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Daniel Bellm (2013)


Translator's Statement

In 1970, I was a teenage college student, casting around half-blindly in the bookstores of Boston and Cambridge for poems that would speak to me, and there, "by accident," inside Frank O'Hara's companionable little book of Lunch Poems,I came upon one that ended casually, ecstatically, "My heart is in my / pocket, it is Poems by Pierre Reverdy." But who was that? And who doesn't desire such a feeling, of carrying around a secret heart? I certainly did, and soon enough I found that slim volume of Kenneth Rexroth's translations, which guided me back to the original work in French, and I haven't stopped reading Reverdy since, over many years of translating poetry and writing poems of my own.

For the past decade, I've worked on several books by Reverdy that have never been translated into English - most recently the strange, dark, and stirring poems that he wrote in the years just after World War II, living in the northern French countryside, long out of the public eye, a book he called Le chant des morts (The Song of the Dead). In 2006, after seeing an original edition of Le chant des morts in the Museum of Modern Art in New York -- stunningly beautiful, handwritten by the poet, with lithographs by Picasso -- I began the labor of love of translating it, not at all sure that it would lead anywhere, but wanting to make these poems in some way my own.

This fellowship from the NEA to finish translating Le chant des morts came at the perfect time, giving a much-needed boost to a project that had begun to languish, constantly set aside in favor of work that could earn me a living. (In terms of material reward, if there's any activity more downwardly mobile than the writing of poetry, it's the translation of poetry.) Thanks to this support, the manuscript is now nearing completion, and I look forward to sharing this neglected masterpiece with a new audience of English-language readers.

 

About Pierre Reverdy

Pierre Reverdy (1889-1960), a leading figure in twentieth-century French poetry, founded the groundbreaking journal Nord-Sud in 1917 with Max Jacob and Guillaume Apollinaire, publishing those poets and the early work of André Breton, Louis Aragon, Jean Cocteau, and many others. He was closely associated with Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Georges Braque, and Juan Gris, each of whom illustrated one or more of his books. Breton's first Surrealist Manifesto hailed him as "the greatest poet of the time." Reverdy's allusive, dreamlike poems have influenced not only French poets but such American writers as Kenneth Rexroth, Robert Creeley, Frank O'Hara, John Ashbery, Alice Notley, and a new generation of experimenters with language.

 


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Dan Bellm is a poet and translator based in Berkeley, California. His translations of poetry and fiction from Spanish and French have appeared in The American Poetry Review, The Ecco Anthology of International Poetry, The Kenyon Review, Two Lines, Circumference, Pleiades, The Village Voice, and other journals and anthologies. In 2013, several translations of French poet Pierre Reverdy will appear in the anthology, Reverdy (New York Review of Books, NYRB Poets), and his book-length translation of Mexican poet Jorge Esquinca, Description of a Flash of Cobalt Blue, will appear from Unicorn Press. He has also published three books of poetry, most recently Practice (Sixteen Rivers Press), winner of a 2009 California Book Award. He teaches literary translation at Antioch University–Los Angeles and at New York University.

 

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