Translations from the Night: Selected Poems of Jean-Joseph Rabearivelo

A friend of mine recommended this book, and I am not disappointed - in fact, it's the best book of poetry I have read in several years!

These poems have the extraordinary, vivid imagery of Surrealists like Aimé Césaire or Alfred Jarry, but they have a more mythic feel. And the poems never devolve into playful or angry nonsense; so they have a resonance for me that other Surrealists sometimes lack.

A few love poems in the book are extraordinarily beautiful, but I think I prefer the poems that are a bit more oblique. Even the most oblique poems in this collection suggest numerous ideas and connections. The intuitive sense of meaning is always there to grasp. It is poetry at its very best, engaging the analytic brain without ever show more allowing itself to be mastered and reduced completely by logic alone. As with the best poetry, it can never be fully mastered by analysis because it has a life of its own, though even within its own waywardness. it has an internal logic and associations that make analysis fruitful and that provide a pathway inside of its heart.

There are repeated motifs of dreams, and the tone is by turns wistful and ecstatic. Reading this book, I experienced multiple feelings of revelation. I don't think I'm up to describing the wonderful qualities of this book!

The translator Robert Ziller has done an admirable job of preserving the magic of the experience as well. I'll close with a taste of the poetry itself - here is the last poem as translated by Ziller. I especially love the imagery of the drunk wax:

"Vain, all these anticipations
that claim to give us wings
and promise
that one day we'll seduce some Martian?

Vain too, the dream
that lost Icarus
more than the sun
that drank the marvelous wax?

Yet what certain triumph
announced to me by all these signs
that earth and sky send out
from the borders of sleep:

within our cities of living
even the most humble of huts
respond to the calls of fire
bursting from the newborn stars."

What an extraordinary talent Rabearivelo was, and what a pity that I had never heard of him before! I wonder how well known he is and if it was merely my own ignorance that I didn't know of him? I hope he is as well known as he deserves! show less

Jean-Joseph Rabearivelo was a Malagasy poet, a Francophone writer who is deemed a forerunner of the Negritude movement, and in this way kin, artistically and intellectually, to Césaire, Senghor, Diop, and the other poets and intellectuals of the movement. I found little to tie him to the movement reading these poems. Rabearivelo does write of the ordinary and impoverished people, fishermen and glassmakers, like some of the Negritude poets did, but his poems lack the political charge and urgency found with the latter. These are still marvelous poems; they are poems that reach towards a point of release. With lots of images of flight as means of escape, from references to the sky, frequently called the azure, to birds and Icarus, while show more the poems still remain deeply rooted to the earth with its trees and fauna, and the people, and the awareness that such flight is deluded.

There will be a day, a young poet
who will realize your impossible vow
by having come to know your books
as rare as underground flowers,
your books written for a hundred friends,
and not for one, and not for a thousand.

On the dark gulf where he will re-read you
by just the glow of his heart where
yours will beat again,
he will not see you
in the peaceful swells
that will always be filled with sunless depths,
nor in the sand, nor in the red earth,
nor under the rocks devoured by lichen
that extend behind him
to the land of the living,
blind and deaf since Genesis.
He will lift his head
and think that it's in the azure,
among the stars and the winds,
that your tomb will have been raised.

Reading this incredible poem which read prophetic after I became aware of the facts of Rabearivelo’s life and death was heartbreaking. The conditions in which Rabearivelo lived in colonial Madagascar, in poverty and with little by way of artistic kinship, which made him seek to leave for France, and he was denied this simple request, most likely played a major role in his tragic young death. A terrible yet familiar fate which robbed readers of more wonderful poetry from this beautiful soul. show less

where nothing emerge but blind birds.

What will they reap when they are weary?
What will they hold between their fingers of wind?
Soft berries reddened to blackness
have already become innumerable mushrooms
on the banks of that river where there are no canoe-men
to load all those baskets of nocturnal fruit.