
who, blooming on the side of one of our tombs,
betroth to the wild roses with their red foliage
the lost purity, alas! of your essence!

NOTES ON TRANSLATION⁵²

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5
Cette branche qui meurt sous le poids de ses fruits,
lesquels ne sont pas sûrs de périr avec elle,
jeunesse regrettant ses beaux rêves détruits
d’être un peu moins qu’éternelle,

c’est toi, ô cœur d’enfant qu’un sentiment obscur
a prématurément offert à mes délices,
et dont abuse, hélas ! le piège le plus pur
de mes perverses malices !

Ou bien, c’est toi, Cité qui, triomphale, sors
du sable dispersé d’une ville abolie :
Iarive du jour sur la terre des morts,
sœur de ma mélancolie !

5
This branch dying under the weight of its fruits,
which are not sure to perish with it,
youth regretting its beautiful, crushed dreams
of being a little less than eternal,

it’s you, O child's heart that an obscure feeling
has prematurely offered to my delight,
and to abuse it, alas! would be the purest trap
of my perverse mischief!

Or yet, is it you, City who triumphantly emerges
from the scattered sands of an abolished city:
Iarive in the present on the land of the dead,
sister of my melancholy!

NOTES ON TRANSLATION⁵³

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6
MATIN MALADE
Matin d’été, ô matin d’été,
bel et triste comme mon cœur,
tes arbres tremblent dans la clarté
en berçant mollement leur langueur.

Quel espoir de soleil virtuel,
paysage vert sans ramiers,
te nourrit de son leurre cruel
qui colore à peine tes palmiers

et te fait un frère adultérin
d’un sentiment lourd de chagrin
et plus lourd encor de soif d’azur

que du poids de l’épuisante nuit
qui m’a tendu son fruit bien mûr
mais gonflé de vénéneux ennui ?

SICK MORNING
Summer morning, O Summer morning,
beautiful and sad as my heart,
your trees tremble in the light,
cradling their languor softly.

What hope of a virtual sun,
a green landscape without wild pigeons,
feeds you with its cruel trick
that barely colours your palm trees

and makes you an adulterous brother
who feels heavy with grief
and heavier still with thirst for the azure sky

than the weight of the exhausting night
which handed me its well-ripened fruit
but swollen with poisonous boredom?

NOTES ON TRANSLATION⁵⁴

---

7
REVE DEVANT L’ATRE
pour Ramilijaona

Quelle belle aurore en-allée,
rose en sa promesse pure,
rend de regret inconsolée
ton âme que plus rien n’azure ?

Devant le mur que la nuit ronge,
—et ton cœur par quelle peine !—
devant le mur, leurrés du songe
d’une musique sombre et vaine,

dans la jouissance d’un rare
bonheur, tes yeux flous écoutent
l’âme d’un instrument barbare
où se décantent et dégouttent,

lentement, les profonds silences
de la nuit et de la lune,
qui couvrent les dures cadences
dont s’enivre ton infortune.

DREAM BEFORE THE HEARTH
for Ramilijaona

What beautiful bygone dawn,
pink in its pure promise,
fills with inconsolable regret
your soul that nothing can bleach?

In front of the wall that the night gnaws,
—and your heart by what sorrow!—
in front of the wall, lured by the dream
of a sombre and vain music,

in the pleasure of a rare
happiness, your bleary eyes listen
to the soul of a barbaric instrument
where decant and drip,

slowly, the deep silences
of the night and the moon,
which cover the hard cadences
that intoxicate your misfortune.

NOTES ON TRANSLATION⁵⁵

---

8
pour Armand Godoy 

Nature exubérante et puissante, ô Tropique !
Nous, du moins, qui vivons en zones tempérées,
ne jouissant que d’un faux renom exotique,
nous n’avons que des fleurs roses décolorées !

Nos cœurs, nos cœurs ardents en sont influencés :
ils sont déjà couverts de cendres sous leur feu,
car pour eux le Présent est déjà le Passé
et n’ose même pas affronter l’azur bleu

de Demain. Leurs rejets rares, leurs pousses maigres,
sortant d’un sol avare, héritant d’un ciel sombre,
ont la seules promesse aride des fruits aigres !

Nourris-nous mieux, soleil qui doubles un cap d’ombre !
Sois-nous plus enflammé pour les gorger de suc,
notre terre et nos cœurs avant l’âge caducs !

8
for Armand Godoy 

Nature, exuberant and powerful, O Tropic!
We, at least, who live in temperate places,
enjoying nothing more than a false exotic reputation,
we have only faded pink flowers!

Our hearts, our passionate hearts, are influenced by them:
they are already covered in ashes under their fire,
because for them the Present is already the Past
and doesn’t even dare to face the azure blue sky

of Tomorrow. Their rare shoots, their meagre sprouts,
emerging from a miserly soil, inheriting a sombre sky,
have only the arid promise of sour fruits!

Nourish us better, sun that doubles a cape in shade!
Let us be more impassioned to gorge them with sap,
our earth and our hearts before they become obsolete!

NOTES ON TRANSLATION⁵⁶

---

9
Bien que ton avenir, à tes yeux, se dessine,
lauré de thyrse en fleurs, promesse de beaux fruits,
comme un puissant fruitier dont l’élan se destine
à reverdir le champ détruit,

ouvriras-tu toujours la fenêtre qui donne
sur toute l’étendue océane du bois,
cœur chargé de printemps, mais qui cèles l’automne
et les jours mauvais d’autrefois ?

9
Even though your future, in your eyes, is taking shape,
laurelled with a blossoming thyrse, a promise of beautiful fruit,
like a mighty fruit tree whose momentum is destined
to regreen the destroyed field,

will you still open the window that looks out
on the entire oceanic expanse of the wood,
heart full of Spring, but which holds back Autumn
and the evil days of old?

NOTES ON TRANSLATION⁵⁷

---

10
Il est un monde qui doit mourir.
Paul Husson.

Il est un monde, il est des hommes qui mourront ;
d’autres, ni pires ni meilleurs,
suscités de ces morts porteront sur le front
de belles couronnes de fleurs ;

celles-ci, sous l’ardeur des soleils successifs,
au seuil de l’automne nouveau,
ne laisseront qu’une ombre aux contours fugitifs
à graver sur quelque tombeau ;

mais une vie obscure, exilée au milieu
de cette calme absurdité,
recherchera le cœur profond de l’azur bleu
pour refaire l’Eternité…

Il est un monde, il est des hommes qui mourront ;
d’autres, ni pires ni meilleurs,
suscités de ces morts, porteront sur le front
de vaines couronnes de fleurs.

10
There is a world that must die.
Paul Husson.

There is a world, there are men who will die;
others, neither worse nor better,
resurrected from these deaths will wear on their foreheads
beautiful wreaths of flowers;

these, under the burning of successive suns,
on the threshold of the new autumn,
will leave no more than a shadow with fleeting outlines
to be engraved on some tomb;

but an obscure life, exiled in the midst
of this calm absurdity,
will seek the deep heart of the azure-blue sky
to remake Eternity...

There is a world, there are men who will die;
others, neither worse nor better,
resurrected from these deaths, will wear on their foreheads
vain wreaths of flowers.

NOTES ON TRANSLATION⁵⁸

---

11
Cité nouvelle, encore inaccessible aux yeux,
qui, buvant le sang des partants,
saccages la promesse enclose en leur printemps,
mortelle fiancée à d’obscurs jeunes dieux,

je pense aux jours futurs où des palais de pierre
et des usines spacieuses
briseront en mon Emyrne silencieuse
les lignes de l’azur et les flots de lumière ;

je pense au paysage hier inviolé
comme le cœur vert des forêts,
ainsi qu’à vous, oiseaux roses, bleus ou dorés,
ivres du seul espace aride et désolé ;

à toi, ma sœur, à toi, fille de roi sans trône,
à toi, rose de la terrasse,
dernière floraison vivante de ma race,
couchant d’un jour heureux et fleur d’une âpre automne !

11
New city, still inaccessible to the eyes,
which, drinking the blood of the departed,
ransacks the promise enclosed in their Spring,
mortal betrothed to obscure young gods,

I think of the future days when palaces of stone
and spacious factories
will shatter in my silent Emyrne
the lines of the azure sky and the streams of light ;

I think of the landscape yesterday as inviolate
as the green heart of the forests,
and of you, pink and blue birds, or golden
intoxicated by the solitude of the arid and desolate space;

of you, my sister, of you, daughter of a throneless king,
of you, rose of the terrace,
last living flower of my race,
sunset of a happy day and flower of a harsh Autumn!

NOTES ON TRANSLATION⁵⁹

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12
Où, parmi le ciment de la Cité future
qui viendra délaver le beau rouge des murs,
où te retrouverai-je, intégrale Nature,
ô corbeille de fleurs, de miel et de fruits mûrs ?

Civilisation, tu dresseras sur elle,
au milieu de tes parcs, tes routes et jets d’eau,
comme sur une tombe, une émouvante stèle,
mais sans l’inscription que demande un tombeau !

Et de toi seul, mon chant que l’avenir déroute,
l’écho plus faible, hélas ! que le sanglot du vent,
redira du passé la ferveur et le doute
de sa voix enchantée et naïve d’enfant !

12
Where, amid the cement of the future City
which will come to wash away the beautiful red of the walls,
will I find you, integral Nature,
O basket of flowers, honey and ripe fruit?

You will erect civilisation over it,
in the midst of your parks, your roads and your fountains,
as over a tomb, a moving stele,
but without the inscription that a tomb demands!

And from you alone, my song that the future confounds,
the echo more feeble, alas! than the wind's sob,
will recount the fervour and doubt of the past
in its enchanted and naïve child's voice!

NOTES ON TRANSLATION⁶⁰

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Thank you very much for reading if you’ve gotten down all the way to the bottom here. I have more time to devote to it now that my dissertation is finished, but the next instalment will likely take some weeks, or a couple of months maybe. In the meantime, I’ll try to be regularly writing articles in between. Cheers for reading, and do please consider subscribing. These translations take a long time to do and I’m making them available for free because the goal here is to bring Rabearivelo to as wide an audience as possible, so I can’t in good conscience paywall this translation. Nonetheless, I appreciate consideration of a paid subscription.

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1. VERS LE BONHEUR/TOWARDS HAPPINESS

Stanza 1

Line 1: Elsinore is the English rendering of the French Elseneur, from Danish Helsingør. It is a town on the Øresund strait between Sweden and Denmark, where the Kronborg castle is located. It is most famous as the setting of Hamlet. In the play, Hamlet is sent to England by Claudius as part of a plot to have him killed at a safe remove from Denmark, but he finds the letter asking the English court to execute him and replaces it with a forgery requesting that his companions, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, be killed instead. After his plan succeeds, Hamlet does not keep away, having in effect fled, but returns to Elsinore and his death (along with the deaths of almost every other character involved in the intrigue). Rabearivelo’s meaning is likely something along the lines of rejecting intrigue, politics, and interpersonal conflict in favour of a pastoral, peaceful existence on hopeful virgin shores. Diocletian was happiest when he was growing cabbages.

Stanza 2

Line 1: ‘vain de palme’ was a little difficult to translate. ‘Palme’ can mean a palm tree or leaf, or a laurel in the sense of a commendation or the plant. But adjective + de (of) + noun without an article makes it a little tough to render the same sense in English using the same grammatical construction.

Line 2: ‘butin’ is actually a cognate with ‘booty,’ in the Arrgh me’hearties sense in English. Even though Hamlet does admittedly have the whole pirate thing going on, I thought that to translate is as ‘booty’ or ‘plunder’ wouldn’t be too appropriate when since Rabearivelo’s time Pirates of the Caribbean has made these words sound much sillier. Worth noting that ‘butin’ is unchanged over 700 years or so from Old French and does not have the whimsical sense that English ‘booty’ has; I think ‘spoils’ preserves this best.

Lines 3, 4: ‘Pourquoi ce signe en la mâtur/ d’aucun voyage en golfe calme ?’—it’s a little strange, this sentence. Strange because the sign, ‘signe’ signifies nothing, or the lack of a voyage in the ‘still/calm gulf’. The point is that the masting seems to Rabearivelo to contain a portent that this journey will be another ‘unfulfilled dream’/’rêve inachevé’.

Stanza 3

Line 2: ‘souffle’ is also a noun meaning breath as well as a verb for blow and the sense is a bit more connected than when a person blows air in English. Basically, this usage has the sense that the wind is breathing.

Line 3: ‘embellie’ is a cognate with English ‘embellishment,’ but has a positive connotation—it means like a burnishing, upturn, amelioration, something along these lines. ‘Good omen’ may be a poor translation but it seems to capture the sense quite well without being ungrammatical like any of these other translations would be in English.

‘L’azur’ means the ‘azure,’ which also just is a more poetic word for ‘sky’ in English, as well as bodies of water. ‘The azure sky’ is to some extent then a pleonasm, but I wanted it to be clear that the sky is the referent here and not any water or a crystal. You could translate it as ‘firmament,’ or ‘Empyrean,’ or something I suppose, or indeed just ‘azure,’ but I’m not sure this is better, and both the former choices would introduce other allusions.

Line 4: ‘où ne s’annonce nulle mort’ literally ‘where no death announces itself’—translated as ‘where no sign of death is’ to tie in with the ‘omen’ metaphor and make it more idiomatic in English.

Stanza 4

Lines 1/2: the adjective (usually) precedes the noun in French so in the original the first line ends with ‘dawn’ and the second with ‘native’ rather than the way round it is in translation. ‘Natale’ is of course a cognate with English ‘natal’ and this retains the sense of birth and motherhood with obviously ties in with the image of a dawn, but n.b. that it also has the sense of ‘native’ as in a homeland.

‘Our first soul’ in the original has a sense of a ‘primeval’ soul also but in English this would not retain the second meaning of ‘first’ (ha ha) as in ‘the greatest,’ which is present in the original.

Line 3: ‘inonder’ means to flood and the original has a sense of drowning. ‘Let us be submerged’ might therefore have been an alternative translation but I think my choice strikes a nice middle ground between the sunlight-as-liquid metaphor and for example saying ‘bask’ which would have lost that connotation.

Line 4: literally ‘where our entity is elaborated/elaborates itself’. I preferred ‘blossoms’ to retain the sense of unfolding outwards which ‘elaborates’ has while also tying in with the whole nourishing sunlight image. ‘Our entity’ as opposed to essence would have sounded a little odd in English—hell, it sounds odd in French, but I think a reader is less likely to get held up on this word, and it retains what I think is the most important sense here which is of the singularity of the natal essence under discussion.

Stanza 5:

Line 1: ‘my child’s gaze’ is literal; the original means ‘the gaze of my child’ as opposed to ‘my childlike gaze’. I think the latter sense seems more reasonable and this may be a mistranslation because of a quirk of Rabearivelo’s expression, but I had to call it as I saw it and so I’ve opted for this slightly ambiguous rendering.

Line 4: ‘guerrier de l’ombre’ means literally ‘warrior of the shadows’ and is ambiguous in the French. I.e., it could be a warrior in the employ of the shadows or a warrior against them. I chose the latter as it seems most intuitive.

A VERY SKIPPABLE TIDBIT: because this poem is the only one in ital, and sits alone in this section before ‘MEDITATIONS,’ it is part of the dedication to G. Henri de Brugada. He has another poem in ‘Traduit de la Nuit’ more ostentatiously dedicated to this subject—it is titled ‘To G. Henri of Brugada’. I was able to find two people named ‘G. Henri’ this could refer to: an artist whose piece Women on a rope swing, etching with aquatint was sold at an auction a few years ago, unhelpfully dated to the ‘20^th Century,’ and a Lieutenant Henri G., First World War veteran who wrote a book called Entente Cordiale based on his letters and impressions. This latter seems most likely, but they could well be the same person—your guess is as good as mine. The only place I can find with a name close to ‘Brugada’ was a ridge in Antarctica, which seems unlikely as most place names in Antarctica were given in the seventies by UK, US and Soviet geological surveys, and why would a nobleman be of Brugda ridge anyhow? It is likely Spanish—the unpleasant-sounding ‘Brugada Syndrome’ is named after a Spanish cardiologist, but I couldn’t find the place. This is all obviously errata, but I’ve included it as it was all I could turn up trying to find out who this ‘G. Henri de Brugada’ fellow might have been. If any reader would like to have a crack at it, let me know if you’re successful. It smacks to me of a pen name or a personal friend, as abbreviating the surname to ‘G.’ seems like a way to preserve anonymity, and the ‘de Brugada’ noble epithet is probably an in-joke.

2. 1—MEDITATIONS

I—D’UN MATIN/ OF A MORNING

This title could also mean ‘For One Morning,’ but it seems more likely that Rabearivelo it titling this after the style of an ode to something rather than the alternative.

Stanza 1

Line 2: the simile in French does not use an equivalent word to ‘like’ or ‘as,’ or indeed an article, it just goes ‘which, young girl whose eyes...’ but this seemed clearer as that rendering might make it sound like an address.

Line 3: ‘front’ is one of Rabearivelo’s favourite words. It pops up all the time in his poems. It literally means ‘forehead’ or ‘brow,’ but I decided to go with countenance here. The sense is something like the opposite of what happens to the sun’s ‘gold complexion’ in Sonnet 18, and we know Rabearivelo is a tremendous Shakespeare fan. The translation ‘brow’ might be nice because it has the shape of a dawn, but the usage in English is a bit more anachronistic, whereas ‘countenance’ I think lines up nicely with Rabearivelo in the early 20^th Century.

Stanza 2

Line 1: this is ‘demur’ in the sense of passive inactivity in response to a command or temptation, rather than the sense of arguing against such a thing. This choice rather than a word ‘remain’ introduces some ambiguity, but since the French is ‘demeurer’ and has the same ambiguity (although I do think the sense here is staying in bed lazily) I tend to go with the cognate where these kinds of coinflips come up.

Line 3: the word ‘enjoy’ here is my translation of ‘jouir’ in the original. This can indeed mean ‘enjoy,’ but also more often means come, climax, orgasm—it’s the French word for that, basically. That translation didn’t really work in this context, so I think Rabearivelo means it in the sense of ‘enjoy,’ and is making a cheeky allusion. Also at the end of this line is one of the many places where if I didn’t have a fairly literal approach to translation, I might be tempted to change the comma out for a semicolon; but this kind of thing we should let slide in poetry, I think.

Stanza 3

Line 1: ‘sortir’ literally means ‘to go out,’ or ‘leave,’ but ‘escape’ (échapper) I think is better here.

Line 2: literally ‘come with me resolving the dilemma,’ could equally be ‘join me in resolving the dilemma’—I think my choice is best of these.

Line 3: ‘of which happiness to choose’ would in French involve a ‘lequel’ more properly, which isn’t there. Nonetheless, this is clearly the sense of it so I’ve added a word.

Stanza 4

Line 1: no big deal, but the ‘lequel’ here vindicates the choice in the previous line, I think.

‘Sombre’ has more meanings in French than you’ve had hot dinners. ‘Enshadowed’ is very specific and likely too embroidered, but I like it, and you’ve got to  pick one possible translation at the end of the day.

Line 3: again we’ve got this pesky word ‘azur,’ i.e., ‘azure,’ meaning sky. I picked ‘firmament’ here.

3. 2

II – D’UN SOIR/OF AN EVENING

Same goes for this title that it could equally mean ‘for a evening,’ and the usage is much more common this way for evenings than for mornings. Nonetheless, I still think both are odes to a morning and an evening rather than ‘for an evening’ like the title of a love poem about a single night for example. I recognise that particularly the content of the latter poem and the use of ‘jouir’ in both might suggest that I’m wrong. This translation being online has the advantage of being a living document which can be much more easily altered than e.g., a print book. If you disagree on this choice let me know I’m very open to being convinced to the contrary on this count.

Stanza 1

Line 1: there’s that word ‘front’ again, here I think it means face—he’s seeing the face of a woman in a dream, we’ve all seen this trope before. I don’t think this could fairly be translated as ‘brow’ or ‘countenance’.

Line 2: ‘fervent’ is a near synonym to ‘ardent,’ in English, which is the French word used here. The main reason for the choice of fervent over ardent is that ardent dream makes little sense, like ‘furious cloud,’ and the sound of the word helps to make the suggesting of a fever dream. ‘Pensée’ literally means ‘thought’ as in the past participle of ‘think’ but the French usage is closest to ‘mind’. Furthermore, the French ‘ardent’ generally has to do with ideas of being burning, fiery, and so on, which is implied by the idea of fever and the association with heat, but not by the English ‘ardent’.

Line 3: don’t worry I hadn’t heard the word ‘panicle’ either before I had to look up the French ‘panicule’.

Line 4: of course the word ‘enchanter’ does exist in English exactly—‘enchant,’ but you’ve of course heard how people say ‘enchanté(e)’ on meeting someone as an equivalent of how an old-fashioned type might say ‘charmed’ in English. I think this choice retains the sense of being charmed and seduced while also preserving the sense of a spell, whereas ‘to enchant’ would only really wear the second meaning obviously.

Stanza 2

Line 4: the word ‘jouir’ is used again. Because of the evening setting and the reference to a ‘caress,’ we might expect that there is a more sexual meaning intended here than in the former case, but I still think that ‘enjoy’ is a more appropriate translation and can’t think of a way to introduce the same overtones in English without making the sentence terribly clumsy, e.g., like if I translated it as ‘taking pleasure from’.

Stanza 3

Line 3: this is the toughest decision in the whole poem. ‘Décevante’ has a double meaning in French of either ‘disappointing’ or ‘deceptive’. The English ‘disappointing’ used to have this too but has lost the latter meaning. I’ve chosen ‘disappointing’ because it kind of has a little whiff of the former meaning, but it may be the wrong choice. I think the sense is stronger though that the persona of the poem is disappointed that he wasn’t able to ‘jouir de’ a last caress than that he feels deceived. I also think that this poem is at a sufficient remove from the earlier Hamlet references that this isn’t a callback to the ghost from Hamlet who it is suggested, and suspected by Hamlet at first may be a deceiving entity rather than the real ghost of his father, the erstwhile king Hamlet.

4. 3

CHANT PATERNEL/PATERNAL SONG

Most of this poem has been translated more or less literally because it’s quite amenable to it. Only a few of the phrases and words could be seen ambiguously.

Stanza 4

Line 1: ‘I don’t even try to open you’ is an anglicisation of a very idiomatic construction in the original French.

Line 3: ‘obscur’ and ‘obscure’ are more or less the same in French and English, but the French has a little more of an implication of shadowed mystery compared to the English which more means arcane or Delphic. This seems to be meant in the first sense.

5. 4

FETICHE/TALISMAN

Concerning magical and mystical practices in Africa, the English ‘fetish’ is generally used rather than ‘talisman’. However these mean essentially the same thing, and to use the word fetish would first bring along a lot of baggage which wasn’t quite so prevalent in Rabearivelo’s time—that X-files episode on Haitian voodoo, zombies and so on, and also has the other meaning of a sexual idée fixe which isn’t in play here. So on this count and the other iffy word which pops up on this poem, I’ve taken the cautious translation, and I think the correct one.

Stanza 1

Line 1/2: ‘fixes’ in the original is the second person present indicative (or subjunctive, but not here) conjugation of ‘fixer,’ ‘to fix’. No other conjugation of the verb ends with ‘es’. But the ‘qui’ lets us know that this is like an English construction say ‘you who fix...’ and that the first line’s items are the subjects of the rest of sentence which we have in the second line. To make this clear in English it was necessary to add a comma on the first line and put in the ‘you’ pronoun; every other way I tried to render this was either ungrammatical, or grammatical but sounded like it was ungrammatical, like e.g., ‘Debris of ice, O absent gaze/who fix the presence of the world’—this is grammatically correct and sensible, but it still makes you do a double-take as a reader. An alternative translation which is a bit simpler-sounding would be to make it third person: ‘Debris of ice, O absent gaze/which fixes the presence of the world’ but this loses the sense of an address. Worth noting though that reading this aloud in French you wouldn’t be able to hear the difference—‘fixe’ and ‘fixes’ are pronounced the same.

Line 3: ‘nègre’ when used as a noun can be equivalent to the English ‘negro,’ but also depending on context and tone is the French version of that other word you’re thinking of. Since it is an adjective here, it certainly should be translated as ‘negro’.

Stanza 2

Line 4: ‘tes fidèles dans la tourmente’ literally means ‘your faithful in torment/turmoil’; as I’ve rendered it, ‘tormented faithful,’ I think it’s more idiomatic.

6. 5

LIVRES/BOOKS

Stanza 1

Line 1: I’m very unhappy with the turn of phrase ‘make up for,’ which I think ought to have no place in a poem, but there really is no better way to translate the verb ‘suppléer’ in this context. In others you could say ‘compensate,’ ‘substitute,’ ‘replace,’ or ‘exchange’ but try as I might no other good translation fits.

Line 3: ‘ashore on my table’ is a slightly clumsy pleonasm, because ‘ashore’ already means ‘on a/the shore,’ so the verb has two locative objects here, but it’s in line with the original and I think very much passes under poetic license.

Line 4: I’ve previously translated ‘golfe’ as ‘gulf’ in this translation, but I prefer ‘bay’ here sonically. It’s just a whim and either is fine. More importantly the article ‘a’ is interpolated here; an equivalent ‘un’ or ‘une’ isn’t there in the French but for some reason I liked the sound better if I chose to break with my usual policy of very literal translation.

Stanza 2

Line 1: again we have a word which I’ve translated differently elsewhere here in the very first poem, ‘embellie’. Because we have the nautical metaphors everywhere here, I think the meaning ‘lull’ is most appropriate. The reader should certainly be starting to notice how Rabearivelo loves to use these same rich words which have a great breadth of meanings over and over, like ‘embellie,’ like ‘front,’ &c.—it’s a technique aspiring poets should take note of.

The ’c’est vrai’ here is a bit odd.—the ‘ce’ seems to have two referents so it should be ‘ils’; I leave it to you to decide whether this is an oversight or deliberate, or one of the not-rare occasions when a French speaker uses a singular pronoun to refer to a plural subject in a subordinate clause (it’s infuriating).

Line 4: the original literally means ‘turning away the bow and the stern of the lighthouses’; I’m a little unclear on this one but I think that my translation is the correct sense it’s meant in. I don’t believe that there could be a way to render it faithfully to the original sentence and have a clear meaning.

Stanza 3

Line 1: the French ‘rhythme’ is given as ‘pace’; in this context the rhythm is like a metaphor of a metronome setting a speed, so I though ‘pace’ was the best word.

7. 6

HÉRODIADE/HERODIAD

To save myself time, I’ve just copy/pasted my notes on translation from my first article on Rabearivelo below, where I just selected half a dozen poems to translate. Herodiad was one of these

I found « votre fragrance/de rose épanouie au front ombreux des soirs ! » very difficult to translate. 'Rose' in French means either 'rose,' as in the flower, or 'pink'. This double meaning is being exploited by Rabearivelo here; rose goes with fragrance and the 'blossoming'/'blooming'/'flourishing' meant by 'épanouie,' while 'pink' goes with the colour of the sunset sky. I was debating which word to translate 'rose' as and eventually just thought why not both?

The rest of the translation is quite literal, give or take a few idiomatic hedges.

8. VILLE MORTE/DEAD CITY

Stanza 1

Line 4: OK, the original is: ‘mais, me sachant plus vain, me crois plus périssable !’ Word-by-word dreary literality would translate this as : ‘But, knowing myself more vain, I think myself more perishable/ephemeral!’ I picked ‘ephemeral’ over ‘perishable’ because it’s more poetic; ‘perishable’ I personally associate with short shelf-life fruit, and I think the rest of the rendering seems sensible to you as it preserves the meaning while being a little more reasonable in English.

Stanza 3

Lines 1/2: it seemed most reasonable to split the ‘tout dit’ into the first words of the two lines to make clear the whole phrase has this as the meta subject/verb. Like if it were rendered as ‘everything speaks in your relapse into the bosom of nature,/ of the ancient, present and future destiny,’ it wouldn’t be as clean.

Line 3: ‘susciter’ is a cognate of course with English ‘resuscitate’; you can infer the various meanings it can have based on that. I chose enkindled frankly because it was the most poetic word available to me which seemed to have the sense which I read into the original. (And I just read Blood Meridian again and remembered liking the taste of this word in it). Alternative translations of this phrase are very reasonable.

Stanza 4

Line 1: ‘all that’ here is standing in for ‘le peu’—‘the little’—this I thought was more idiomatic.

Line 3: ‘enlacer’ means ‘to entwine’. Instead I went with ‘root-wrapped’. This is one of the bigger departures from the original you might see me go with, but I think it brings across the image which the original intends rather well, and doesn’t bog us down with any literal messiness, thinking of twine itself and so forth. Besides, Rabearivelo wants you to envision a grave wrapped in flora—entwined doesn’t much bring that across.

9. SAGESSE/WISDOM

I

Stanza 1

Line 2: P.-J. Toulet was a French poet. I only know him from his reputation as an opium addict and early fantaisiste. Read about him here if you’d like to get this reference better: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul-Jean_Toulet

Stanza 3

Lines 2/3: this is another example of Rabearivelo cutting off a line between an adjective and its noun, so in the English translation they are reversed. The noun rather than the adjective begins the next line. This in the French means that the adjective (vibrant) generally gives an implication to the rest of the line where it appears. Reading in translation you have to either perform some gymnastics in your head to cast the idea of vibrancy on the rest of the line where it rightfully ought to be, or accept it as a quirk or translation and engage with the text as presented to you in English. Your professor will be forced by dogma to accept you doing either or indeed both; don’t worry.

II

Stanza 1

Line 1: ‘pâture’ is like the grass cows feed on; fodder—I liked ‘pabulum’ here to keep the ‘pa-‘ initial sound and the meaning. Alternative choices are reasonable; this may be a touch arcane.

Line 3: again ‘ardent’ in French has an implication of ‘burning’; I chose to translate it as ‘fervent’ earlier for this reason. Here a similar reasoning applies.

Line 4: ‘désenivrer’ can also mean ‘to disenfranchise,’ but this is a very metaphorical translation and based on Rabearivelo’s personal life and allusions in other works I think this is more reasonable.

Stanza 2

Line 3: ‘nouer’ in French means ‘to knot’ but is almost always used metaphorically to have to do with the development of a plot or narrative. Consider the English loanword ‘denouement’. Here therefore I translated it as ‘develop’.

Line 4: ‘front’ again! Here I think forehead is the best translation because we can use the idiom of a lined forehead to signal wisdom which is the meaning here.

Stanza 4

Line 1: ‘Destin’ here is translated as ‘Fate’ only because generally in English it is more conventional to capitalise ‘Fate’ as in the ‘Three Fates’ rather than destiny (it’s English not Turkish; no Kismet here); take your pick of words though, certainly ‘Destiny’ is the cognate and therefore the default preference of a literal translator.

Stanza 5

Line 1: it ought to be noted that ‘atteinte’ usually means an achievement, ‘reaching’ something. This is the sense in which death arrives; death here is achieved like something sought after. I couldn’t render this well in English.

10. LA GUIRLANDE à L’AMITE/THE GARLAND OF FRIENDSHIP

POUR UNE OMBRE/FOR A SHADOW

Samuel Ratany was a colleague and close friend of Rabearivelo; they were the same age and collaborated at the nascent Malagasy literary journals. Ratany’s two most famous poems, Embona and Midnight Elegy, were both dedicated to Rabearivelo. He had a similarly turbulent life and died in 1926 at only 25 years old.

Ratany aged about 15

The revival of oral culture, the hainteny, and the mitady ny very—‘search for what is lost’ in Rabearivelo’s work is largely a product of Ratany’s influence. One of his last poems, Izay ho feoko eo am-pialana aina, ‘My Last Breath,’ is one of those odd artistic artefacts which seems to predict his imminent death very accurately, like Shostakovich’s Opus 110. I’m always fascinated by these types of pieces where the artist really seems to have felt the hand of death on him/her. They force me to disagree with Kollwitz when she said in 1932 ‘At the very point when death becomes visible behind everything, it disrupts the imaginative process. The menace is more stimulating when you are not confronting it from close up.’ This was when she was working on her Death Cycle—famous pieces like Woman With Dead Child, before another world war came along. She didn’t live to see the end of it. Anyway, I’ll cut the digression off here, but hopefully this contextualises the Ratany dedication reasonably well.

Stanza 1

Line 3: as noted in the endnotes in the Bibliothèque malgache arrangement, the manuscript says ‘motres’; almost certainly Rabearivelo meant to write ‘mortes’.

Stanza 2

Line 1: ‘s’élancer’ means to set off, as in on a journey or a mission. It can also figuratively mean to throw yourself into something. It’s a slightly odd word choice by Rabearivelo here, so I’ve picked something idiomatic-sounding in English. It might be that I’ve introduced a sense of furtiveness which isn’t really there in the original, rather we have the sense of a desperate, longing, searching gaze which isn’t brief as ‘darts’ implies. But frankly ‘you towards whom my gaze quests’ which would probably be the best figurative translation just sounds weird.

Line 2: the French rendering is constructed more like ‘searches in vain the Elysian space,’ word order and construction here has been fiddled a bit, again to sound more natural in English.

Line 3: ‘égaré’ is another one of these multisemantic (to coin a word) words which Rabearivelo loves so well. It’s the past participle of ‘égarer’ which usually means ‘to lose,’ ‘misplace,’ ‘forget’; the reflexive form ‘s’égarer’ means ‘to forget oneself’. The other rarer meanings are ‘to distort,’ or to ‘overcome’. That’s distort in the active reflexive sense in English, as in if I crumple the piece of paper the paper is distorting, rather than to say I distorted the truth. It isn’t transitive here. I’ve chosen the ‘distorted’ translation because it seems most sensible, the sense in which Rabearivelo means ‘égaré’ is that the searching gaze returns changed and warped, which I think ‘distorted’ gets across well.

Line 4: ‘nef ayant fait naufrage’ literally means ‘the ship having been shipwrecked’. I’ve tried to render it as unclumsily as I can while keeping two subjects here (rather than just saying e.g., ‘the shipwreck lost body and soul’.

Stanza 4

Line 1: ‘Que ton ombre s’abreuve’ could also be translated as ‘Let your shadow imbibe,’ but I think it flows quickly enough from the last stanza that the reader hasn’t forgotten the contingent phrase just yet.

Line 2: ‘sympathetic’ here is really taking a liberty. The original means ‘cultivated in common,’ but then takes another line to get to the heart which is beating with the same commonly cultivated rhythm as the metaphorical spurting of blood from the book. To get this association clear, I thought just to say ‘sympathetic’ makes it read more cleanly and get the sense across in the neatest way. A translation like ‘the blood that spurted with a rhythm cultivated in common with,/before it was thrilled by the shady shores,/your heart...’ would just be a mess.

Line 3: ‘ravi’ can also mean ‘abducted,’ or ‘stolen’. I think thrilled makes sense—it’s the more common meaning, and the sense seems to be that the rhythm of the heart, what it sympathetically beats with, has changed.

Stanza 5

Line 2: another coinflip of whether to translate ‘décevoir’ as ‘to disappoint’ or to deceive’. The ‘to disappoint’ meaning is more common so unless there are externalities suggesting otherwise this is the safer side to hedge on. So maybe not a coinflip so much as an 80/20 in favour of ‘to disappoint’.

Line 3: ‘éteinte’ literally means ‘extinguished’; it’s the feminine past participle of ‘éteindre’ which can apply to anything from turning a light off to putting out a fire to killing off a species. Here I think ‘extinct’ is best, but you could make an argument with a lot of utility that ‘extinguished’ works better because it ties in with the idea of a burning soul, a light of genius. I went with extinct because it applies to the actual noun it’s grammatically associated with, ‘race,’ more appropriately, but you couldn’t be criticised for second-guessing this choice.

Stanza 6:

Lines 2/3: these are both quite idiomatic constructions involving every Francophone’s favourite word ‘que’; this I think is a good way of representing the phrases in English.

11. A SAHONDRA/TO SAHONDRA

‘Sahondra’ is Malagasy for Aloe capitata, a flowering aloe plant which grows a crownlike plume of red and yellow flowers.

The Hova were one of the three traditional castes of Malagasy society. They were the middle layer between the Andriana, the aristocracy, and the Andevo, the slave caste. They have a rough equivalence with e.g., Roman freemen, another society with a roughly three-tiered caste system.

This was another poem that translated very literally very easily, so I only have a few marginal notes on the translation.

Stanza 1

Line 3: ‘scène’ of course literally means ‘scene,’ but here it figuratively is meaning a marvellous sight like a beautiful sunset from a vista, so I could’ve said ‘sight,’ I supposed, and kept the ‘s’ sound, but marvel keeps the implication of seeing and reflects the sense of a marvellous view, I think.

Stanza 2

Line 3: the original is literally ‘[le] temps hova aboli’—so ‘the abolished hova-time’ would be most literal, but the rendering I went with I think is more idiomatic.

Stanza 3

Line 1: definitely this is the biggest change in comparison with the original. ‘Dessiller’ is a French verb which is close to untranslateable in a single word. I believe (thought I haven’t checked) that it is cognate with ‘seel,’ so ‘unseel’ would be the English equivalent (as in to seel, that is to sew shut, a hawk’s eyes for training purposes). This is not done anymore by hawkers of course so the verb is obscure in English; I’ve only once seen it used in Thom Gunn’s Tamer and Hawk (which is an excellent poem; I recommend it). Because of its rarity even though it would be correct to translate as ‘the transfiguring and unseeling days,’ I think this translation is better and doesn’t oblige the reader to look up vocabulary.

Stanza 4

Line 2: there’s that word ‘front’ again! You could translate this idiomatically as something like ‘wear its pride on your sleeve,’ maybe.

12. A PIERRE CAMO/TO PIERRE CAMO

Pierre Camo was a Parisian, born 1877, who spent thirty years in Madagascar as a colonial administrator and writer after the fashion of a George Orwell. He was the principle founder of Latitude-sud 18°, a journal which Rabearivelo contributed to frequently. You can find translations of his (Rabearivelo’s) poems published there in one of my previous posts. He was an important mentor for Rabearivelo. You can consider this sort of dipolar background Rabearivelo had where on the one hand with Ratany he’s interested in writing Malagasy poetry and using French to translate, promulgate and preserve Malagasy oral culture and pre-writing literature, and on the other hand because of the French colonial influence and people like Camo he takes a deep interest in French literature and the western canon more broadly. Really a fascinating background for a writer.

Stanza 2

Line 1: ‘propylée’ is a propylaion, or propylaion, is the gateway of a temple in classical Mediterranean architecture—think of the front of a parthenon-style building, with the row of columns topped with a triangular roof, at the top of a set of steps, all in marble. I picked the Greek rather than latinised version more or less on a whim. It’s also one of those odd Latin/Greek nouns where you’ll see the plural used to mean a single example, as in ‘propylea’.

Stanza 3

Line 3: ‘courir’ here I interpreted as wanting to mean ‘hurry,’ or ‘hasten,’ as I rendered it. Frankly I’m unsure whether Rabearivelo wants to mean that the soul of the poem runs before the laurels or is caused to run there.

Line 4: this is ‘before’ in the sense of ‘in front of,’ not I think the temporal relative sense.

Stanza 4

Line 4: ‘inassouvie’ is a cognate with ‘unassuaged,’ both originally coming from the Latin ‘assuāviō,’ meaning ‘to calm,’ or ‘sweeten’. Instead of this translation, though, the ‘plus’ could indeed mean ‘more’ as it usually does instead of ‘yet,’ although I think the latter is more likely here, and we could instead of unassuaged argue for ‘unquenched,’ or even ‘unquenchable,’ or ‘insatiable,’ something along these lines.

13. A TRISTAN DEREME/TO TRISTAN DEREME

Tristan Derème, the pseudonym of Phillippe Huc, was a French poet of the fantaisiste school after Paul-Jean Toulet. This is for Rabearivelo a negative association; he has already mentioned Toulet here and called him ‘bitter’ in SAGESSE/WISDOM.

‘Iarive’ is the word Rabearivelo generally uses for Antananarivo; it has a more wistful, figurative, Iliad-y sense than does ‘Antananarivo,’ identifying with the hill of Ambohimanga and the region as the spiritual centre of Imerina more than with Antananarivo as the post-French administrative and economic capital. Although I could anglicise this as ‘Iarivo,’ or even translate as ‘Antananarivo,’ I have preferred to leave it as is, since Antananarivo has very different implications as a name, like the difference between Byzantium and Constantinople.

Stanza 3

Line 1: that word ‘azur’ pops up here again once more! Luckily we have an adjective linked here so we can fool around with this a bit and get ‘sky of purple azure,’ which sounds rather nice, from ‘azur de pourpre’.

Line 3: ‘ficus’ is an English word as it is a French word, meaning the genus that includes fig trees. It almost always is used to refer to fig trees. This is another case of while I could use the exactly commensurate English word I don’t want to oblige dictionary usage.

Line 4: ‘thicket’ may be another wrong choice. The French is ‘touffe’. Now, ‘thicket’ is a very 19^th-century, Thomas Hardy kind of word choice... at least I didn’t go with I leant upon a COPPICE-gate—the French ‘touffe’ is usually used to refer to a clump or tuft of hair. It also has a vulgar meaning referring to (generally female) pubic hair—the English equivalent to ‘une touffe’ in this sense would be ‘a bush’. Thicket sanitises this possible double meaning out of the poem. I fully admit this may be a mistake, as the poem is quite sarcastic, but ‘wild clumps,’ or ‘tufts’ sounded wrong to me.

Stanza 6

Lines 1/2: ‘Les voici-t-ils pas revenus ?’ was beyond me to render cleanly while preserving the ‘voici,’ which means something like ‘Here, see!’ or signals presentation. I did briefly consider putting ‘Hark—have they not returned?’ before getting a hold of myself.

Line 3: just n.b. that ‘trépas’ is a much more literary way of saying ‘death’ in French. I don’t think there’s quite an English equivalent that doesn’t start to get close to personifying the concept or getting too arcane... like e.g., respectively ‘Thanatos,’ or ‘quietus’ would be a tough sell here. Unfortunately we don’t have an equivalent to ‘trépas’ as in a literary alternative to the noun ‘death’. You could consider capitalising the ‘d’ here—‘Death’—instead.

Stanza 7

Line 3: here’s another favourite choice in the Rabearivelo lexicon: ‘entité’; I’ve chosen ‘essence’ once again even though it doesn’t have the same implication of singularity, for essentially the same reason as last time.

Line 4: originally instead of ‘southern light,’ I had put aurora australis, because I thought it kept the literary sound of ‘australe’ well even if all Rabearivelo means is the unique light of the southern hemisphere. I had second thoughts, but this is a good figurative note to associate with this last line. It has a lot more mystery than ‘southern light,’ and while it goes overboard a bit it’s not far off the implication of the original.

14. A MARCEL ORMOY/TO MARCEL ORMOY

Marcel Ormoy was the pen name of Marcel Prouille. I will leave it to the reader to look into the ‘Makoko Kangourou’ hoax and the amusing, unintentional car crash that was Rapsodie nègre. Rabearivelo also writes about Marcel Ormoy in Enfants d'Orphée, a translation of which is also available for free on this Substack publication.

Stanza 2

Line 1: ‘quand pourrai-je’ more has the sense of ‘when can I,’ or ‘when will I be able to,’ but in context it seems like a kind of permission is being sought (sarcastically), so it’s translated as such.

Line 4: ‘seule’ can be taken to mean ‘lonely’ as I’ve put it but also alone. It’s a little subtle, but the clause could also be taken to mean ‘by the voice of my race alone’.

Stanza 3

Line 3: ‘entretenir,’ literally ‘to hold between,’ means ‘to preserve,’ ‘nourish,’ or ‘keep hold of’. I’ve gone for option one here.

Stanza 4

Line 2: ‘fonds’ is strange here; it means ‘funds’. It can also mean background and has a few other rare meanings, but they don’t make sense here because it’s a pural, i.e., ‘backgrounds’ would be an odd inclusion. Instead, based on its usage in A PHILLIPPE CHABANEIX, I have good reason to guess that he means fountains, or founts, despite the juxtaposition with another financial word.

Line 4: ‘déroute’ means a rout as in a forced retreat of an army, it does not mean the same thing as rut. Very odd word choice, doesn’t seem to fit sententially, but il est ce qu’il est.

Stanza 5

Line 2: take a drink every time Rabearivelo uses ‘front’! ‘Face’ here seemed the most appropriate of the alternative potential translations.

Line 3/4: the construction used in the French here doesn’t quite go directly into English. It’s been rerendered a bit to be more sensible here; the main difference is instead of ‘laquelle’ being translated as ‘which’ or ‘which one’ as it usually would, I felt that just a simply ‘it’ helped the fluency.

15. A JEAN LEBRAU/TO JEAN LEBRAU

Jean Lebrau was a French poet who resided in Moux for most of his life. His main profession was as a winemaker, and the few parts of his work which have come to my attention are generally pastoral accounts of vineyards, landscapes of the Pyrenees south of the Basque, and suchlike.

I have to say, this might be my favourite poem of all the ones presented here. Truly beautiful—hopefully the translation doesn’t completely fail it!

Stanza 2

Line 1: ‘grappe’ can mean bunch or cluster; of course the former seemed best here.

Line 2: take another shot for ‘azur’! This one was a little odd—'grillé’  means ‘grilled’—I went with ‘seared’ because it’s a cooking work which can be meant by ‘grillé’ but made more sense in context. ‘Fauves’ is a noun meaning ‘beast’ or ‘wild animal’. Rabearivelo here is doing something slightly rare in French but very common in English, where we stick nouns next to each other to produce compound meanings without any prepositions: ‘FALLOUT SURVIVAL SHELTER’ is the (very funny) example from Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz—German does this too, like when Heidegger talks about the concept of a hammer-Thing. Rarer in French, but not unheard of.

Line 6: ‘filles’ can mean ‘daughters’ or simply ‘girls’—just a judgement call here to pick a meaning. ‘Daughters of Regret’ seemed more reasonable.

Last line: ‘trembler’ has the same figurative meaning in French as English of course; the implication is that he’s quaking in his boots over the insufficiency of his offering. The French literally says ‘qui meurt’—‘which dies’—but changing this to an adjective makes this more natural, I think.

16. A PHILLIPPE CHABANEIX/TO PHILLIPPE CHABANEIX

Chabaneix is another member of the fantaisistes, the ‘Fanciful School’ of French poets along with Derème and Toulet. He was born in Paris, raised largely in New Caledonia, before moving to La Rochelle. He was the son of another colonial administrator. I have had no contact with his work that would let me summarise it.

Line 9: ‘moiré,’ meaning ‘shimmering’ I think was the intention here. The original simply says ‘moire,’ which is an archaic word for a shot of silk (apparently)—I think that this is another case of Rabearivelo missing an accent (we all do it when writing French), but it wasn’t picked up by the arrangers of the French text I’m working from. I’ve copied their practice of making endnotes pointing these out but also putting it here because probably nobody reads the endnotes, and it has the potential to bear on the translation as well as just being a case of saying [sic].

Lines 12-14: I had to do a lot of reordering here as tends to be the case when French sentences are long—their way of constructing things is just totally different to English often and doesn’t work when you try to cram the literal translations of words into a similar grammatical framework. The order has been switched about a bit and ‘magic’ is repeated for clarity. Otherwise I think it’s relatively faithful.

Lines 16-18: again, for clarity and cleanliness I’ve chose only to use the ‘having been’ construction once, whereas in the original Rabearivelo repeats it three times, once for each element in the list of reasons why the voice is less ephemeral. This sounds normal in French, but in English is just a bit much.

Line 19: this is the use of ‘fonds’ in the plural I mentioned earlier which caused me to translate the word as ‘founts’ previously; I could be wrong.

17. A ROBERT-EDWARD HART/TO ROBERT-EDWARD HART

Robert-Edward Hart was a French-English poet, born in Port Louis, Mauritius to expat parents. His grandfather was a professor English at a London university. He visited Madagascar in his twenties, while Rabearivelo was a teenager. He wrote two collections of poems about the experience, Sensations de route and La vie harmonieuse. Both are excellent, if you can find them. Renaud hailed him as a critical poet for Mauritian literature upon his death in 1954. His prose work was influential also.

Stanza 1

Line 4: ‘incombe’ has a direct English cognate, ‘coomb,’ a now-rare word meaning ‘valley’. Because it’s rare I thought it best just to say valley even though ‘coomb’ is a closer translation.

Stanza 3

Line 1: another classic Rabearivelo word, ‘entité’. Again, I have found that ‘essence’ is the best word to convey something like his meaning.

Lines 3/4: the clause ‘et de toute influence s’affranchit’ has been reversed in the English to ‘and frees itself from all influence’ to sound more natural. The alternative is grammatically correct but these are the last lines of the poem and a clumsy-sounding phrase would threaten to bring it to a screeching halt.

18. A G.HENRI DE BRUGADA/TO G.HENRI OF BRUGADA

As I mentioned earlier, there are a couple of candidates who this G. Henri of Brugada could be. It is likely the same man who published the diary of letters and poems written during the First World War.

Stanza 1

Lines 3/4: I switched a verb and adjective here to try to make it make sense. Sometimes Rabearivelo’s meaning is a little obscure. The sense is that in order to enchant the persona into lovesickness, a musical sob is produced to insinuate that feeling and cause it to bloom—the ‘musical sob’ could be taken to mean a sexual moan, or a cry of pain which confesses the lovesickness and allows it to blossom. It’s frankly unclear to me.

Stanza 2

Line 4: the French is ‘le dur lac oublié sur le trésor qu’il porte ?’—literally, this would be ‘the hard lake forgotten on the treasure which it carries?’—yeah, odd one. Sometimes you find that words like ‘sur’ and ‘dans’ apply in ways that you didn’t necessarily remember from French class, but here I think that the phrase is just obscure and odd. This sometimes (or often) happens with Rabearivelo. I’ve tried to translate it in a way which more clearly expresses what I believe is the intended sense while using as much of the original vocabulary as possible in a slightly reordered way.

Stanza 3

Line 3: n.b. that ‘flight of flights’ in French is using two different words, ‘essor’ and ‘vol,’which both mean ‘flight’. ‘Essor’ is just a more literary way of saying ‘flight’ which English doesn’t have an unarcane equivalent of, so I’m forced to repeat myself, but frankly I think it ends up sounding rather good in English here. It’s another situation like we had with ‘trépas,’ basically. You get this with a lot of languages that have many words with varying levels of gildedness to use in different situations, or even a tense like the passé simple in French which is a more cultured, literary past tense. Ancient Hebrew for example has dozens of known words for ‘lion’ which have varying levels of literariness or vulgarity. Hilariously, we know all their dozens of words for lion because lions pop up so often in the Bible and related texts, but even though we have archaeological evidence that they used similar cutlery to use, we don’t know their words for knife, fork, or spoon!—they just never come up in the writings that survive. English sorely lacks these kinds of literary alternatives to its pedestrian words—most of the arcane language in English either sounds pretentious when actually used, or is technical terminology cribbed from Latin, Classical Greek, or Middle French.

Line 4: take another drink for ‘fond’! Here it clearly means ‘depths,’ though. No ambiguity.

19. A RAMILIJAONA/TO RAMILIJAONA

Ramiljaona, 1887-1948, was a Malagasy portrait photographer who likely took the surviving photographs of Rabearivelo. He was rather famous in Madagascar in his time and took the portraits of most of the country’s notables.

Ramiljaona with his camera in 1910, Antananarivo

Stanza 2

Lines 3/4: again, I’ve pulled the trick of switched the sentences two principle clauses around to make it sound cleaner in English. In the original French it reads ‘for whom no more than dust and ashes are the intrigues of our great royal dead and their forgotten age!’ I hope you’ll agree that as I’ve rendered it it’s less clumsy. One other note is that I’ve translated ‘commerce’ as ‘intrigue’—the closest word would probably be something like ‘business’ or ‘goings-on,’ but I like the mystery of ‘intrigue’.

20. A J.-H. RABEKOTO/TO J.-H. RABEKOTO

Rabekoto is a rather common Malagasy name. I wasn’t unfortunately able to find out who this character was. If any readers can ferret the information out, like with G. Henri, I would be very grateful.

Stanza 1

Lines 1-4: the ‘quis’ here get a little obscure in terms of what they’re referring to and are hard to render effectively in English, but I think this is a faithful translation.

Stanza 2

Line 2: ‘postlude’ is also a word in English, but coda is much more common. As I’ve said before, my preferred policy is to take the closest word which doesn’t make the reader double-take or pull out a dictionary.

Stanza 4

Line 3: ‘escarpolette balancée’—so, ‘escarpolette’ is the French for a ‘swing,’ while ‘balancer’ is the verb ‘to swing’. It would be not quite redundant but definitely silly-sounding to say ‘a swinging swing’ here. I chose pendulum because while we lose the vision of a desolate and lonely swing blown by the wind, we do gain by prolonging the metaphor of rhythm, number, and inexorable fate which is contributing to the strength of the persona’s nostalgia. But the reader should note that escarpolette does not in fact mean ‘pendulum’.

Line 4: this is fairly close but ‘de quelle alarme’—‘of what (level of) disquiet/anxiety’ is just folded into a single adjective for practical housekeeping reasons. I think this is a cleaner and better way of rendering the French past participle-by-subject construction—i.e, ‘swung by the wind’ would be literal—than trying to go word-by-word.

21. LEVANT/RISING

Stanza 1

Line 2: Datura is a genus of nightshades which includes the flowering plant better known as Jimsonweed or devil’s trumpets. They have beautiful, delicate-looking conch-shaped flowers but are extremely poisonous and can even kill if ingested in large enough amounts.

Line 3: ‘enchantement’—this is a noun which can either mean something causing joy or delight, or literally an ‘enchantment’. It’s roughly synonymous with ‘ravissement,’ the nominal form of the word ‘ravi’ which gave us a bit of trouble earlier. I’ve gone with delight because the ‘de’ as opposed to e.g. ‘par enchantment’ suggests to me that the meaning intended here is closer to ‘ravissement’ than to English ‘enchantment’. Reasonable minds may differ here.

Line 4: ‘Emyrne’ is a slightly difficult word to translate. It doesn’t have an equivalent outside French except maybe the Malagasy ‘Imerina,’ i.e, the land of the Merina. The Merina are the most numerous and historically politically dominant ethnicity in Madagascar. Imerina, or Emyrne, is the area in the central highlands which has historically been the centre of their society. Antananarivo, the modern capital, is in the east of this region and developed around the historical seat of royal government and spiritual life, the royal hill of Ambohimange. Antananarivo is usually referred to by Rabearivelo as ‘Iarive’. In both cases, although I could translate these as ‘Imerina,’ and ‘Antananarivo,’ I find it better to leave them as they are.

Stanza 2

Line 1: ‘tiède,’ meaning ‘tepid’ has exactly the same figurative connotations of half-heartedness as English. ‘Verdure’ could have been translated as something like ‘foliage,’ but since it’s also a loanword in English I preferred to keep it as is.

Line 2: ‘pesante’ does indeed mean heavy, but also heavy with portent. It’s more like if in English we say something has gravity, or is pregnant/gravid as much as it is saying something has a lot of poids. Additionally, ‘entrave’ means ‘ensnares,’ or ‘hinders,’ ‘stumbles,’ but the partial sense it has of capturing has given it a slang meaning, which is equivalent to English ‘get’ in the sense of comprehension, i.e., ‘I don’t get it’. I don’t know whether ‘entrave’ had this meaning when Rabearivelo was writing, nor whether it’s a usage common in Madagascan dialectical French, but it may be a layer here.

Line 3: no translation comment, just to say what a beautiful image!

Stanza 3

Lines 1/2: minor note—this is another case of Rabearivelo splitting a noun/adjective pair so that one starts and one ends a line. Because of the different way nouns and adjectives are ordered in English and French these are flipped; the French reads literally: ‘and, as if to deliver from a dream/spurious’.

Major note: ‘en-allée’ is an odd word which I’ve seen pop up a few times in French works from around the turn of the century and nowhere else. It pops up in Segalen’s Les Immémoriaux to refer to the movement of a Tahitian ceremonial dance. I had already read this book and seen it pop up there, but this was also mentioned in a WordReference forum that I came across while I was trying to work out how best to translate the word. That forum post linked to an article about how this word was part of a programme to translate Tahitian phrases lexically while retaining the Tahitian grammatical constructions resulting in odd nouns like ‘en-allée’ which are tough to parse in French. In Segalen’s usage, I have to suppose it has to do with a rising and falling motion of the dance, and it sort of directly means ‘in-come’. For this reason I’ve decided to translate it as the adjective ‘tidal’. In other usages, it seems to mean ‘gone away,’ or since it is usually treated as a noun rather than a past participle, ‘something which has gone away,’ but since Segalen’s use is the one which Rabearivelo would probably take the most thematic interest in (that theme being post-colonial matters) I believe that this is likely to be where he got the word from and is using it in the same sense. Translating it as an adjective rather than a noun or past participle is obviously a major change, but I feel that ‘tidal’ best conveys the sense in which I think it’s meant, and fits best in an anglicised construction. I recognise that if indeed the intention behind the term is to be a Tahitian construction which sounds odd in French, this is a touch ironic, but these last couple of stanzas begin to get a bit subclause-y and tough to parse regardless, so I’ve preferred a translation in this case which tries to convey the sense and not the mores of how it’s constructed more than is necessary.

Line 3: ‘flagellée,’ cognate with English ‘flagellation,’ literally ‘flogged,’ ‘whipped,’ something like this—has slightly more figurative suggestion than the English. Basically figuratively he means ‘tortured’.

22. DESERT/DESERT

Stanza 1

Line 1: ‘unie’ usually is closest in meaning to English ‘united’. In this case, since what is being reflected is the ubiquitous self-similarity of the desert, I felt that ‘unified’ was slightly better, though neither is quite satisfactory.

Line 2: take a shot for ‘azur’! Same concerns and caveats as usual; I’ve done a similar thing to how I usually translate Rabearivelo’s use of ‘azur,’ translating it as ‘sky’ and sneaking in the word ‘azure’ elsewhere nearby.

Line 4: ‘vol’ means either ‘flight,’ as in flying in the air, not fleeing, or it means ‘thievery’. Frankly search me on this line—I’m not sure what the intended meaning is; it’s a very odd use of the word ‘vol’. To hedge, I’ve just rendered this translation word-by-word. N.b. also that ‘sillonnés’ can also mean ‘criss-crossed,’ but this I think is an ugly word. Because this word refers to the ‘monts de sable’—sand dunes of the desert, one has to suppose, both translations can make sense, so I simply went for the more poetic word since the meaning is so unclear anyway.

Stanza 2

Line 4: here translated as ‘the lonely’; ‘le seule’ can also mean ‘the sole,’ or ‘the only’.

23. DZORAH

Dzorah seems to be an alternative spelling of Tzorah, which is identified with the biblical town of Zoreah, the birthplace of Samson.

Stanza 1

Lines 1/2: this was a slightly trickier version of the perennial problem we’ve been having with these noun/adjective line splits. Trickier because this adjective ‘long-dead,’ which I believe is the best rendering, is three words in French which occur either side of the comma which ends the line. In this case I’ve chosen to confine the whole phrase to the first line, slightly disregarding Rabearivelo’s intention to enjamb it.

Stanza 2

Lines 2/3: this is very tough for technical reasons. This is a zeugma around the verb ‘faner,’ conjugated as ‘fanerait’. In French this can mean ‘to fade,’ like sunlight might fade, or ‘to wither,’ like a rose would wither, and applies to both nouns—rose and sunshine. This is deliberately ungrammatical but that is the whole point of zeugma/syllepsis, whichever term you prefer. Now, in English there is no single word like ‘faner,’ which means both ‘wither/wilt,’ and ‘fade’ (at least which I’m aware of). I believe the best compromise is fade. The second problem here is that in French the verb ‘faner’ is ergative—meaning that is can be transitive or intransitive—one can ‘faner’ a rose, or a rose can ‘faner’. This is another reason to choose ‘fade’ over ‘wilt,’ for example, as ‘fade’ has more ergativity in English than the alternative translations—I could hold a polaroid near to a flame to fade it—transitive—or I can say that my memories will fade—intransitive. This is all a touch technical, I doubt any reader would have been hung up on this point had I not brought it up, but I find these technical points of translation fascinating, and with the amount of detail I’ve gone into already about some of these translation choices what’s a little more? (Only a very fastidious/completionist reader will ever read all these notes anyway).

Line 4: ‘azuré’ has nothing to do with the word ‘azur’ which has come up a lot already. It means ‘to bleach,’ or ‘whiten’. It is possible that Rabearivelo intended to coin it as a verb—‘to azurise,’ or something, and to have this be associated with the azure sky of Madagascar, who knows? Or maybe it’s a double meaning. Since the bleaching meaning is the typical meaning of this verb, though, and the poem is about retaining the Malagasy identity and the threat of Christianisation/westernisation—might we not think that the bleaching/whitening here is a figurative way of saying Europeanisation? N.b. also that ‘parc,’ which usually means—you guessed it—‘park,’ means in general any public green space. I’ve put ‘field’ as it’s a more poetic noun than ‘park,’ I think.

24. CLAIR DE LUNE/MOONLIGHT

Stanza 1

Line 1: literally ‘With no nightingale except from/of the dreams’—maybe something like ‘With no nightingale except a dream-nightingale’ could have been better, but I didn’t want to give the false impression that the word was repeated in the original.

Line 2: ‘effeuiller’ means to pluck the leaves off a plant, or to flip through the pages of the book. The verb was used earlier in this collection with the latter meaning. In this case I think the plucking meaning is more appropriate, only intended to mean the plucking of feathers rather than leaves.

Stanza 2

Line 1: I’ve had to insert my own punctuation here to clarify the meaning; after translating into English with pronunciation close to the original, which has the question mark at the end of the stanza, I realised it wasn’t clear that all of this is a question, and the first stanza is part of this question too. Hopefully this rendering clarifies that.

Stanza 3:

Lines 2/3: just another case where I’d like to point out that English natural word ordering forces me to switch the starts and ends of a couple of Rabearivelo’s lines. Also that he uses the word ‘pacifique’ to mean peaceful. This is of course ‘pacific’ meaning the same in English but because most people think first of the ocean and aren’t familiar with the word as an adjective in English in any other situations, I’ve preferred ‘peaceful’ to avoid confusion.

Stanza 4

Line 2: the French ‘obscur’ is much like the English ‘obscure,’ in that it can mean arcane, dark, enshadowed, or all these things at once. I’ve gone with ‘dark’ here because I worry that the word ‘obscure’ in English is a little heavy on the ‘arcane’ implication these days rather than the other meanings. I think Rabearivelo mostly means ‘dark’ here, although I don’t like to use a word this threadbare when there is admittedly a much closer word, I think it’s for the best.

25. LYS/LILY

The word ‘lys’ in French, like such English nouns as ‘deer,’ does not change in the plural. I guess that it is LILY and not LILIES because the first stanza addresses itself to a singular ‘toi’.

Stanza 1

Line 4: the French is a little more like ‘O lily that the winds sway,’ but I’ve tried to render it a bit more idiomatically.

Stanza 2

Line 1: ‘gerbe’ can be translated as several words to do with bunches of flowers, the choice is a little harder than with ‘panicule,’ which has an exact English counterpart. I’ve gone with wreath because so far as my experience goes this is the most common meaning intended—you hang a ‘gerbe’ on your door at Christmas, e.g.

Line 3: ‘inouï’ is I think usually best translated as ‘unheard-of,’ but I’ve preferred arcane here as it has roughly the same meaning, but condenses it to a more singular single word than ‘unheard-of,’ if you get my meaning. Of course, inouï is similar to putting un- at the beginning of a word, so perhaps ‘unknown’ is a superior choice. It’s for the birds, as far as I’m concerned.

Line 4: literally ‘until its fall on the grass’.

26. REGARD/GAZE

N.b. that this is ‘gaze in the sense of a gaze, but without the article—NOT the imperative—that would be ‘regardes’—2^nd person singular informal, ‘regardez’—2^nd person formal/plural, or ‘regardons’—1^st person plural (‘let us gaze’). You could also more simply translate this as ‘look,’ but I’ve preferred the more poetic alternative. Besides, we often talk in lit crit about the colonial/postcolonial gaze. Me personally, I’m sick to the teeth of reading criticism in that genre (it’s just all-consuming), but if such an implication is appropriate anywhere it’s in Rabearivelo!

Stanza 1

Line 1: ‘sans retour’ means ‘without return’; I’ve had to make this an adverb to get the sense across idiomatically. ‘Against’ is chosen here as the translation of ‘sur’ in order to fit with the verb ‘fermer’ in the next line.

Stanza 2

Lines 2-4: the pronoun ‘it’ is not the only possibility, however remote the others are. I picked it because it seems that ‘this one,’ ‘Celui-ci,’ is most like the answer to the question of which world? N.b. though that if I’m wrong there is nothing grammatically to suggest that this couldn’t be ‘he’ or ‘she’ rather than ‘it.

Stanza 3

Lines 2-4: same goes here for the choice of ‘it’ as in the previous stanza.

Stanza 4

Line 2: ‘together’ is an alternative here to ‘at the same time,’ which would be more literal but is not preferred for brevity.

27. HORLOGE/CLOCK

Stanza 1

Line 2: ‘ténébreuses,’ like ‘obscure,’ is another word that can be translated in several ways of which I’ve chosen a slightly pedestrian one even though there exists an English equivalent: ‘tenebrous’. My sense of the French usage is that like the English is means ‘dark,’ or ‘shadowy’.—I’m just going here by the principle of why say utilise when you can say use?

Line 4: ‘tu les marques’ just means ‘you mark them,’ it isn’t grammatically an unambiguous imperative, it may just be an indicative, but my sense of it is that it is somewhat imperative so I’ve translated it as such. This is also another case where I want to grab Rabearivelo’s shoulders and shake because this comma really should be a semicolon. By rendering this in the imperative I think I’m giving it some of the strength at the ending which a semicolon would, which helps my conscience here.

Stanza 2

Lines 1/2: it probably wouldn’t hurt these notes if I stopped pointing it out every time we’ve reversed one of Rabearivelo’s noun/adjective enjambments, but if you should start as you mean to go on then you should probably go on as you started, too.

Line 4: tough one here. Literally ‘at the time when your presence forgets itself a little bit’. I think my translation captures the intended meaning best as is possible, but this is certainly a line which I would be very willing to go back and reconsider.

Stanza 3

Line 2: literally ‘which ignores itself deep within us...’ but this English rendering is better, as ‘ignore’ does not any longer have quite the same sense as ‘ignorant’ in English. Both words have drifted quite a lot semantically. ‘Unaware’ may be better here than ignorant, in fact.

Stanza 4

Line 1: ‘parer’ can mean ‘to shield oneself,’ in fact more often (anecdotally) means this than it means ‘to adorn,’ but I think that the latter is a better interpretation here. As should be more than clear by now, Rabearivelo loves words with double meanings. Unfortunately such a word in unavailable to us here in English. (Or maybe I just don’t know the right word—open to suggestions).

28. SEPT QUATRAINS/SEVEN QUATRAINS

à Fernand Mazade.

Fernand Mazade (1861-1939) was a French Symbolist poet. Given his own predilections, we would very much expect Rabearivelo to be much more fond of him than others he has addressed himself to in this collection!

Mazade is also well-known as a translator of Ukrainian poetry, especially Shevchenko. The reason I’ve heard of him is that since the Russo-Ukrainian War began his collections of translations have become quite popular again in France.

I personally haven’t read any of Mazade’s work, only about it, but also it should be said that he was at least as much a scholar of poetry as a poet himself, and probably just as well known in his time for his academic work in literary criticism, translations, and on the history of French and Ukrainian poetry.

TENTATION/TEMPTATION

Line 1: ‘Belle d’une beauté...’—literally ‘beautiful of a beauty’—I really don’t get this construction. I’ve never seen another similar arrangement elsewhere in French; I really don’t know what to make of it, but I suspect that my translation is probably a good stab at it.

Also ‘sombre,’ like these other words ‘obscur’ and ‘ténébreux’ has a constellation of different equivalents in English which include the cognates of the other words, plus anything to do with shadows, darkness, obscurity, sombreness and so on. In this case because it is ‘sombre as the night,’ I think the sense is darkness—‘dark as the night’.

Line 2: again, ‘front’ could be any of the following: ‘forehead,’ ‘brow,’ ‘face,’ or ‘countenance’. In each case where this word comes up, I’m picking whichever seems to fit best to me, but others may prefer the alternatives in any given case.

Line 3: ‘effeuiller’ comes up again—this word has been discussed, it can mean plucking the leaves from a plant, or flicking through the pages of a book. More uncommonly, it can mean ‘to strip’; I’ve gone with this meaning here based on context—how can you flick through the pages of a bare breast?

Line 4: ‘poitrine nue’ could be translated I suppose as ‘bare chest,’ but that puts me in mind of geezers at a football match so I’ve gone with this alternative.

ROSSIGNOL DE MON CŒUR…/ NIGHTINGALE OF MY HEART...

Line 1: ‘attardé’ is a word you would rarely see in a French poem now for good reason. It is the past participle of the French for ‘to delay,’ and means ‘retarded’. It is just as pejorative in French as its English equivalent. As a past participle in a literary context it can also (I was unaware of this and had to look into it) mean ‘lingered’ in a sort of transitive sense—kind of like ‘left behind’. This is the best explanation I can give of the translation here; it’s an odd sentence.

Line 2: English does not have a passé simple, which is French’s more formal, literary past tense. Rabearivelo is notable for usually using other less formal expressions of the past tense, so I’d like to underline that ‘lifted’ is in the passé simple here, and sounds very literary.

Line 3: ‘azur’ again. You know the drill.

Line 4: ‘rutile’ usually means the shine of a gemstone—I don’t believe that I’ve seen it compounded with a liquid metaphor. Because of this, I’ve gone for ‘glistening’ rather than ‘shining’ or ‘glowing’.

OFFRANDE ILLUSOIRE/ILLUSORY OFFERING

‘Illusoire’ usually would be used to refer to an illusion in the sense of a mirage, rather than a falsehood intended to deceive, but here I do think that the offering is ‘illusory’ in the sense of being delusive, deceptive, like a Trojan horse, rather than being an illusion. It seems obvious but it’s usually worth noting these things however minor.

Line 3/4: just a quick note that we have another case here where a word order change has landed a couple of words on different sides of Rabearivelo’s enjambment than in the original.

VENT/WIND

Line 1: an ‘amphora’ is a kind of Greek jar. Based on this and many of his references and word choices I really do believe that Rabearivelo was familiar with Keats, but that’s just my suspicion. Maybe some of this is just natural convergence of very young male poets.

Line 2: the verb ‘parer’ comes up again, and again I think ‘adorn’ is the correct sense here.

Line 3: Aurore, Greek Eos, is the Roman god of the dawn. I could have written ‘Dawn,’ but I prefer to preserve the classical references.

ANGOISSE DU DEPART/THE ANGUISH OF DEPARTURE

Rabearivelo has another collection based on a similar set of themes, Chants pour Abéone, after the Roman goddess of departure and loss Abeona. Apparently it was originally titled Les Poèmes du départ et du regret.

AUTOMNE AUSTRAL/AUSTRAL AUTUMN

That is, austral in the sense of southern, like the aurora australis. Australia isn’t called that for nothing, you know?

Line 1: Often in French when multiple subjects possess multiple things—each snowdrop has a crown, the thing possessed is singular in French. This is just a quirk of the language, the sense is definitely ‘crowns,’ not a single, shared ‘crown’.

Line 4: another toss-up of which sense is ‘front’ meant in.

HERPES/FLOTSAM

Line 4: literally ‘while they were playing the game of buccaneering’.

29. ARBRES/TREES

AUX ARBRES

N.b. that this might (emphasis on might) be a play-on of one of the famous lines of the French national anthem—Aux armes, citoyens!—To arms, citizens! (i.e., arm yourselves/take up arms). I’ve actually seen this same wordplay done before in a French environmentalist advert when I was quite young, back when environmentalist adverts were a lot more twee (remember reduce, reuse, recycle?) and friendly rather than the new breed which are a lot more threatening and portentous.

Stanza 1

Line 2: ‘oublieuse’ can mean ‘oblivious’ as well as ‘forgetful’; I think the latter is much more appropriate here. Note also, because I think I haven’t thought to mention this before, throughout this translation I have translated French ‘race’ as English ‘race,’ rather than the softer-sounding ‘people’. This is partly because there is a French word ‘peuple’ for that which Rabearivelo never uses, and also to try to be faithful to the strong racial, nationalistic feeling which Rabearivelo has—his chief artistic goal was to poetically represent the Malagasy people in the wake of colonisation, and one of his chief internal dissonances which his poems often wrestle with is that in order to be published, and out of his genuine love for French literature, he often found himself doing so in French rather than Malagasy.

Line 3: ‘zone’ obviously is closest to English ‘zone’ rather than ‘place,’ but it’s taken on a sci-fi sound I feel since Rabearivelo’s time, maybe just because of the ‘z’. It makes me think of pre-fab structures and industrial zones, and these implications should obviously be kept well away from this poem.

Line 4: ‘ranimer’ would be most closesly translated as ‘to reanimate,’ but again, as much as I like Re-Animator, this would have brought in some odd and I think inappropriate implications. ‘Revives’ would also be very possible, maybe better, even.

Stanza 2

Line 2: I have been variously translating ‘aïeux’ as ‘ancestors’ or ‘predecessors’. These are I’m aware not interchangeable, but I’ve been changing it up because I have the sense that if I exclusively used ‘ancestors’ I would stray into applying the kind of earnestly misguided mystique that you often get in the X-Files episodes involving American Indians, whereas if I went with predecessors exclusively, there would be none of that sense which would be equally as wrong.

Stanza 3

Line 1: ‘anéantir,’ if you parse that word, as you can see, means something like ‘to bring to nothing’. Although probably most people would translate this as destroy, in fact I’m sure I’ve seen it translated as such before (although I can’t quite remember where), I think annihilate is a better equivalent, although there does exist a French verb ‘annihiler’.

Line 2: search me what he means by ‘ship of your boughs’. ‘Ramures’ can also mean ‘branches,’ but I find ‘boughs’ more poetic. Because I’m not quite sure what’s being gotten at here, I can’t rule out the other meaning of ‘ramures,’ which is ‘antlers’.

Line 3: I’ve decided here not to translate the word ‘quelles,’ meaning ‘what,’ because it doesn’t go idiomatically into the English rendering. N.b. also that ‘pulpe’ means ‘pulp,’ which could be pulped fruit or wood or whatever, but because we are talking here about branches laden with fruit (I think; maybe it’s antlers laden with woodpulp!) it probably means ‘flesh,’ as in fruit flesh—e.g. the flesh of a peach (the French for animal flesh would be ‘chair’)—so in order to avoid putting ‘fruit-flesh,’ which is clumsy, or ‘flesh,’ which would not be clearly referring to fruit, I’ve just put fruit. You could also put ‘the flesh of fruits,’ I suppose.

Line 4: I’m not aware of a one-word English equivalent of ‘reverdir’; if one exists it would probably be a better fit here.

Stanza 4

Line 2: the first ‘son’ refers to the silence; the second to the shadows (presumably). Since the attribution is no clearer in the French, I decided not to arrange it to make it clear and change the construction too much.

Lines 3/4: I could have added a ‘so’ here to make it a little clearer, but the sense is clearer if you significantly change the word order as I did (although I’m usually unwilling to do this) something like: ‘everything will incite me so that to your green mysteries/I offer ardent, sad and funereal songs!’ might, and I stress might, have been an alternative. The choice of where to put the line break was largely arbitrary and came down to keeping whole the same clauses which are in the original, without splitting them down the middle, even though they are given in a different order.

Stanza 5

Line 1: I generally don’t like the English usage of ‘for’ to mean ‘because’; this is one case where I would’ve used it if not for the ‘for’ later in the line.

Line 3: I regret that I had to go with ‘adorn’ here because we’ve already translated a different French verb this way. I had to look up the verb here ‘ceindre’ (odd verb—conjugates like ‘craindre’)—it means ‘to put on’ or ‘surround,’ or ‘don’. I went with adorn because we need a transitive equivalent here.

Line 4: double whammy! Two shots for ‘front’ and ‘azur’ in the same line! The word blue also appears in the original, ‘azur bleu,’ so I’ve gone with the precedent I set earlier when it was ‘sky of purple azure’ and translated as ‘sky of azure blue, adding a word in order to keep all words in the original and be clear that we’re referring to the sky.

30. AVIAVY

Editor’s note from the French text: Figuier (Ficus...), symbole de noblesse—‘Figtree (Ficus...), symbol of nobility’.

Stanza 1

Line 3: ‘qui furent les flambeaux’ literally means ‘who are the torches’; I went with ‘torchbearers’ because it seemed like the more likely intention. This may be an overreach.

Line 4: ‘finissant’ could have been translated as ‘dying,’ but ‘expiring’ is obviously closer to the meaning of the word, and although I don’t quite feel it here I suppose that the intended sense is something like the clinical feeling which ‘expiring’ has in English.

Stanza 2

Line 2: just another ‘front’-based margin call. ‘Face’ chosen here, largely in this case on a hunch.

31. ZAHANA

Editor’s note from the French text: Un des quatre Phyllarthron présents dans l’île.—‘One of the four [species of] Phyllarthron present on the island [of Madagascar].’

Phyllarthron is a species of flowering plant native to Madagascar and Comoror. They have white or purple trumpet-shaped flowers not totally unlike datura (Jimsonweed), although much larger. Unlike datura, though, they open outwards at the rim of the trumpet more into a wrinkled set of fans, which have some of the yonic suggestion of an orchid. The stamens are pronounced and similar to those of a lily, and the speckling and streaks within the flowercup are suggestive of lilies too.

Stanza 1

Line 4: ‘de nos sentes’ means literally ‘of our paths,’ but I think the given rendering is more sensible.

Stanza 2

Line 2: ‘jutent’ is the third person plural indicative of ‘juter,’ which is indeed the French for ‘to cum,’ ‘to ejaculate,’ and all these words’ many synonyms. It is just as vulgar as the English. In other cases in this translation where the word has a secondary vulgar meaning, as many French words do, I’ve been content to simply point it out in my notes and let the implication/double meaning hang. Here I really do have no option except to translate it as ‘ejaculate,’ which is probably the least vulgar word for the meaning here. There is a second reason; in English an ejaculation can also be an outburst, of speech for example, and this is the metaphorical sense which Rabearivelo was going for. I did consider using a word like ‘burst,’ or ‘spray,’ but it just felt cheap.

Stanza 3

Line 1: alternatively, ‘exiled from the places where we were born’ would be reasonable to be more idiomatic. I thought the literal word-by-word was idiomatic enough that it wasn’t word overhauling the language too much.

Line 2: ‘jets,’ which I have translated as ‘spurts,’ has no intrinsic vulgarity as far as I know, although in this context some is given to it. The fact that this word can also mean a burst or a spray might argue for a less vulgar translation of ‘juter’ earlier, but I really do think that Rabearivelo intended some nontrivial level of vulgarity and explicit sexuality here—he’s had enough of equivocating with references to ripe figs by now, I think!

Stanza 4

Line 1: pick a ‘front’ translation, any ‘front’ translation!

Line 3: i.e., ‘your defeat is like a sister to the defeat of my race!’

32. HASINA

Editor’s note from the French text: Dragonnier (Dracaena augustifolia).—‘Dragontree (Dracaena augustifolia).

I looked a little into this and it’s slightly incorrect. There is indeed a Madagascan dragon tree, but it is not Draccaena augustifolia—easy mistake to make but the latter is a tropical Asian shrub which looks kind of like a bush/shrub version of the Madagascan dragon tree, but the ‘dragonnier’/dragon tree of Madagascar is in fact Dracaena marginata Lam. Hasina is the Malagasy name for this ‘dragonnier,’ this dragon tree.

Stanza 1

Line 1: ‘fiancer,’ which is the verb from which ‘fiançons’ comes, is also the origin of the English ‘fiancé,’ literally ‘betrothed’. I felt that ‘join together’ was better because it makes clearer that there are two elements being joined—this is a weaving together of two destinies using a metaphor of marriage or betrothal—the poem is an appeal to a lover.

Line 2: ‘azur,’ drink drink drink!

Stanza 2

Lines 1-3: I’ve added in the initial ‘neither’ to make that this is a ‘neither...nor’ list clearer in the English. In line 2 specifically ‘les ramiers,’ or ‘wood pigeons’ are the wild pigeons which anyone who has been to the intertropical latitudes has seen. They are coloured a bit differently than the ones we get at the kind of latitude where I live (London); this word in French can also refer to collared doves, which would’ve been nicer for the betrothal metaphor but is a much less common meaning and obviously wood pigeons are a fixture in Madagascar; I can’t be sure of the same for collared doves. The word ‘touffe’ pops up again here, not necessarily referring to vegetation this time. There is a sly suggestion here as mentioned before—‘touffe’ is often used to mean a bush, in the sense of female pubic hair. It always strikes me that even though both are Germanic languages English usually has the harsher-sounding vulgarities.

Stanza 3

Line 1: I’m unsure whether I’ve mentioned this in any of the biographical tidbits I’ve been giving about Rabearivelo, but he was born into one of the many noble Merina families which was dispossessed after French colonisation (égalité for thee but not for me!—liberté the opposite of course!). ‘Abolie’ of course literally means ‘abolished,’ but of course contextually here the sense is more like ‘bygone’.

Line 2: by ‘my dead’ here of course Rabearivelo means something that might be better conveyed in English as ‘my ancestors’. Because such phrases as ‘our glorious dead’ are common in English I haven’t felt the need to change this.

Stanza 4

Line 1: the ‘palm tree’ here is of course the hasina, the dragon tree which the note mentions. I considered putting ‘dragon tree’ but the fact is that ‘palmier’ means ‘palm tree’; ‘dragonnier’ means ‘dragon tree,’ so I’ve rendered it as ‘palm tree’. This is another decision which I could definitely be talked into reversing.

Line 2: again, I decided to translate ‘ceindre’ as ‘adorn’ because it’s the only good transitive option. Literally, though, it would be ‘to have our foreheads adorned with our most beautiful flowers’. This is a minor change to be more idiomatic.

33. BOUGAINVILLEA

Editor’s note from the French text: Liane originaire du Brésil (Commerson, voyage avec Bougainville).—‘Liana originating from Brazil (Commerson, voyage with Bougainville).’

Yes so ‘liana’ is an umbrella term for a large number of vines. Bougainvillea is one of these vine-bushes which is one of the four o’clock flowers—lovely name. I knew none of this before looking into it. When first reading through before I looked into all this, although I could tell contextually reading the poem and with the poems before and after that Bougainvillea must be a flower, I was a little confused because I’d only heard of it as one of the islands in New Guinea, and also Mark Leyner’s The Tetherballs of Bougainville.

N.b. also that the French edition I am working from reproduces a slip in Rabearivelo’s manuscript where in line 2 he writes ‘bongainville’; I’ve done the same in the French as a cute artifact but not carried it over into the English.

Stanza 1

Line 1: another ‘azur’! This one is a little trickier because Rabearivelo is doing the thing we mentioned earlier which is more commonly seen in English of putting nouns next to each other to produce a compound meaning (both languages get this from their Germanic roots; it’s rarer in French)—the example I gave earlier was Fallour Survival Shelter; you could also think of, say, ‘fire blanket’—these would likely come with some a ‘de’ or a ‘pour’ in French. Additionally, he’s put  a word in between ‘azur’ and ‘livrée’ which can be a noun or an adjective!—‘bleu’. This is a little bit of a conundrum when you come to stick on one of the many options to translate this, but I think it’s best to render this as some kind of possessive phrase in English which is overall nominal—I’ve gone for ‘the azure-blue sky’s livery’; maybe ‘the livery of the azure blue sky’ sounds a bit less crammed, but I worry that it’s overlong when it’s trying to do the job of three words in French (although the difference is only two very wee words).

Line 2: in the French manuscript (I checked) and the edition I’m mostly working from, it says ‘bongainville’. I’ve presumed that Rabearivelo meant ‘bougainvillea,’ and I think this is reasonable.

Line 4: ‘empourprée’—what a lovely verb, not used often enough in English. Just a note to say that this is another ergative verb, and context doesn’t make clear whether the flora is empurpling or being empurpled.

Stanza 2

Line 1: ‘résister au temps’ literally means ‘to resist time,’ but I’ve given the idiomatic translation. This is the equivalent saying in French so I think this is fair (although the French increasingly use French lexical translations of English phrases and this particular saying is one victim of that trend). Later in the line I’ve added a neither; Rabearivelo is in the habit of leaving out the first ‘ni’ in his ‘ni...ni...’ phrases (i.e. neither...nor...) and in English it isn’t clear that this is what is meant without the initial ‘neither’.

Line 2: the plural ‘soleils’ is usually equivalent to the English continuous noun ‘sunlight,’ and should only be translate as ‘suns’ if context suggests it strongly.

Stanza 3

Line 1: another toss-up of how to translate ‘sombre’. I’ve gone for the straight-shooting choice here as it seems to be more expressive a kind of austere grief than darkness. This also keeps the sibilance.

Line 2: similar to previous note; ‘austral’ chosen over southerly to be a direct translation and keep the alliteration because I don’t think these successive lines with the two-word alliterations are entirely a sonic accident.

Line 3: we are more used to seeing ‘rekindle’ in English but this is not implied by ‘aviver’. Although the subject matter of the poem might suggest that ‘rekindle’ would be more appropriate, it simply isn’t the word he chose.

Stanza 4

Line 2: ‘génie’ is also the noun meaning a ‘genie,’ can also mean ‘spirit’ in general. Good question which is meant here—I’ve gone for genius because I can’t imagine that it means a specific magical being.

34. MANGUIER/MANGO TREE

Editor’s note from the French text: Manga (Mangifera indica).—Don’t really see a need to translate this one; a ‘manguier’ is a mango tree.

Stanza 2

Line 1: ‘éphémère’ is of course best translated as ‘ephemeral’ usually, but I think that here there is a better argument for ‘fleeting,’ which we would more often see associated with ‘passer-by’ and doesn’t have the implication of nebulousness, or spiritual or electrical phenomena which ephemeral has (at least for me). (Come to think of it, it might be that I just feel that way because it sounds like ‘phenomenon,’ sharing part of its Greek root.)

Line 2: the ‘royal mountain’ here is Ambohimanga, which I believe I’ve mentioned before in this translation (this has taken me a damned long time and it’s damned long; I forget exactly what’s in it); Ambohimanga is the historical seat of the precolonial Merina kings and queens of Madagascar.

Line 3: I could have said ‘floral,’ I suppose, which is more common in English, but ‘vegetal’ is frankly a word which needs to make a comeback! and ‘floral’ implies flowers, which meaning isn’t explicitly obtained by ‘vegetal’.

Line 4: word-by-word it’s ‘that opens to the evening your heart,’ could easily be misconstrued as ‘that opens the evening to your heart’. I’ve changed the word order to clarify this.

Stanza 3

Line 2: ‘attraits’ literally means ‘attractions,’ but I wanted to have some implication of magic in here, and I think that ‘attractions’ makes it sound like a set of curios or zoo exhibits, whereas the sense of ‘attrait’ which I think is more applicable, especially in context of the other Rabearivelo poems we’ve encountered, is the sense of ‘feminine charm’.

35. ORANGER/ORANGE TREE

Stanza 1

Line 2: another occasion where I’ve preferred to translate ‘zones’ as ‘places’ rather than ‘zones’ for the same reasons of not wanting any sci-fi or industrial words. I think a good policy in general with Rabearivelo is to select the most pastoral synonym.

Line 3: ‘source’ of course means ‘source,’ but so does that English word originally mean a natural spring. I think that ‘spring’ is best here following the policy of picking the most pastoral word. ‘Source code’ has nothing to do with this poem!

Line 4: the word ‘jet’ appears again here which popped up earlier alongside ‘juter’. Again, we should probably read a somewhat sexual imagery into this. Literally the whole line means ‘and of which the sweet spray for our thirst gushes,’ I’ve added ‘to slake’ to make the meaning clear and let it be a slightly more idiomatic construction in English. ‘Assuage’ equally plausible here.

Stanza 2

Line 1: ‘autant’ means ‘so much’; I’ve changed this for ‘likewise’ which is a rarer meaning which can be implied by the same word. I hope that the rest of the stanza is a good argument for why this is better given this comparative listing structure, which would not be well signalled by the ‘so much’ translation.

Stanza 3

Line 2: the Eclogues are Virgil’s pastoral poems. They often deal with a theme of stolen homeland. Good vindication of my choice to pick the most pastoral words!

Line 3: this is ‘august’ in the sense of ‘austere,’ ‘glorious,’ ‘heroic,’ not the month. For French readers that is ‘glorieux’ as opposed to mid-Thermidor to mid-Fructidor.

Stanza 4

Line 1: a ‘vocable’ is a root word, or originating term. Like e.g. the trigrammaton (I think that’s the word; fact-check me) word roots in Hebrew. Here I didn’t really have an unclumsy one-word solution which captures this meaning without transmuting it a bit. I went with ‘patronymic’ because by this we still mean a name, a name that is original and ancient, and we bring in the classic Rabearivelo theme of ancestry. Patronymic chosen over matronymic not at all arbitrarily—without making any moral judgement on the fact it is the usual presumption, and more to the point whenever Rabearivelo refers to ancestors he says aïeux, meaning ‘forefathers’; there is no French word aïeuses.

‘Jusqu’à la nuit’ means ‘up to the night’; I think that the sense of up to the border of the night is best expressed by slightly altering it to ‘nightfall’.

Line 2: it’s nice to be able to translate ‘fiançer’ literally for once!

36. LILAS/LILACS

Plural presumed here; no article present to differentiate and the French for lilac does not change between singular and plural like e.g. English ‘deer’.

Stanza 1

Line 1: ‘printanière’ means ‘of or relating to Spring’. There is a word for this in English: ‘vernal,’ but I don’t want any nontrivial proportion of readers to be having to check dictionaries when reading these translations if I can avoid it. Besides a ‘vernal announcement’ is more ambiguous—it could e.g. mean an announcement made in Spring. By the way, I generally prefer to capitalise the names of seasons; others don’t. This is purely personal and has nothing to do with the source text; names of seasons are not capitalised in French.

Stanza 2

Line 1: a classic French ambiguity here—this could mean ‘pink blue,’ (a nice sunset-y, slightly oxymoronic colour is what I picture), or a ‘blue rose’. Since the subject is twilight I think that the compound colour is much more likely.

Line 4: ‘retenir’ can be understood many ways. This I think (‘take hold’) is the most natural here.

Stanza 3

Line 3: again we have this weird word ‘en-allés’! This gives me pause because it seems to be less in the Segalen back-and-forth sense of the Tahitian dance, which was translated as ‘tidal’ earlier, and more in the other sense I’ve come across, ‘gone away’—i.e., a dear departed friend as we might say in English. What occurred to me is the way Nietzsche uses untergang initially in Also Sprach Zarathustra—‘undergoing’/’going under’ as a metaphor for death, before he transmutes its meaning into an undergoing in order to effect an overcoming! It’s obviously my interpretation but given Rabearivelo’s perennial interest in overcoming and reversing the ‘going under’ of his culture, I think that this little intertextual thought may actually be quite helpful.

Stanza 4

Line 1: I think ‘seule’ here is showing us its third meaning in French apart from ‘lonely’ and ‘only’/’sole,’ which is ‘very’ in the sense of ‘the very idea’. Like elsewhere, reasonable minds may differ.

Line 2: I really do think that ‘emerges’ is the best translation of ‘surgit,’ but it’s difficult to carry over the implication in French of a sudden emergence, a surging forth.

37. GRENADIER/POMEGRANATE TREE

Editor’s note from the French text: Punica granatum, originaire du Moyen-Orient, introduit à Grenade.—‘Punica granatum, originating in the Middle East, introduced to Grenada.’

A Grenadier is a pomegranate tree. Grenade is the French for a pomegranate.

Stanza 1

Line 1: unlike ‘Emyrne,’ I’ve decided to replace the ‘e’ at the end of the French word with the ‘a’ which is usually a good guess when translating these kinds of proper nouns into English. This is because ‘Imerina’ is a known and circumscribe word in English to me. N.b. also that ‘of Imerina’ is my heuristic for an adjective which doesn’t exist in English: ‘imérinienne,’ i.e., ‘of or relating to Imerina’.

Line 2: ‘sultanes’ can also mean ‘sultanas’. You can bet your socks it doesn’t but, you know, nota bene as I keep saying (or maybe nota male).

Line 3: ‘drunk on the moon’ sounds a little odd at first to an English reader. We seem to have kind of lost this metaphor in English but the moon has usually been associated with madness, hence ‘lunacy’. Also important to note (resisting the urge after writing the previous comment self-made me self-conscious about continuously saying n.b.)  that madness does not have the same connotations everywhere as in the anglophone world; in most places and most times through history the mad have been considered to be fey—divinely inspired. Also ‘plane trees’ are a thing, this isn’t another nominal juxtaposition like ‘fire blanket’ or ‘Fallout Survival Shelter’ (seriously read A Canticle for Leibowitz, it’s great).

Line 4: ‘seuil’ is translated as ‘threshold’ usually, I just preferred ‘brink’ because it associates more easily with ‘sea’ in my mind. The alternative has no real issue this is just a personal hangup.

Stanza 2

Line 4: comma added for clarity. ‘Diminished’ loses a bit of the sense of ‘étriquée,’ which as you can probably hear even if you have no French (it’s nicely onomatopoeic), usually means something like ‘restricted’. I preferred ‘diminished’ because it better suggests prevention of growth. Come to think of it maybe it doesn’t and maybe more implies a reversal of the same. I could probably be easily moved on this one do comment any disagreement. This one may just have been a whim.

Stanza 3

Line 2: ‘maint’ directly means ‘manifold,’ but when used negatively it’s best translated as ‘any’—similar to how in English we would say ‘there are manifold things,’ but contrarily instead of saying ‘there aren’t manifold things’ we would certainly say ‘there aren’t any things’.

Line 3: this line is another odd one which I don’t know what to make of semantically, really. The translation given is basically lexical.

Stanza 4

Line 4: ‘quel’ usually signposts a question and means ‘what’ or ‘which’. I don’t see how that could be the sense here so have preferred the rarer meaning of simply ‘that’.

38. FILAO

Editor’s note from the French text: Casuarina equisetifolia, originaire d’Australie.—‘Casuarina equisetifolia, originally from Australia.’

Usually in English Casuarina equisetifolia is called beach she-oak or a whistling tree, although I don’t believe it’s actually related to the oak tree. My botany is about as good as my Martian, though.

Stanza 1

Lines 3/4: I assume by this he means does the soil have whatever element is necessary for the ‘slenderness’ of the colonisers. That is, that is what I assume he means grammatically. Semantically—search me.

Stanza 3

Line 2: ‘rejets’ generally means ‘rejections,’ ‘emissions,’ or sometimes ‘throws,’ but here I think it is intended in the botanical sense of offshoots.

Line 3: I was tempted to translate ‘reposoir’ as ‘hermitage’ but I managed to restrain myself, aren’t you glad?

39. LAURIER/LAUREL TREE

No editor’s note on this one. Laurel wreaths have of course been used since forever to crown kings and queens in the absence of precious metals or to adorn sportspeople and great achievers and so on. If you’re not familiar with them though like I wasn’t have a look at their pink, white and purple flowers. By the way laurel and bay are the same thing, as in the bay leaves used in cooking.

Stanza 1

Line 1: ‘séculaire’ can mean ‘secular’ as you might expect, but I think much more likely here is the second meaning, which is ‘ancient,’ or ‘age-old’.

Line 2: ‘verdissaient,’ from ‘verdir,’ is a French verb which I suspect may have come up already but can’t remember—it means ‘to turn green,’ like it can be a metaphor when someone is jealous, but also botanically refers to when a plant grows out healthy looking green growths, or when a brown lawn starts to go green again at the tail end of summer when things call down.

Line 3: this has come up again I think, but a ‘thyrse’ can been a bunch of flowers, like a panicle, but in botany refers to when flowering plants have a central stem which you get these growths from diagonal to the vertical which split into the flowering stems in a kind of fractal way but just to a limited iteration. There’s no way that gives a clear picture but I found this nice diagram online (and in French, no less!):

Thanks aquaportal.com! (Domain name is for sale if you’re interested).

Stanza 2

Line 2: like in English, ‘empreinte,’ meaning ‘imprint,’ also has the implication in English not only of an impression made but also of a critical imprimatur.

Line 3: ‘souille’ could also be translated as ‘stains’ or ‘soils’; I went for the closest-sounding. Also another instance where I’ve gone for ‘essence’ as a translation of ‘entité’ instead of just ‘entity,’ which I don’t think really carries the intended meaning Rabearivelo is investing in this particular word throughout the collection.

Line 4: again, I think that ‘flambeaux’—‘torches’ is meant by Rabearivelo as a metonym for ‘torchbearers’ again like when it popped up before.

Stanza 3

Line 3: ‘front’!

Stanza 4

Line 3: ‘venir de + infinitive’ usually means ‘just finished [verbing]’—here it’s probably taking a longer view as you sometimes can with this construction and have it mean ‘used to [verb]’.

40. AMONTANA

Editor’s note from the French text: Figuier symbole de royauté (cf. rova), Ficus baronii, voir aviavy, note 6.—‘Figurative symbol of royalty (cf. roya), Ficus baronii, see aviavy, note 6.’—In this translation note 6 is just the commentary on poem 6, instead this is referring to the note on the poem AVIAVY earlier about a fig tree.

But yes, amontana seems to refer to a set of very old, large grandfather fig trees which grow among other places around Ambohimanga.

Stanza 1

Line 1: ‘à peine’ is literally ‘at pains’; means the same as in English. I think ‘barely’ here is better in English idiomatically.

Line 2: ‘front’!

Line 4: ‘jours noirs’—we have the saying ‘dark days’ in English which might have been preferred but noir is most literally black and introducing an alliteration which isn’t in the original unnecessarily is generally not a great idea.

Stanza 3

Line 3: this says literally ‘desolate tomb of being alone among the landscape,’ but I think this is a word order oddity and benefits from reordering to be more idiomatic.

Stanza 4

Line 2: ‘mânes’ means ‘ancestor spirits’; there are other more generic words for ghosts and spirits and so on. I just put ‘spirits’ anyway because ‘ages gone by’ gives it the right sense I think and the line would have had a few too many syllables with ‘ancestor’ in there too. Also note ‘gone by’ is from ‘révolus’—‘revolved,’ literally. This is where we get the English term for revolution as a political overthrowing—it’s a loaned metaphor from French to do with the wheel of History turning.

41. AU SOLEIL ESTIVAL (FRAGMENT)/TO THE SUMMER SUN (FRAGMENT)

pour Charles Maurras

I’ll just give some brief notes on Charles Maurras; he’s too big a topic to cover in any great detail here. If you haven’t come across him before I do recommend you look into him if you have any interest at all in politics, since France’s revolutions and counter-revolutions are more or less a microcosm for all of post-feudal politics internationally. Maurras was a counter-revolutionary French philosopher who was in favour of a revival of the French monarchy. I’d say that Evola would be a good analogy for his views. He remains quite controversial (much like Evola), or Carl Schmitt as one of these 20^th-century political philosophers who cannot really be ignored in any circumspect political education but whose association with certain regimes of the 20^th-century swallows up quite a lot of discussion of his ideas which would otherwise be productive. (The Jonas Dryasdusts in history and political science departments out there like to write about these types’ political affiliations and ‘write about it and about it,’ compiling their ‘torpedo histories’ instead of actually discussing the ideas at hand.)

He was in favour of a revival of the monarchy in the Orléans lineage. Critical to note that he was not a Bonapartist—Bonaparte was more or less a Republican emperor, so far as that oxymoron makes sense—who was very much an internationalist and wanted to do typically Republican things like have a single, base-10 system of weights and measures across Europe and who rose to prominence as a Republican general. (Look up the French Republican calendar; it’s fascinating.) Maurras was an old-school conservative, very into the spiritual side of things (like Evola)—he was more Carlylean than Burkeian (who, incidentally, predicted the rise of Napoleon in 1790 in Reflections on the Revolution in France—[paraphrasing from memory] ‘some popular general will arise and become master of your whole Republic’), if that makes sense. The controversy around Maurras comes mostly from his anti-semitic beliefs and his association with Pétain’s Vichy Regime.

One of the reasons why it’s fallen to some schmuck recent graduate like me to translate Rabearivelo into English, even though he pops up in Senghor’s Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache de langue française, and even though this kind of postcolonial stuff has been the most fashionable and profitable seam to mine in the academy as far as the humanities go since the seventies, even though ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ is I think now the most-cited academic work of the last century and every undergraduate doing something less STEM-y than CompSci is required to read it and The Wretched of the Earth and Orientalism and probably some Bhabha for good measure (the lit crit guy, not the nuclear physicist)—even despite all this the only English translations of Rabearivelo are Leonard Fox’s, which is out of print, and a few poems which pop up in The Penguin Book of Modern African Poetry—the one of the reasons which this sentence started with, and I don’t blame you for losing the thread, that’s on me—is that Rabearivelo was a pretty complicated guy politically. He was a big admirer of Charles Maurras and the Action française movement. Rabearivelo is not a useful subject for the postcolonialists in the academy because he was basically a reactionary postcolonial subaltern. He wanted to basically kick out the French and reassert a verb uninternationalist, protectionist Merina ethnostate. Blood and soil stuff, really. He’s absolutely fascinating. Senghor was basically like this too but these kind of teeth really got ground down by Fanon and the internationalist types who got their hands on the postcolonial tiller in the seventies and made it not a blood-and-soil kick out the Europeans nationalist cause but tried to marry it with like internationalist Marxist stuff. This is the kind of benthic intellectual substrate that movements like the ANC and pan-Arabism spring from (the Megatherion muck, Carlyle would say!) and Rabearivelo is just not politically expedient to this basically Rousseauian take on postcolonialism. It’s a shame because his poetry is really quite beautiful and his pastoral scenes of Madagascar just floor you with their beauty.

It's pretty easy to understand this when you remember that Rabearivelo was from dispossessed Merina nobility. If not for the French then rather than being the wretched of the earth, he would have been a Merina baron! If you want to get an idea of the kind of place Rabearivelo is coming from politically, the best topic to look into is queen Ranavalona I of Madagascar. But the key takeaway here is that because the academy in the humanities is basically a political organ of people who would’ve been quite at home politically in the First Republic, and is essentially devoted to the study and exultation of its own politics, they find themselves busily mining out this lignite seam and along the way missing the glittering diamonds like Rabearivelo! Imagine as a postcolonialist deliberately ignoring the uncontroversially greatest poet from a particular African country, who even has this really nice tragic tortured soul story which usually helps sell an artist, and ignoring him because he was a nationalist! The mind boggles—most of these people have probably read Journey to the End of the Night and liked it, but Rabearivelo smells off to them. Well, here he is in English for free so as long as Google doesn’t push Substack too much further down in the index hopefully this will be a useful free resource for an undergraduate somewhere down the line who feels like doing some really honest postcolonial studies.

For more analysis on this and a good biography you can check out Gavin Bowd (who was one of my professors at St Andrews and was the guy who originally put me onto Rabearivelo)’s excellent article Jean-Joseph Rabearivelo, Charles Maurras and colonial Madagascar (2016). You can find it in the journal Modern & Contemporary France, vol. 24 , no. 1 , pp. 1-14. https://doi.org/10.1080/09639489.2015.1068283 ISSN is: 0963-9489

1

Stanza 1

Line 1: ‘susciter’ generally would mean something more like ‘to arouse’. I think in the context of drawing sap from a plant ‘coax’ is better, but I’m not sure that there is an English verb which would be quite right in this context. ‘Draw’ or ‘coax’ best represents the physical action being taken, I think, but the metaphor of arousal of sap as the sort of essence or entity of the tree as an analogy for the essence of the Merina people isn’t captured too well by these words unfortunately. Nonetheless I think ‘coax’ is the best choice in the final analysis and hopefully wherever I’ve been forced to make these kinds of compromises, people will actually read these notes and they’ll help make the meaning clearer.

Line 4: this is ‘flight’ in the sense of an escape, or fleeing—‘flight from justice’—not in the sense that a bird flies.

Stanza 2

Line 2: ‘ardente’ has popped up a couple times in this collection, it means ‘burning,’ ‘fervent,’ something like this—English ‘ardent’ though a cognate is not quite as strong and has largely lost the fire-related aspect of its meaning. Here ‘burning’ was chosen because I liked the image of a glowing brand or sign in the sky like a religious revelation.

Line 3: ‘à la voûte élancée’—little tough to translate, this one—‘à la’ is a French expression literally meaning ‘to the,’ but figuratively ‘with,’ or assigning a quality—‘duck à l’orange,’ ‘à la mode,’ &c.—here it’s assigning a quality, it’s a way to grammatically construct a simile in French which English kind of lacks. You could argue for several different constructions of this phrase in English; reasonable minds can differ on which is best, certainly, but I think that the one given here—‘with their soaring arches’—is reasonable. N.b. that ‘voûte’ is closest to ‘vaulted,’ i.e. a vaulted arch, and the implication here is like picture how a particularly tall pal tree begins to bend in a particular direction at the top and ends up looking like half a vaulted arch.

Stanza 3

Line 2: ‘première,’ literall ‘first,’ primary’—here translated as ‘primeval’ because it connotes the ancestor spirit idea a bit better than either of the direct translation options, I think.

Stanza 4

Lines 1/2: ‘enchanted cup’ is interesting in the context of Rabearivelo’s other collection La Coupe des Cendres—The Cup of Ashes—the thesis is kind of like the loss of Madagascan indigenous culture is like being forced to swallow a bitter cup of ash, rather than sharing in like a communion-y swig from the cup of the clan like in a longhouse after returning in glory from going a-viking. Amalthea was the nymph in Greek mythology who nursed the infant Zeus with goatmilk. Remember Zeus in born in secret to Rhea, who hides him in a cave in the mountains with nymphs, including Amalthea, who raise him. This is because Cronus is eating each of his children as they are born because of a prophecy that one of his children will depose him (just as he deposed and castrated his father Uranus). The metaphor here ought to be pretty obvious.

Another interesting tidbit to note is that just before Rabearivelo was born, a new moon of Jupiter was observed by telescope in the 1890s and named Amalthea by Camille Flammarion, after whom the publishing imprint Flammarion (which does a lot of sci-fi) is named. From the mid-eighteenth to the early twentieth century when it was completely confirmed that the heavenly bodies were rocky objects and not lights hung in the sky, it was an almost universally-held belief that there were humans also on the other planets. This was because of the observation of what are now known to be glacial valleys of Mars, then presumed to be deliberately dug canals (the digging of canals for the easy transportation of goods then being considered one of the major characteristics of civilisation). Schiaparelli the astronomer and others proposed that we Earthlings ought to dig great trenches and set fires in them to communication with Martians and Venutians or whoever else. Just an interesting thing to note that Rabearivelo and probably most others at his time would have believed in the existence of people on these other bodies, it was a common subject of speculation. That said, Flammarion who named the moon Amalthea was a good deal more quacky than most UFO-types, and could probably be reasonably well described as the first founder of what have become UFO religions (quite popular in France—look into Raëlism—the novelist Michel Houellebecq has done some interesting writing on it). He believed in reincarnation on different heavenly bodies, and took a spiritual interest in Halley’s comet for example. I don’t know too much more about the subject than that, but it certainly smells like the Heaven’s Gate UFO religion (cult probably more appropriate) took a lot of inspiration from Flammarion’s ideas and writings. I do hope these tidbits about the context and references in these poems are interesting and not just a huge digression and waste of time—I find them interesting in any case and of course these are just the notes to the translations. I highly doubt most people will read them, anyway.

42. 2

Stanza 1

Line 1: unfortunately there is no grammatical context here which can establish for us whether this l’ is in fact masculine or feminine. Based on the fact that the l’ is betrothed to a nubile, I think that the guess that it’s a ‘le’ is reasonable.

Line 3: ‘annoncé’ literally means ‘announced,’ of course, but frankly I think that this translation represents the meaning well and in a much more poetic way than a lexical translation.

Line 4: ‘deviner’ is colloquially used to mean ‘guess,’ but is of course a cognate with English ‘to divine’—I generally think that in the context of a formal work like a poem, the best way to translate this word tends to be by splitting the difference with one of the many close ‘d’-words in English like e.g., ‘descry,’ ‘discern,’ ‘detect,’ ‘discover,’ ‘distinguish,’ &c. Also a cortège is a procession, but since we use this as a loanword in English I saw no need to translate it.

Stanza 2

Lines 1-3: so the construction that ‘c’est plus tard’ introduces is consummated in French by the word ‘où,’ meaning ‘when,’ or ‘where’. However, in English it isn’t clear that it is the girding of the brow that’s what’s happening later per the start of the construction, so I’ve changed it to ‘that’ in the English. Additionally, ‘à l’heure’ is a French phrase meaning ‘on time,’ or ‘on schedule’. I’m admittedly unhappy with this line as translated; it’s tough to get the right sense here but hopefully the sense of it comes across.

Stanza 3

Line 1: ‘alors que’ usually is best translated as ‘whereas’ or ‘although,’ and often introduces a subjunctive-mood clause. Here, though, I think it is best translated as ‘then that’.

Stanza 4

Line 1: ‘propice’ has an English cognate ‘propitious’ which is obviously the superior choice of word here, but because of my policy of trying to choose vocabulary which won’t make readers pull out a dictionary, I think this synonym is more appropriate.

Line 2: another use here of the ambiguous word ‘séculaire’—again I think that ‘ancient,’ or ‘age-old’ is a much more likely intention here than the other meaning of ‘secular’.

Line 3: ‘forgotten memory’—lovely oxymoron!

43. 3

Stanza 1

Line 3: ‘allées’ can also mean ‘pathways,’ ‘aisles,’ it’s quite a general word for any sort of narrow thoroughfare. I’ve just opted for the most similar-sounding meaning.

Line 4: literally ‘lifting up some perfumes of heady sage.’ I’ve switched heady over to apply to the other noun just to be more idiomatic—generally we would say a heady scent rather than a scent of heady something, I should think.

Stanza 2

Line 2: ‘azur’!

Line 3: ‘will make it’ is moved to the end of the line and put in a clause with imperceptible because the French construction sounds odd in English. Could be translated as ‘render’ instead of ‘make it’. Potayto potahto.

Stanza 3

Line 2: ‘du regard’ literally ‘of the gaze’. I think this rendering ‘with his eyes’ is most idiomatic.

Stanza 4

Line 1: ‘Imanga’ is Ambohimanga, the ancient royal hill which was the seat of power in the nation of the Merina. The fortified settlement at the top was the palace of the Kingdom of Imerina.

The fortification atop Ambohimanga.

44. 4

Stanza 1

Line 1: ‘profiter de’ is a French verb/phrase which can mean ‘to enjoy,’ or ‘to make the most of’.—‘Il faut que tu profites de ta jeunesse’ could be reasonably interpreted as either ‘you must enjoy your youth’ or ‘you must make the most of your youth.’ In this exemplary case we would probably assume the latter, whereas e.g. ‘il faut que tu profites de tes vacances’—‘you mut enjoy your holiday’ would probably be the best interpretation. ‘Embellie’ is a bright spell or a brightening up; you could reasonably translate this as ‘bright sunshine’ based on context. When rendering this in English we run into the slight problem that ‘claire’ means ‘bright’ or ‘clear’ and ‘embellie’ implies the ‘bright’ already.

Line 2: ‘Euphorbia’ is one of the largest genera of flowering plants. Most of the Madagascan varieties of euphorbia are small succulents with purple flowers.

Lines 3/4: ‘faisceau’ is a word with a lot of meanings. It can mean fasces in the context of heraldry. It can also mean ‘body,’ or ‘laserbeam.’ Odd word. In this context since we’re referring to flowers, I think that the alternative meaning ‘clusters’ is most likely. I’ve switched the order of clauses a bit here to make the meaning more intelligible and present it more idiomatically.

Stanza 2

Line 1: I think it’s better to, even though it’s the same word, translate ‘profiter de’ differently than we did earlier because the subject here seems to more naturally align with the sense of ‘making the most of’ something than ‘enjoying’ it. In hindsight, the first use at the start of the poem could probably be changed to align with this translation with a lot of utility, but since it’s repeated twice, I think ‘Let us make the most of, let us make the most of...’ would be far too wordy.

Line 3: although it sounds like ‘trouble’ in this context should be translated as ‘troubled’—like e.g. what happens to your reflection in a puddle when you drop a pebble in—I have only ever seen this usage intended to mean blurry or hazy.

Stanza 3

Line 1: ‘funérailles’ is plural in the French, it’s more like ‘funeral celebrations,’ i.e. a series of celebrations of life rather than a single service.

Line 3: drink for ‘azur’! Probably Curaçao is most appropriate (or Frosty Jacks for those of you on a student budget or who don’t have a sense of shame about what you consume).

Stanza 4

Line 2: the ‘de’ here is pulling double duty on linking betrothal to both these two elements and also being part of the phrase ‘in love with’—‘amoureux de’—this is hard to represent in English with the same concision, so unfortunately this little foible has been ‘lost in translation’.

45. 5

Stanza 1

Line 1: ‘imérinien’ translated as ‘of Imerina’ here. This has come up before in the collection, but essentially because I haven’t seen Imerinian as a word anywhere before I don’t think it’s right to coin it especially when the word for the ethnicity which we might call Imerinian is Merina, which can be a noun or adjective.

Line 2: ‘quench its’ thirst also fine here. Slake chosen basically arbitrarily and used elsewhere in this translation, used each time ‘désaltérer’ comes up for consistency’s sake.

Line 3: the sense here seems to be more like ‘witness’ or ‘watch’ than see, but since the word used is ‘voir’ I see no good reason to interpolate extra meaning which I may be subjectively projecting in this instance.

Line 4: ‘biens’ means ‘good things’ in this instance. It can also mean ‘welfare,’ ‘goods,’ or ‘possessions’ as well as the more familiar sense as an adverb. It’s unfortunate that there isn’t really a good English noun equivalent, so we have to have the slightly pedestrian, clumsy sounding ‘good things’. You could say ‘gifts,’ but again I don’t want to interpolate meaning unnecessarily.

Stanza 2

Line 1: this is ambiguous in the French too. It could be fought over by night in the sense of fought over during the night or equally as in the night is fighting over the day. ‘Disputer’ can be less intense and just mean arguing, too.

Line 2: inference kind of unclear to me here; translated lexically. ‘Présent’ has the same ambiguity in French as its cognate ‘present’ does in English, i.e., that it can mean a gift or the temporal now. Although other words in French are more commonly used to mean ‘gift,’ I think that because we’re following a stanza where we’ve already been talking about ‘biens’ there is good reason to suppose that this is meant in the sense of a gift. However the holding in your hands image doesn’t really help us to disambiguate this—you can figuratively hold the present in your hands just as you can literally hold a gift.

Line 3: ‘Entretenir’ more usually translated as ‘maintain,’ which if you parse the etymology you can see means literally keep in hand—nonetheless because that’s a bit obscure I think it’s best to translate this as ‘hold on to’ because of the last line—‘in your hands’.

Stanza 3

Line 1: ‘sort’ has many meanings as a noun (it sometimes seems like every word Rabearivelo uses is the most ambiguous possible choice)—primary possible meanings here would be a spell, or a ‘going-out’; n.b. that when ‘sort’ refers to a spell it has the implication of an evil spell, a hex, rather than a positive charm.

Line 2: another ‘front’ tossup. ‘Brow’ could work well here too, I think.

Line 3: ‘dommage’ and ‘calamité’ can sometimes be on their own, or work a little differently to English equivalents, e.g. ‘c’est dommage que...’—it’s odd nonetheless that there is no punctuation separating it from ‘l’espoir vaine,’ so I’ve added an em dash for clarity. We can be sure that it is a vain calamity and not a vain hope because ‘espoir’ is a masculine noun and ‘vaine’ is inflected in the feminine here, even though the word order would suggest that ‘vain’ applies to ‘hope’.

Stanza 4

Line 3: like most languages other than English, the French words for brightness and clarity can pretty much mean either/or, like ‘clair’. I think most probably here though that the persona of the poem and the child are being crowned with light or brightness, and not clarity.

46. 6

Stanza 1

Line 1: ‘doux’ can mean ‘gentle,’ or ‘sweet’. ‘Gentle’ chosen here because it makes sense in opposition to ‘firmness,’ which concept crops up into the last stanza.

Line 3: margin call whether this is in the sense of ‘disappointing’ or ‘deceiving’. When in doubt I think the former is a more likely candidate.

Line 4: ‘anadyomène’ might be my favourite word. You usually (only, if we’re honest) see it associated with Venus (Venus anadyomène) and it specifically refers to the birth of Venus out of the sea; hence ‘Venus rising from the sea’ is the usual translation of the names of these scenes. This of course makes sense here and what a wonderful image—picture the sunrise over the sea, as if the sun is being born out of the sea like Venus and rising up from the horizon. Since the word ‘anadyomène’ is exclusively associated with Venus I did consider ‘O Venutian sun rising from the sea,’ but I like it better without the Venutian, even though the implication is lost. I think the line is beautiful enough to pass muster anyway.

Stanza 3

Line 1: preferred this to ‘marine waves,’ which makes the adjective seem superfluous somehow (even though it’s not—how else could you be sure they aren’t soundwaves), even though we’ve has to turn an adjective into this genitive turn of phrase.

Line 2: had to look up this word ‘purpurines’—apparently a purpurin is a type of flower which a deep purple dye can be derived from. The noun ‘purpurin’ is the same in both French and English. I couldn’t find any example in either language of it being made an adjective. Since you could do this with the -ine suffix in either language with the same effect I’ve left it untouched in translation. Oh, there is one place ‘purpurine’ as such appears which is in the French binomial for a species of moth Noctuelle purpurine (English: Eublemma purpurina). Those of you who know me personally probably know that moths are my irrational fear—the way their wings move when they fly just fills me with this horrified disgust—but when I looked up this moth even I couldn’t deny that it’s really quite beautiful.

As you can see, this moth has adapted this beautiful pattern in order to resemble a flowerbud and thus be ignored by predators. It may be that rather than the colour Rabearivelo is using an obscure reference to describe a rose which resembles this flower fugazi, or making a suggestion that the roses are not what they seem!

Line 3: ‘éclore’ is a verb usually associated with hatching from an egg, or it’s the French equivalent of ‘breaking’ in the phrase ‘dawn breaking’; these alternate meanings are wrapped up in the usage here—it’s suggesting birth, creation as well as maturation which blooming usually suggests. Also note that in the French this is a past participle—i.e., ‘bloomed,’ but the sense in which i’s meant is better represented in English by the gerundive.

Stanza 4

Line 1: I think this has come up before, but just in case—an amphora is a type of two-handed ceramic vessel. The word is Greek but you’ll find similarly shaped vessels at archaeological sites the world over, and the design remains popular today. Example pictured:

Line 2: ‘figure’—‘figurates,’ to coin a word, would be best here if it were a word. ‘Figure’ can mean ‘draws’/’sketches,’ but also ‘describes metaphorically/figuratively’.

47. 7

Stanza 1

Line 1: ‘vain(e)’ as well as ‘vain’ or ‘shallow’ can mean ‘useless,’ or ‘without effect’. I think the sense here is of in vain.

Line 2: ‘au bois découronné’ is tough to translate. ‘Découronné’ literally means ‘decrowned,’ so I think that the best equivalent idiom in English keeping it to a single word is ‘dethroned’. Tough to translate this well but the sense is again this idea of the Malagasy people as having been deprived of their inheritance/land, with the woods of Madagascar as a metonym for their national inheritance.

Line 3: ethnologically the Malagasy have a mixed origin. In terms of the populations still genetically represented in the current inhabitants, the first settlers whose descendants still live there were Austronesian (a very general term) sailors who sailed there from the far east, perhaps Polynesians. Over time populations from East Africa reached Madagascar in a number of migration events and mixed with the people living there already.

Stanza 2

Line 1: the ‘au’ here is best translated as through because the ‘à’ is from the verb which appears at the beginning of line 3—‘revis,’ from ‘revivre’—‘to relive’. This is formed as ‘revivre à [qqch.]’—‘to relive through something’. French transitive verbs often incur either ‘à’ or ‘de’ to link them to their object. One of the tough things about learning the language is remembering which verbs are ‘à’ and which are ‘de’ verbs as there isn’t much consistency in terms of which kinds of verbs take which, although over time you get a kind of sense for what the flavour of each kind is and can make a pretty reasonable guess most of the time.

Line 2: not clear here whether ‘azur’ is meant to say that the sky is marine-looking or whether we’re exclusively talking about the sea here. Because we had this Venus rising from the sea metaphor in the last poem, I’ve chosen to guess that we’re just talking about the sea here although given that that metaphor was about the sun it might well be that we’re talking about a heavenly azur here again and it’s being likened to the sea.

Stanza 3

Line 3: ‘pirogues,’ or ‘piragas’ are small boats made by hollowing out a tree trunk. These kinds of boats were used by Austronesian peoples to settle almost every landmass from Madagascar to Easter Island (and there is exciting new evidence now that around the 11^th century they reached South America!)—exemplary picture below.

Stanza 4

Line 1: like before, this is pulp in the sense of fruit flesh, not necessarily pulped. This is just a metonym for fruit I think, like last time this came up.

48. 8

Stanza 1

Lines 1/2: it might have been more idiomatic to reorder this a bit as ‘O sun, is this how the adventure/of the nomads come from that distant continent ended?’ but then the second line is overlong and I don’t think an English brain balks too much at the French word ordering here.

Line 4: ‘butin’ is literally ‘booty,’ like arrgh me’hearties booty, but I like treasure here just as a more poetic-sounding word in English. ‘Plunder’ is a good alternative that keeps the implication of the treasures having been, ah, liberated from previous owners.

Stanza 2

Line 4: ‘prospérer’ can be transitive in French; in English you can’t prosper a survivor, so this had to be made into a ‘let subject verb’ construction.

Stanza 3

Line 1: on this occasion I think that ‘vaine’ is meant in the sense of ‘useless’. It might though be intended to also have the implication of navel-gazing which translating as ‘futile’ sheds. My concern with going with ‘vain’ again would be that it would make the narcissism angle the primary meaning which I don’t believe it is in this situation.

Line 2: ‘Hauts-Plateaux’ literally means ‘high plateaus,’ but it’s the term in general for the highlands of any given country.

Line 3: same policy as before with translating ‘imérinienne’ as ‘of Imerina’—not sure whether I noted this before but the adjectival forms of proper nouns in French are never capitalised, unlike English where you can more or less choose. E.g., in French the adjective version of ‘Europe’ is ‘européen,’ whereas in English you could write ‘European’ or ‘european’ and nobody would bat an eye.

Stanza 4

Line 3: ‘renfermer,’ literally ‘to contain,’ but also can mean ‘to seal away [within something],’ ‘to sepulchre’.

49. Cœur et Ciel d’Iarive/HEART AND SKY OF IARIVE

à Robert-Jules Allain.

Robert-Jules Allain (1905-1934) was another Madagascan poet and close friend of Rabearivelo, writing for the same journals and moving in the same circles. Less information about him survives compared to Rabearivelo but his work can still be found in the same journals Rabearivelo published in. This collection, Volumes, was published in 1928. After the publication of this collection, Rabearivelo published ‘Notes sur Quelques Poètes IV’ in December 1928 in the journal L’Essor, part of a series of essays on his contemporaries, this one on Allain. A few other documents survive where Rabearivelo wrote to or about several other poets including Allain, but of Allain they are relatively few and none after 1934, when we have Rabearivelo’s obituary of him. Madagascan poets of this time were not a long-lived bunch.

1

Stanza 1

Line 2: ‘Diane’ is of course French for Diana, the Roman goddess who is roughly equivalent to Artemis, she is the goddess of hunting and associated animals, chase dogs and hinds and so on. However, when not capitalised in French a ‘diane’ can also be a way to refer to a young virginal woman. This could be the intention of Rabearivelo—he wasn’t shy about using ‘nubile’ as a noun earlier on, but I’ve chosen to guess that he meant to capitalise this as the goddess because of the next line calling her a god of the woods. Maybe he’s talking about like some kind of nubile tree nymph?—I think that assuming ‘diane’ was intended to be ‘Diane’ is reasonable, though. Also, ‘front’!

Line 3: same story again here as in one of the recent poems; ‘dethrones’ is the best translation of the idiom—literally ‘decrown’ in French means to ‘usurp,’ ‘overthrow’.

Stanza 2

Line 2: ‘errante’ literally means ‘errant’; the sense here is of nomadic wandering, which is now a rarer meaning of ‘errant’ in English—usually we would use it to mean poorly behaved like an ‘errant schoolboy,’ so I’ve chosen the non-cognate which gets this sense a bit better.

Line 3: ‘la nuque étoilée’ is a little tough—‘étoilée’ comes from ‘étoile,’ which is the noun for a ‘star’. This verb is used in French to describe the star-spangled banner for example, but I preferred just to put starred to avoid connoting the United States flag, which I don’t think is being evoked here at all.

Stanza 3

Line 2: ‘renégats’ has the cognate ‘renegades,’ but because Rabearivelo is perennially talking about Christianity and trying to de-Christianise Madagascar, I think it’s a good bet that he means the second, rarer, more literary meaning of this French word—‘apostate’.

Line 3: ‘veuille’ is the present first person subjective—‘may I want’ would be the closest but I can’t write it in good conscience. I’ve translated as ‘wish’ because it brings across some of the wistfulness engendered by the subjunctive mood here. ‘Six Imernes’—your guess is as good as mine. The only other use of the word ‘Imerne’ I have seen in in Bombled’s lithograph ‘Sur la Frontière de l’Imerne,’ one of many pieces of art commissioned as part of an official collection called ‘The War in Madagascar’. I’ve chosen to make the educated guess that this is equivalent to ‘Imerina’—I believe that it’s pluralised to refer to the woods of Imerina based on the content of Stanza 1. This explaine why it ought to be pluralised if we see it as a kind of reverse metonym where in each part, each wood, there is all of Imerina contained and replicated like a synecdoche viewed from the opposite end than is usual. I’ve also capitalised ‘Forgetful’ and put it into the middle of the term contrary to the original because I couldn’t get it in there cleanly otherwise. Something about ‘forgetful Six Imerinas’ gave me the icks.

Stanza 4

Line 1: ‘sauvage’—‘savage,’ or ‘wild’. Most prejudicial interpretation is probably correct, Rabearivelo is expressing an unknowably strong national feeling here.

Line 3: ‘filon’—‘seam,’ or ‘vein’ in the sense of a vein of precious stones.

Stanza 5

Line 1: em dash added for clarity.

Line 3: ‘subissant le sort et son atteinte’ was tough to translate. ‘Sort,’ as we’ve come across earlier can mean ‘fate,’ or ‘spell’. I liked ‘doom’ here because it carries the sense of judgment and inexorably oncoming death—I recently read Children of Húrin and it gets thrown around a lot in there. Tolkien was a scholar of pre-Norman, Anglo-Saxon history and literature, and the word was used in the Wittan and in the hundred-courts to refer to a final judgement of the man presiding over cases there. I chose it for the less legal sense though of a fatal fate (one guess what noun ‘fatal’ refers to) because it has kept the sense of fatality which ‘fate’ hasn’t.

Stanza 6

Line 1: ‘jeunesse dernière’ is an odd one; it literally means ‘last youth’—I think the slightly rarer meaning of ‘former,’ or ‘bygone’ is more plausible here. The latter half of the line is literally ‘had for its supreme pride,’ but this has been rendered a little different so that it can be more idiomatic when combined with the subordinate clauses that will follow in the rest of the stanza. This did mean that certain verb tenses had to be changed—what I did was to shift the subjunctive in the ‘ait’ here elsewhere—it’s a little ungrammatical, but in English the past conditional and pluperfect can carry the subjunctive mood. I don’t like it personally as I think it’s dreadfully colloquial, but I think it’s the way to go here if we want to represent this very French construction idiomatically.

Line 2: the ‘pur’ here comes with a [sic] in the notes from the editor of the French edition. It’s an added complication in a stanza that was difficult anyway; I’ve chosen to interpret it as trying to mean that the persona’s youth alone has this capacity to make the tombs bloom again.

50. 2

Stanza 1

Line 1: this might be a bit of a pun—‘Iarive’ sounds very much like ‘arrive,’ from the verb ‘arriver’—‘to come,’ or ‘arrive’. Like if someone asks you to hurry up in French and you want to say ‘coming!’—you’d say ‘j’arrive!’—Iarive sounds much like the third person present indicative conjugaton, so ‘he/she/it comes’—and la morte as well as being a noun acting as an epithet—dead Iarive, if you talk quickly and squint a bit, this line sounds a lot like ‘it’s coming; it’s coming; it’s coming—death!’

Stanza 2

Line 1: ‘naît’ literally means ‘is born,’ but applying to a day dawn is a good translation and keeps the verb active, whereas in English one can only be born in the passive voice.

Lines 2/3: not the Tim Burton film—coralline (I had to look this up) is a type of red algae which grows in frond structures and calcifies on the outside giving it a not-superficial resemblance to coral. Unfortunately, in the next line we lose the rhyme with the French word for ‘hill’ in translation—‘colline’. Unfortunately, this loses the association between the two. Ambohimango is one of a number of hills sacred to the Merina and these hills are being associated with these coral crowns by the rhyme which is absent in English.

Line 6: this one I really can’t be proud of. ‘Ronde’ here is meaning a round dance, one of these dances where you hold hands in a circle, go round and round and in and out. ‘Ronde’ isn’t a known enough loanword to leave untranslated, although it does seem to be used occasionally in English for this purpose, and the English ‘round’ implies a song not a dance, while ‘round dance’ just sounds dreadful. Instead I’ve gone for ‘ronda’ which is an Argentine round dance. I’m sure there’s a cleaner translation option here, but I don’t see it.

Line 8: ‘étonner’ is a cognate with ‘to astonish,’ but I think that ‘shocks’ is closer to the modern sense of the word.

Line 10: ‘ténébreux’ can mean ‘dark,’ as well as the more specific ‘shadowy’; I prefer the latter because it’s closer to the sense of the Latin root.

Line 11: the ‘s’ on the end of ‘seules’ suggests that the sadness and sorrow are going by themselves, not going only to the destination cited. To make this a bit clearer I moved ‘alone’ to the end of the sentence rather than leaving it in a similar position in the sentence.

51. 3

Stanza 1

Line 1: whenever Rabearivelo uses this word ‘zone,’ it’s hard to choose a translation. ‘Part,’ ‘region,’ or ‘place’ is probably best in most circumstances. Certainly ‘zone’ is too sci-fi. I won’t recapitulate all that as I’ve gone over it before, but I think I forgot to mention in my last note where this word came up that ‘zone’ also can have an implication of a bad urban area in French and can be made into a verb ‘zoner’ meaning ‘to loiter’.

Line 3: this is before Indian independence and consolidation as a nation-state; at this time the word ‘Inde’ is best understood as referring to the entire subcontinent whose people now call it desi and also extending south-east into the Indo-Malaysian archipelago.

Line 4: I’ve chosen to translate both these adjectives just into their cognates in this case. Those of you who know me will now that I’m a Shostakovich obsessive. There’s a similar problem with translating the name of one of his ballets, Светлый ручей—this could be The Limpid Stream (my favourite translation), The Bright Stream, or even The Clear Stream. English is one of the unusual languages which has clearly (!) separate words for ‘bright’ and ‘clear’; most languages just use the same word. N.b. also that ‘profonde’ usually gets translated as ‘deep,’ but since this is kind of a metaphorical translation I’ve gone for the cognate here, largely on a whim. (When in doubt translating poetry I think going on feeling is not actually a bad idea from a technical perspective.)

Stanza 2

Line 2: for ‘contraire’ I’ve gone with the cognate, but the sense is more of irreconcilability, I think.

Line 4: ‘garder’ can mean ‘keep,’ ‘retain,’ ‘guard,’ or even ‘save’. I think hold gets most of this compound sense.

52. 4

Stanza 1

Line 2: ‘parler’ is the infinitive form of the French verb meaning ‘to speak,’ so here the noun language unfortunately loses some of the sense here, which is more like ‘parlance,’ but I prefer it nonetheless.

Line 3: ‘Navire-Austral’—obvious proper nouns which I can find corroborating references for absolutely nowhere are the absolute bane of my existence in this translation project. I think that Rabearivelo is referring to the archaic constellation ‘Argo Navis,’ which was the largest constellation in the early Hellenic astronomical system. It’s clearly visible even as far south as Madagascar and the boat shape was observed and interpreted in this constellation by many separate culture, from the Ancient Greeks and -Egyptians to Pacific cultures which had no contact with them, including possibly the Polynesians. I think therefore that Argo Navis is a good bet for what Rabearivelo is referring to (picture included for reference), but nonetheless I’ve translated it lexically to be on the safe side and you can have this note if you want my opinion on what’s being referred to.

You can see from the stars in the constellation and its proximity to the southern cross why it’s so easily visible in the southern Tropics.

Stanza 2

Line 2: ‘tree that declines’ is an alternative; I didn’t like it.

Stanza 3

Line 3: ‘églantiers’ are wild roses, Rosa canina, also known as ‘dog roses’; I find this a little odd, since all the dog roses I’ve ever seen were pink and white, but the poem is as it is.

53. 5

Stanza 1

Line 2: ‘détruits’ literally means ‘destroyed’; ‘crushed’ would be ‘écrasés,’ but in English it’s idiomatic to crush rather than destroy a dream.

Stanza 2

Line 1: ‘obscur’ in the sense of ‘hidden,’ I think.

Lines 2-3: ‘délices’ is being juxtaposed with the half-rhyme ‘malices’. Neither has a great equivalent in English in this instance and certainly we can’t avoid losing the counterpoint if we want to be even vaguely lexical in this translation. ‘Délices’ is something like a capricious joy or pleasure—a whim, maybe. ‘Malices’ on the other hand although it looks like the nasty English word ‘malice’—i.e. unalloyed evil intent (like without even having a ‘means justify the ends’-type rationale, like Iago-type evil would be malice, right?)—doesn’t mean ‘malice’. It’s more like ‘mischief,’ as it’s been translated here, and has the same playful, capricious implication as does ‘délices’.

54. MATIN MALADE/SICK MORNING

6

Stanza 1

Line 4: ‘berçant’ means ‘rocking’ but has a gentle implication and is usually applied to e.g. rocking a baby to sleep, so I think ‘cradling’ is a good figurative translation here.

Stanza 2

Line 1: love this phrase, ‘virtual sun’; ‘virtuel’ does indeed mean ‘virtual,’ or ‘potential’—has to be understood in the pre-Tron and that hilariously shitty X-Files episode with Krista Allen from Baywatch which was somehow that irremediably dreadful despite being written by William Gibson—yes, the same William Gibson who wrote Neuromancer—has to be understood in the pre-all that sense; these poems were written in the late twenties, which weren’t so roaring in Madagascar and certainly nobody had heard of wonders like Sinistar whose immersive innovation of stereo sound in gaming led us decades later to dream of being downloaded. It’s funny how twee and gauche and downright silly all these ideas are now. Seriously, go watch that X-Files episode; it’s like mainlining the nineties without having to waste the time it takes to watch a full feature like Hackers which if you think about it is pretty appropriate. Anyway, I almost translated this ‘virtual sun’ term as ‘potential sun,’ but I rejected this as it implies a lack of any sun, only the potential for there to at some point exist one, whereas ‘virtuel’ is trying to suggest a nascent or incipient sun. For this reason the next draft translation I went with ‘almost-sun,’ justified by the title of Rabearivelo’s other collection Presque-songes—Almost-dreams, which come to think of it Virtual Dreams is a cool title—but in the end decided that if it ain’t broke...

Line 2: ‘ramiers’—mentioned before but this can mean a wood/wild pigeon such as you get between the tropics most commonly, but secondarily may also mean a collared dove.

Line: ‘leurre’—‘ploy,’ ‘trick,’ or ‘lure’—not easy to get this idiomatically but basically this ‘feeding with a cruel trick’ is like ‘lulling into a false sense of security’.

Stanza 3

Line 2: ‘chagrin’ has stayed closer to its old-school meaning in French which is ‘grief’ as translated, whereas in English it’s come to mean something like annoyance at being cheated or at an unexpected outcome or insult.

Line 3: tricky. Could be another time where ‘azure’ is a marine reference and not talking about the sky. That said, there frankly isn’t a difference in Rabearivelo’s poetry. Imagine you live on an island and are unaware of any other land. you look around and in every direction there is water and you can see to the horizon. Might you not imagine that you’re in the bottom and centre of some kind of giant snowglobe shape made of water? That snowglobe is the azur, the firmament and the waves, at once marine and empyrean.

Stanza 4

Line 3: ‘gonfler’ is more usually just a word for filling rather than swelling owing to filling, but here I like swelling because it tends to happen to overripe, rotting things. I think of the way an abscess swells as it fills.

55. REVE DEVANT L’ATRE/DREAM BEFORE THE HEARTH

pour Ramilijaona/for Ramilijaona

This is the same Ramilijaona as an earlier poem was dedicated to—the best-known Malagasy photographer, a contemporary and friend of Rabearivelo.

Stanza 1

Line 1: another ‘en-allée’ popping up here. It’s never easy to know what to do with these. My suspicion is that like the last one and unlike the first example which referred to a dance, this is ‘en-allée’ in the sense of ‘gone away,’ ‘departed,’ ‘bygone,’ especially because of the motif of regret here.

Line 4: this is the kind of odd construction that the French love, with all these ‘que’s and ‘ne’s and reflexive verbs and whatever else which an English brain will just never be able to wrap itself around. Very tough to represent these kinds of turns of phrase idiomatically. ‘Azurer’ is not strictly related to ‘azur,’ the other word which keeps popping up—it means ‘bleach,’ or ‘whiten’. There’s something going on here of course with the ‘azurer’/’azur’ thing which is counterpointing the pastorality of Magagascar and its wide sky and seas with colonisation. My suspicion is that is has something to do with the French sort of emerging from the horizon sailing over like some kind of apparition emerging from the azure horizon like the dawn constantly does in Rabearivelo’s poems, but then betraying that auspicious emergence by undermining the pastorality and history of Madagascar—this is why Rabearivelo is always talking about the ancestor spirits standing in bitter judgement and most of the pastoral scenes are metonyms for this, I suspect.

Stanza 2

Line 2: this line is also a bit of a grammatical oddity in the French which doesn’t quite fit the subject/object orientation of the rest of the stanza, so I’ve tried to preserve this oddity in translation.

Stanza 3

Line 1: despite what cropped up earlier, although ‘jouissance’ has the same etymological roots, it doesn’t have quite the same implications as ‘jouir’.

Line 2: ‘flous’ is literally ‘blurred,’ or ‘fuzzy’. I think ‘bleary’ is the best semantic translation of the intention.

Stanza 4

Line 4: ‘enivrer’ means ‘to get drunk’ or more generally and as translated ‘intoxicate’; I just want to note that I considered translating it here as ‘bewitch’ and probably would’ve been well justified by the very magical and strange sense of the poem at large. I definitely think ‘intoxicate’ was the correct choice in the end, but by no means should the line be understood without a kind of compound sense of bewitchment as well as intoxication.

56. 8

pour Armand Godoy/for Armand Godoy

Armand Godoy (1880-1964) was a French Cuban Symbolist poet of considerable note. Rabearivelo is probably a fan of his largely because of his Chansons créoles, which aligns pretty well with Rabearivelo’s main concerns. I smell more than a passing inspiration though; if you go and read Godoy’s poetry his figurative toolbox is very like Rabearivelo’s—and look, granted—the dawn and the native flora of your country and the sky are not exactly copyrightable fare—these metaphors are basically threadbare to the post-Second World War artistic cynic, right? but the lexicon, the way these things are limned and figuratively milked for their figurative potential really smells like Godoy had a lot of influence. He also was famous for starting a literary journal—might well be that Rabearivelo was trying to follow his example professionally and artistically. Certainly this poem suggests as much to me.

Stanza 1

Line 1: the Tropic of Capricorn passes through Madagascar.

Line 2: again we have an issue with which word to pick for ‘zone’; ‘place’ chosen in this case.

Line 3: ‘jouissant’ does not have the sexual implication of the root word. The ‘false exotic reputation’ is of course that old-school dark continent John Mandeville Orientalist schtick. N.b. that ‘renom’—‘reputation’ has an implication of positive reputation—cognate with English ‘renown’.

Line 4: here translated as ‘faded,’ the word ‘décolorées’ refers to bleached, washed-out, or faded colour. It’s the word you’d use if you use knock-off detergent and all your clothes go pale.

Stanza 2

Line 1: another word which has popped up a lot in this collection, ‘ardent’ can mean ‘ardent,’ ‘fervent,’ and several other good translations exist too. Here ‘passionate’ chosen because in my opinion it best goes with the noun ‘hearts’.

Line 4: on first glance this looks ungrammatical because we would naturally assume that the ‘doesn’t even dare’ phrase’s subject is the ‘hearts,’ but ‘hearts’ is plural and ‘ose’ is third person singular, so it seems that ‘Present’ is the subject. Additionally, ‘azur bleu’ here I’ve inferred is again referring to sky but n.b. in all these cases that there isn’t actually a word which exclusively, unambiguously means ‘sky’ present.

Stanza 3

Line 1: just a brief comment that this ‘Tomorrow’ and a lot of the other motifs in this poem put me very much in mind of that Macbeth soliloquy. May or may not be an intentional intertextual reference. ‘Rejets’ and ‘pousses’ both basically mean plant offshoots, although in other contexts they can refer to anything sprouting or shooting out from another thing.

Line 2: ‘avare’ cognate with English avarice: means ‘miserly,’ ‘mean,’ ‘greedy’. ‘Sombre’ I’ve often translated in this poetry as ‘sombre’. In hindsight I suppose that the French is more meaning literally dark and shadowy whereas in English we generally now use this to refer to a sort of sombre grey mood, but hey ho—I trust the reader to understand the intention.

Line 3: ‘seules’ here is a plural—based on where it crops up on the sentence I’m forced to assume this is a instance where I should just say [sic] and translate what I think the obvious intention is. Maybe there’s some odd French grammatical quirk I’m unaware of which says that this should take the plural because of ‘fruits aigres,’ even though it seems to refer to the singular ‘promesse’—like the adjective is inflected by what the promise is of rather than the promise itself sometimes, but this seems very unlikely to me.

Stanza 4

Line 1: I think this is like when you have multiple light sources and you seem to have one shadow, although I’m not sure how this would happed with a singular light source like the sun unless you have some large object partially occluding the light and refracting it.

Line 3: ‘l’âge caducs’ (again, [sic]) is a date of expiration. I think as rendered is the best way to bring across the intended sense.

57. 9

Stanza 1

Line 4: unfortunately there isn’t a better word I’m aware of in English to translate ‘reverdir’ than the extremely limp and silly ‘regreen,’ which I feel embarrassed to have to resort to. I could drop the greenness implication and just go with, say, ‘revitalise,’ but at least half of this decision is like an effete protest that English needs to coin a word like ‘(re)verdify’ because it’s a bit of a gaping hole that we don’t have one.

Stanza 2

Line 1: ‘donner,’ literally ‘to give’—in the context of a window it’s figuratively equivalent to an English phrase like ‘looks out onto’ which tells you what can be seen from a window—like it gives you a view of, let’s say.

Line 2: ‘océane’ here turned into an adjective to be more idiomatic.

Line 4: ‘autrefois’ is the equivalent of ‘olden days,’ ‘bygone days,’ ‘yesteryear,’ ‘times gone by’. Literally ‘another time’. Here I like ‘days of old’ because it collapses it into the ‘jours’ and doesn’t have extra words compared to the original.

58. 10

Thanks to the excellent Bibliothèque nationale de France, I found out that Paul Husson was a French (shocker) author who was likely born in 1883, died 1927, and is best known as the founder of the journal Montparnasse. I’d be lying if I claimed to know any more or have come across him before this translation. N.b. that Volumes was originally published in 1928; this poem is a kind of eulogy.

Stanza 2

Line 1: reminds me somehow of a line I read somewhere, might be my favourite time-passing line (like the Spongebob technique of going ‘TWENTY MINUTES LATER’)—I think it was in Vollmann’s You Bright and Risen Angels—‘The sun rose and set with idiotic regularity’.

Line 2: ‘seuil’ has popped up in this collection before—previously translated as ‘brink,’ I preferred ‘threshold’ in this case.

Stanza 4

Line 4: ‘vaines’ here is plurally inflected, unambiguously the wreaths are being referred to as vain. I originally went with ‘wear on their foreheads/wreaths of flowers in vain’ but shied away from changing up the phrasing too much and didn’t want to much with the semantics when the grammar is pretty explicit.

59. 11

Stanza 1

Lines 1-4: the stanza is addressed to the city as a ‘you,’ second person subject. I just couldn’t make this work properly when trying to construct the translation, and ended up basically throwing it out and reframing it in the third person. It doesn’t seem like much because it makes it so much more natural and idiomatic it doesn’t really pop, but this is one of the more dramatic overhaulings I’ve done anywhere in this translating—just n.b. basically that ‘saccages’ is second person so this is like ‘New city [...], you ransack...’—the trouble was this ‘qui’ in the second line which in English unfortunately just really makes the brain infer incorrectly that the ‘new city’ is being referred to in the third rather than the second person. If only Rabearivelo had started this poem with like ‘O new city’ this problem would be solved!

Stanza 2

Line 3: ‘briser’ is an ergative French verb meaning ‘break up,’ ‘smash,’ ‘scatter,’ ‘wreck’ and other things. I don’t get the sense that this is meant transatively here, even though the most natural meaning you would want to ascribe would be that the factories, a French interpolation, are wrecking Emyrne. Actually just grammatically it seems like the factories are doing the shattering. It seems odd, but I have to call these things how I see them.

Line 4: ‘les lignes de l’azur’ almost seems like he’s now talking about like syzygies and asterisms in the night sky, which in Madagascar would have been so bright with stars and so tropical at this time as to be closer to a rich blue than the uncompromising black Londoners like me picture night as. In many cultures, blue was the colour associated with death because of cyanosis, and this! At least here we have the absolute unambiguous word for ‘light’ and we don’t have to fret whether maybe Rabearivelo actually means ‘clarity’.

Stanza 3

Line 4: the ‘of the’ is added here to make the adjective ‘seul’ a bit more cleanly applicable here.

Stanza 4

Line 4: ‘couchant d’un jour’ in a sunset in this case with the ‘heureux’ we get a kind of half-syllepsis. Also ‘âpre’ can mean ‘cruel’ but re weather and seasons it seems more reasonable to interpret it as ‘harsh’.

60. 12

Stanza 1

Line 3: ‘intégrale’ is a cognate with ‘integral,’ but the sense is sort of more like ‘whole’; nonetheless I’ve given the cognate as this is the real original sense of the English word.

Stanza 2

Line 1: word order changed a bit here to be idiomatic. In French you can repeat a subject or like in this case pull it to the front of the sentence to emphasis it: ‘Moi, je suis...,’ but this doesn’t go over so well in English. Also since the first words of all three stanzas are capitalise I don’t believe that there is good reason to keep ‘civilisation’ capitalised in translation as Rabearivelo sometimes likes to do with nouns (like a lot of poets before William Carlos Williams made it impossible to be sincere without being cringe).

Line 2: ‘jets d’eau’ would literally means ‘streams/jets of water,’ but in the context of the built environment described I think that if not fountains then probably waterpipes is the sense. I think ‘fountains’ is more likely.

Line 3: ‘émouvante’ is ‘moving’ in the sense of ‘touching,’ ‘stirring’. Translated as cognate nonetheless as I don’t think it hurts the sense.

Line 4: ‘demande’ is from ‘demander,’ which can have a very soft meaning of ‘to ask,’ but here I think ‘demands’ is best, in the sense of ‘requires,’ ‘obliges,’ not in the literal sense of asking coercively.