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El desnudo perdido
Le nu perdu(1971,René CHAR) Porteront rameaux ceux dont l'endurance sait user la nuit noueuse qui précède et suit l'éclair. Leur parole reçoit existence du fruit intermittent qui la propage en se dilacérant. Ils sont les fils incestueux de l'entaille et du signe, qui élevèrent aux margelles le cercle en fleurs de la jarre du ralliement. La rage des vents les maintient encore dévêtus. Contre eux vole un duvet de nuit noire. René Char.
188 pages, Paperback
First published September 1, 1971
25 people want to read
About the author
René Char
147 books130 followersRené Char spent his childhood in Névons, the substantial family home completed at his birth, then studied as a boarder at the school of Avignon and subsequently, in 1925, a student at L'École de Commerce de Marseille, where he read Plutarch, François Villon, Racine, the German Romantics, Alfred de Vigny, Gérard de Nerval and Charles Baudelaire.
His first book, Cloches sur le cœur was published in 1928 as a compilation of poems written between 1922 and 1926. In late November 1929, Char moved to Paris, where he met Louis Aragon, André Breton, and René Crevel, and joined the surrealists. He remained active in the surrealist movement through the early 1930s but distanced himself gradually from the mid-1930s onward. Throughout his career, Char's work appeared in various editions, often with artwork by notable figures, including Kandinsky, Picasso, Braque, Miró, Matisse and Vieira da Silva.
Char was a friend and close associate of Albert Camus, Georges Bataille and Maurice Blanchot among writers, Pablo Picasso, Joan Miró, Nicolas de Staël, Georges Braque and Victor Brauner among painters. He was to have been in the car involved in the accident that killed both Camus and Gallimard, but there was not enough room, and returned instead that day by train to Paris.
The composer Pierre Boulez wrote three settings of Char's poetry, Le Soleil des eaux, Le visage nuptial, and Le marteau sans maître. A late friendship developed also between Char and Martin Heidegger, who described Char's poetry as "a tour de force into the ineffable" and was repeatedly his guest at La Thor in the Vaucluse.
His first book, Cloches sur le cœur was published in 1928 as a compilation of poems written between 1922 and 1926. In late November 1929, Char moved to Paris, where he met Louis Aragon, André Breton, and René Crevel, and joined the surrealists. He remained active in the surrealist movement through the early 1930s but distanced himself gradually from the mid-1930s onward. Throughout his career, Char's work appeared in various editions, often with artwork by notable figures, including Kandinsky, Picasso, Braque, Miró, Matisse and Vieira da Silva.
Char was a friend and close associate of Albert Camus, Georges Bataille and Maurice Blanchot among writers, Pablo Picasso, Joan Miró, Nicolas de Staël, Georges Braque and Victor Brauner among painters. He was to have been in the car involved in the accident that killed both Camus and Gallimard, but there was not enough room, and returned instead that day by train to Paris.
The composer Pierre Boulez wrote three settings of Char's poetry, Le Soleil des eaux, Le visage nuptial, and Le marteau sans maître. A late friendship developed also between Char and Martin Heidegger, who described Char's poetry as "a tour de force into the ineffable" and was repeatedly his guest at La Thor in the Vaucluse.
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
January 20, 2022
Traced upon the Abyss
In the chimerical wound of Vaucluse I watched you suffering. There, although subsided, you were green water, and yet a road. You traversed death in its disorder. Flower valleyed by a continuous secret.
* * *
Mirage of the Peaks
They take for clarity the jaundices laughter of shadows. They weigh in their hands death's remains and exclaim: "This is not for us." No precious viaticum embellishes the mouth of their uncoiled snakes. Their wife betrays them, their children rob them, their friends mock them. They see none of it, through hatred of darkness. Does creation's diamond cast oblique fires? Quickly a decoy to shroud it. They thrust in their oven, they place in the smooth dough of their bread just a small pinch of wheaten despair. They have settled and they prosper in the cradle of a sea where glaciers have been mastered. Be warned.
How may we, as a frail beginner, convert the future and rake out this fire interrogated and stirred up so often, which was caught on your offending gaze?
The present s only a game or a massacre of archers.
From then on faithful to his love as is the sky to the rock. Faithful, fused, bu ceaselessly wandering, concealing his way through all the sweep revealed by the fire, held by the wind; the sweep, the butcher's hoard, bleeding on a hook.
* * *
Forerunner
I have recognized, in a rock, death fugal and measurable, the open bed of its small assistants under the seclusion of a fig tree. No sign of a stone-cutter: each morning of the earth opened its wings at the foot of night's flight of steps.
Without repetition, freed from fear of men, I dig in the air my grave and my return.
* * *
Venasque
The frosts round up the pack of you,
Men who burn hotter than any bush;
Winter's long winds mean to hang you.
The stone roof is the scaffold
Of a church frozen standing.
* * *
Alsace - That Part of the World
I showed you La Petite-Pierre, the dowry of its forest, the sky born at the tips of the branches,
The compass of its birds of the branches,
The twice-living pollen under the flare of the flowers,
A tower they're hoisting in the distance like the pirate's canvas,
The lake once again the mill's cradle, a child's sleep.
There, where my belt of snow oppressed me,
Under the eave of a rock flecked with crows,
I've left the need for winter.
We love each other today with no beyond and no issue,
Ardent or effaced, different yet together,
Turning away from the stars whose nature is to fly and never arrive.
The ship is bound for the high sea's vegetation.
With all lights dowsed she takes us aboard.
We were up before dawn in her memory.
She sheltered our childhoods, ballasted our golden age,
There at our call, the traveling host, while we believe her truth.
* * *
Sentinel of the Mute
In the rampart the stones huddled together and men lived on the moss of stones. The dead of night carried a rifle and women no longer gave birth. Ignominy resembled a glass of water.
I have joined in the courage of a few beings, have lived violently, without growing older, my mystery in their midst, I have trembled at the existence of all the others like an incontinent boat above the partitioned depths.
* * *
Nakedness Lost
They will bear boughs, they whose endurance has learned to wear out the gnarled night which precedes and follows the flash. Their speech receives existence from the intermittent fruit that spreads it by tearing itself apart. They are the incestuous sons of the gash and of the sign, who raised on the well-rims the blossom circle of the jar of rallying. The winds' fury keeps them still unclothed. Against them there flies a down of black night.
* * *
Septentrion
- I have been out walking on the bank of the Folie -
To my heart's questions,
Although it did not ask them,
The woman beside me submitted,
So inventive is absence.
And her eyes subsiding like the violet Nile
Seemed endlessly counting their earnings thinning out
Under the cool stones.
The Folie wore in her hair long cutting reeds.
Somewhere that brook was living its double life.
The cruel gold of its name, sudden invader,
Was coming to give battle to adverse fortune.
* * *
The Fig-tree's Lied
It froze so hard, the milky branches
Harassed the saw, snapped in men's hands.
Spring did not see the gracious ones grow green.
The fig-tree asked the master of the recumbent
For the bush of a new faith.
But the oriole, its prophet,
The warm dawn of its homing,
In alighting on the disaster,
Instead of hunger, perished of love.
* * *
The Vertical Village
Like the wolves ennobled
By their vanishing
We lie in wait for the year of
Dread and liberation.
The snowed-in wolves
Of remote hunts
With the date effaced.
Under the rumbling future,
Furtive, we are waiting
For, to bring us together,
The upland amplitude.
We know that Things do happen
Suddenly,
Somber or too ornate.
The dart joining both sheets together,
Life against life, clamour and mountain,
Flashed.
* * *
October Judgement
Cheek to cheek two wretches in their stiffened distress;
Frost and wind have taught them nothing, have neglected them;
Daughters of remote history
Fallen from the rushing seasons and standing there huddled.
No lips to transpose them, time moves on.
There's be no abduction, no rancor.
And anyone walking along passes by them, by us, without a glance.
Two roses perforated by a deep ring
Are putting into their quaintness a little defiance.
Does one lose life otherwise than by thorns?
By the flower, of course, as the long days have learned!
And the sun has ceased to be initial.
A night, day low, full risk, two roses,
Like the flame under cover, cheek by cheek with the creature who is killing her.
* * *
Wrestlers
In the sky of men, the star's bread seemed to me shadowy and hardened, but in their narrow hands I read the joust of these stars calling others: emigrants from below deck still dreaming; I gathered their golden sweat, and through me the earth ceased to die.
* * *
Default of Heirs
The night was old always
When fire set it ajar.
So with my house.
One never kills the rose
In the sky's wars of the sky.
One does exile a lyre.
My persistent grief
Out of a snow cloud
Obtains a lake of blood.
Cruelty likes to live.
Oh spring who gave the lie
To our twin destinies,
Of the wolf I shall raise
This sole pensive likeness.
* * *
End of Solemnities
Strengthened by the goodness of a winter fruit, I carried the fire into the house. The civilization of storms formed drop by drop at the roof's tiled eaves. I shall be able at leisure to hate tradition, to dream of the frost of passersby on paths not particular. But to whom might I entrust my children never born? Solitude was stripped of its spices, the white flame mired down, offering from its heat only the expiring gesture.
Without ceremony, I step across this walled-up world: I shall love uncloaked what was trembling under me.
* * *
With One and the Same Bond
Atom astray, young tree,
You're growing tall, I have right of way.
At the sign of the drinking field
We, children, untaught, used to taste
Pure early-morning radiances.
Love that uttered prophecy
Invites fire to take all back.
Oh fruit flown from the maple, your
Future's once upon a time.
Your wings are exanimate flames,
Their leading edge a bitter dew.
At hand, the resurrection rain!
We - we are living on this leisure,
Moon and sun, bridle or whip
In a hallucinated order.
* * *
Exit
Ineffable severeness
That maintained our orchards,
Sleep but waken me.
It was, it will be
The flint moon, one
Quarter striking the next,
Like the united lovers
We reverberate
To a thousand distant flashes.
Who now endures evil
Under its happy forms?
End of reign:
Youth rising.
Ineffable severeness
That maintained our orchards,
To offer all is to spring from you.
* * *
Tradition of the Meteor
Hope I am tempting
Fall is drinking me.
Where the meadow sings
I am, I am not.
The stars tell lies
To the skies inventing me.
None other than me
Passes that way,
But this bird of night
With wings that leave wakes.
*
Pale flesh tendered
On a narrow bed.
Sour flesh surrendered,
Sink below ground.
Stay at the window
Where your fever throbs,
Oh willful heart,
Runner embattled!
On the sprouting frost
You are immortal.
* * *
Mute Game
With my teeth
I have seized life
Up against my youth's knife.
With my lips today,
With my lips only.
The short-reaching
Flower of the roadsides,
Orion's dart,
Has reappeared.
* * *
Course of Clays
Watch acute porter, morning to morning
Long, coiling their jets, the frantic brambles,
The land pressing us with its absent gaze,
The ache growing numb, a cricket's level song,
And a god springing to swell the thirst
Of those whose speech is addressed to living waters.
Then rejoice, dearest, in the fate following:
This death does not end memory in love.
In the chimerical wound of Vaucluse I watched you suffering. There, although subsided, you were green water, and yet a road. You traversed death in its disorder. Flower valleyed by a continuous secret.
* * *
Mirage of the Peaks
They take for clarity the jaundices laughter of shadows. They weigh in their hands death's remains and exclaim: "This is not for us." No precious viaticum embellishes the mouth of their uncoiled snakes. Their wife betrays them, their children rob them, their friends mock them. They see none of it, through hatred of darkness. Does creation's diamond cast oblique fires? Quickly a decoy to shroud it. They thrust in their oven, they place in the smooth dough of their bread just a small pinch of wheaten despair. They have settled and they prosper in the cradle of a sea where glaciers have been mastered. Be warned.
How may we, as a frail beginner, convert the future and rake out this fire interrogated and stirred up so often, which was caught on your offending gaze?
The present s only a game or a massacre of archers.
From then on faithful to his love as is the sky to the rock. Faithful, fused, bu ceaselessly wandering, concealing his way through all the sweep revealed by the fire, held by the wind; the sweep, the butcher's hoard, bleeding on a hook.
* * *
Forerunner
I have recognized, in a rock, death fugal and measurable, the open bed of its small assistants under the seclusion of a fig tree. No sign of a stone-cutter: each morning of the earth opened its wings at the foot of night's flight of steps.
Without repetition, freed from fear of men, I dig in the air my grave and my return.
* * *
Venasque
The frosts round up the pack of you,
Men who burn hotter than any bush;
Winter's long winds mean to hang you.
The stone roof is the scaffold
Of a church frozen standing.
* * *
Alsace - That Part of the World
I showed you La Petite-Pierre, the dowry of its forest, the sky born at the tips of the branches,
The compass of its birds of the branches,
The twice-living pollen under the flare of the flowers,
A tower they're hoisting in the distance like the pirate's canvas,
The lake once again the mill's cradle, a child's sleep.
There, where my belt of snow oppressed me,
Under the eave of a rock flecked with crows,
I've left the need for winter.
We love each other today with no beyond and no issue,
Ardent or effaced, different yet together,
Turning away from the stars whose nature is to fly and never arrive.
The ship is bound for the high sea's vegetation.
With all lights dowsed she takes us aboard.
We were up before dawn in her memory.
She sheltered our childhoods, ballasted our golden age,
There at our call, the traveling host, while we believe her truth.
* * *
Sentinel of the Mute
In the rampart the stones huddled together and men lived on the moss of stones. The dead of night carried a rifle and women no longer gave birth. Ignominy resembled a glass of water.
I have joined in the courage of a few beings, have lived violently, without growing older, my mystery in their midst, I have trembled at the existence of all the others like an incontinent boat above the partitioned depths.
* * *
Nakedness Lost
They will bear boughs, they whose endurance has learned to wear out the gnarled night which precedes and follows the flash. Their speech receives existence from the intermittent fruit that spreads it by tearing itself apart. They are the incestuous sons of the gash and of the sign, who raised on the well-rims the blossom circle of the jar of rallying. The winds' fury keeps them still unclothed. Against them there flies a down of black night.
* * *
Septentrion
- I have been out walking on the bank of the Folie -
To my heart's questions,
Although it did not ask them,
The woman beside me submitted,
So inventive is absence.
And her eyes subsiding like the violet Nile
Seemed endlessly counting their earnings thinning out
Under the cool stones.
The Folie wore in her hair long cutting reeds.
Somewhere that brook was living its double life.
The cruel gold of its name, sudden invader,
Was coming to give battle to adverse fortune.
* * *
The Fig-tree's Lied
It froze so hard, the milky branches
Harassed the saw, snapped in men's hands.
Spring did not see the gracious ones grow green.
The fig-tree asked the master of the recumbent
For the bush of a new faith.
But the oriole, its prophet,
The warm dawn of its homing,
In alighting on the disaster,
Instead of hunger, perished of love.
* * *
The Vertical Village
Like the wolves ennobled
By their vanishing
We lie in wait for the year of
Dread and liberation.
The snowed-in wolves
Of remote hunts
With the date effaced.
Under the rumbling future,
Furtive, we are waiting
For, to bring us together,
The upland amplitude.
We know that Things do happen
Suddenly,
Somber or too ornate.
The dart joining both sheets together,
Life against life, clamour and mountain,
Flashed.
* * *
October Judgement
Cheek to cheek two wretches in their stiffened distress;
Frost and wind have taught them nothing, have neglected them;
Daughters of remote history
Fallen from the rushing seasons and standing there huddled.
No lips to transpose them, time moves on.
There's be no abduction, no rancor.
And anyone walking along passes by them, by us, without a glance.
Two roses perforated by a deep ring
Are putting into their quaintness a little defiance.
Does one lose life otherwise than by thorns?
By the flower, of course, as the long days have learned!
And the sun has ceased to be initial.
A night, day low, full risk, two roses,
Like the flame under cover, cheek by cheek with the creature who is killing her.
* * *
Wrestlers
In the sky of men, the star's bread seemed to me shadowy and hardened, but in their narrow hands I read the joust of these stars calling others: emigrants from below deck still dreaming; I gathered their golden sweat, and through me the earth ceased to die.
* * *
Default of Heirs
The night was old always
When fire set it ajar.
So with my house.
One never kills the rose
In the sky's wars of the sky.
One does exile a lyre.
My persistent grief
Out of a snow cloud
Obtains a lake of blood.
Cruelty likes to live.
Oh spring who gave the lie
To our twin destinies,
Of the wolf I shall raise
This sole pensive likeness.
* * *
End of Solemnities
Strengthened by the goodness of a winter fruit, I carried the fire into the house. The civilization of storms formed drop by drop at the roof's tiled eaves. I shall be able at leisure to hate tradition, to dream of the frost of passersby on paths not particular. But to whom might I entrust my children never born? Solitude was stripped of its spices, the white flame mired down, offering from its heat only the expiring gesture.
Without ceremony, I step across this walled-up world: I shall love uncloaked what was trembling under me.
* * *
With One and the Same Bond
Atom astray, young tree,
You're growing tall, I have right of way.
At the sign of the drinking field
We, children, untaught, used to taste
Pure early-morning radiances.
Love that uttered prophecy
Invites fire to take all back.
Oh fruit flown from the maple, your
Future's once upon a time.
Your wings are exanimate flames,
Their leading edge a bitter dew.
At hand, the resurrection rain!
We - we are living on this leisure,
Moon and sun, bridle or whip
In a hallucinated order.
* * *
Exit
Ineffable severeness
That maintained our orchards,
Sleep but waken me.
It was, it will be
The flint moon, one
Quarter striking the next,
Like the united lovers
We reverberate
To a thousand distant flashes.
Who now endures evil
Under its happy forms?
End of reign:
Youth rising.
Ineffable severeness
That maintained our orchards,
To offer all is to spring from you.
* * *
Tradition of the Meteor
Hope I am tempting
Fall is drinking me.
Where the meadow sings
I am, I am not.
The stars tell lies
To the skies inventing me.
None other than me
Passes that way,
But this bird of night
With wings that leave wakes.
*
Pale flesh tendered
On a narrow bed.
Sour flesh surrendered,
Sink below ground.
Stay at the window
Where your fever throbs,
Oh willful heart,
Runner embattled!
On the sprouting frost
You are immortal.
* * *
Mute Game
With my teeth
I have seized life
Up against my youth's knife.
With my lips today,
With my lips only.
The short-reaching
Flower of the roadsides,
Orion's dart,
Has reappeared.
* * *
Course of Clays
Watch acute porter, morning to morning
Long, coiling their jets, the frantic brambles,
The land pressing us with its absent gaze,
The ache growing numb, a cricket's level song,
And a god springing to swell the thirst
Of those whose speech is addressed to living waters.
Then rejoice, dearest, in the fate following:
This death does not end memory in love.
June 8, 2021
Atom astray, young tree,
You're growing tall, I have right of way.
At the sign of the drinking field
We, children, untaught, used to taste
Pure early-morning radiances.
Love that uttered prophecy
Invites fire to take all back.
Oh fruit flown from the maple, your
Future's once upon a time.
Your wings are exanimate flames,
Their leading edge a bitter dew.
At hand, the resurrection rain!
We—we are living on this leisure,
Moon and sun, bridle or whip,
In a hallucinated order.
- - -
Like the wolves ennobled
By their vanishing
We lie in wait for the year of
Dread and liberation.
The snowed-in wolves
Of remote hunts
With date effaced.
Under the rumbling future,
Furtive, we are waiting
For, to bring us together,
The upland amplitude.
We know that Things do happen
Suddenly,
Somber or too ornate.
The dart joining both sheets together,
Life against life, clamor and mountain,
Flashed.
- - -
It froze so hard, the milky branches
Harassed the saw, snapped in men's hands.
Spring did not see the gracious ones grow green.
The fig-tree asked the master of the recumbent
For the bush of a new faith.
But the oriole, its prophet,
The warm dawn of its homing,
In alighting on the disaster,
Instead of hunger, perished of love.
- - -
Watch, acute porter, morning to morning
Long, coiling their jets, the frantic brambles,
The land pressing us with its absent gaze,
The ache growing numb, a cricket's level song,
And a god springing only to swell the thirst
Of those whose speech is addressed to living waters.
Then rejoice, dearest, in the fate following:
This death does not end memory in love.
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