For the Poet, LIFE is PASSION personified and ether(ea)lized...

The Wedding Ceremony of the Dead, Translation of Pierre Emmanuel's "Les Noces de la Mort" by T Wignesan

.................................... I

Orgy of stone !
I drank hate in your inferior parts
And bathed during a wild summer our green sepulchres
O ! death
and my animal mouth became distorted
on those decomposed lips which long ago turned
strange

Stricken by god for having loved you
during transfiguring summers O ! Madeleine
wholly naked breasts dried up by such severe beauty
and by such an impetuous sun between your legs
and upon your flanks two large smelly wounds

I loved you streaming and golden through fatigue
O ! grape of sin ripened by my gaze
I loved your heated mounting sucking in shadows
and the houses your famous teeth and your gardens
all juicy the evening of the dream of whores

Nocturnal city whose walls of tears bitter crypt
the obscene litanies that I have sung that I have prayed
to your Madonnas of pleasure and those testing
the guilt-ridden ex-votos which I trimmed
during my wild years !
How I prayed shed tears sang
How I intoned in a tenebrous voice your praises
at the organ of winter’s rains in the tubas
vertiginous in the shade
and how I walked !

How I stalked Death for a long time under your arcades
with my blood I mixed the oil of cobbled paving
where I looked atrociously for pure crime
amongst discordant murders the agonies
the love

And the svelte leaded-glass window I loved
so naked in the square of memory
that she was visible in the great heaps when her haïr
raving cascaded graminaceous over you revealed
your proud marble...O ! speechless
that she was grave and sculpted by your labours
death which bathed you with her tender arms
that she was tall like down in the depths of the lakes
and that your rivers ran sweet on her ivory

How difficult was the offering of tears where to be
.............crucified,
you appeared
to be betrayed down there in the darkness

How she was superbly black this heavy calice
raised by two hands of blood over your sin

Which
............from the other being never useless
...............................................................is the tomb

II

Lord ! You looked for me
in the vacuous waters of a woman
under the searing myrtles You stifled her
the youthful dead drenched in tears ! And you cried out
more desperately than the light
and You laughed at the earth...one could hear
Your heart beating ferociously amongst the stones
Father of my pain ! You tear apart my demise
but why destroy the cadaver since You want
the blood ? and why the emptiness ? and why
do You let me have this victim ?

Hands sullied by the night Am I the murderer
am I the cursed priest of this death
have I eaten the bread over her and drunken the wine
have I shed Your blood over her
.......................................................have I invented
her body cross of voluptuousness whereupon to have me
........................................................nailed


O ! jealous gods !...What is my crime ?
................................................................I loved her
She was a sword of fury between us
in times gone by,
but dead what can she still retain of my likeness
this forgotten rock pounded by her kisses ?
Is this blasphemy
that these rites of a pious heart
serve as down under the stone’s wing
a black sun in her hair
a sip of shadow at her lips
a portion of autumn in her hand
a herb

But O !
You aren’t at all deceived by these environs
of alleys of tranquil slumber : and You require
that I were naked in the battle !
Here I am
made glorious, a great flag of adorable countryside
Death
at the highest tower of the impossible,
laid out for her !

I am the fort on which converge all vistas
raised on the naked ire of memory
hymn of stone and the resounding tomb
where adorable Easter rises protected in You
she who was death
............................................O ! Sacred One !

You Lord, march into crime !
....................................................amidst
the detonations of the soul and the mammoth
explosions of the depths,
hurry up with the profanes dénouement or the darkness
or it hardly matters the resurrection ! and don’t ever
lift eyes towards the curtain of the theatre.

(from the collection : Tombeau d’Orphée, 1941/1946/1967)
© T. Wignesan – Paris, October 1, 2014 (Translation)





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