Robert Desnos: Night of Loveless Nights

Daniel Barbiero
June 2023

Robert Desnos: Night of Loveless Nights
Translated by Lewis Warsh
Winter Editions, May 2023

Lewis Warsh’s translation of Robert Desnos’ long poem “The Night of Loveless Nights” holds claim to having been the first book by the French poet to be published in English. Originally published in 1973 as issue 10 of The Ant’s Forefoot, Warsh’s translation came out 43 years after the original publication of the poem in book form in 1930, and nearly 30 years after Desnos’ death in June 1945 of typhus in the Thersienstadt (Terezin) concentration camp, where he had been sent after his arrest in 1944 for participation in the Resistance. Despite the distances of time and place separating Warsh (1944-2020), a second-generation New York school poet, and the Parisian Desnos, one of the early Surrealists, there is a natural affinity between Desnos’ exoteric Surrealism and Warsh’s surrealistically inflected vernacular, which is brought out in Warsh’s translation. On the fiftieth anniversary of its original publication we have Warsh’s Desnos once again, in this fine, bilingual edition.

Enter, and Exit, the Medium

Robert Desnos (1900-1945) was born into a working-class Parisian family. Although his formal schooling ended at age sixteen, he continued to educate himself through extensive reading and was mentored in the language arts by the journalist Jean de Bonnefon, for whom he worked as secretary, and the poet Louis de Gonzague. It was at the Certa, a bar in the old Passage de l’ Opéra, that Desnos, on leave from the Army, was introduced to André Breton by his friend Benjamin Péret in spring 1921. Desnos began frequenting the group gathered around Breton in 1922, shortly after he completed his military service. It was a time of transition, when Breton and Dada were evolving into what would become Surrealist movement. From September 1922 to February 1923, Desnos participated in the group’s experiments with hypnosis and automatic speech and writing. He was remarkable for the ease with which he could be hypnotized, and for the fluency of his verbal output while asleep — he often spoke and wrote in fully formed alexandrines and could mimic the puns Marcel Duchamp was then creating through his alter ego Rrose Sélavy. Desnos quickly became the central figure in these experiments and by all accounts was dependent on the attention and esteem it won him, particularly from Breton, whose November 1922 essay “Entrée des médiums” (“The Mediums Enter”) prominently featured a transcript of the hypnotized Desnos’ responses to questions the group put to him.

Although the experiments were discontinued largely due to Desnos’ increasingly erratic and violent behavior while hypnotized, he remained with the group for another several years, even if his attitude toward the group’s direction in general and Breton in particular became progressively more ambivalent. The final break came at the end of 1929. It had been precipitated by the notorious Bar du Château meeting of 11 March 1929, which Breton and Aragon had called in order to discuss the possibility and desirability of collective action, but which devolved into a quasi-trial of the Grand Jeu group. Desnos’ response to the letter of invitation was unenthusiastic but not outright negative; in any event, he chose not to attend and was, in Breton biographer Mark Polizzotti’s description, “sickened” by the inquisitorial turn the meeting had taken (p. 284). As a consequence of that incident, and because of ideological and personal disagreements that had been simmering for some time, by May Desnos had drawn away from Breton and toward Georges Bataille, with whose journal Documents he had become associated, and whom Breton saw as a rival.

Despite epistolary attempts at reconciliation, Desnos’ break with Breton was complete by December 1929, and he comes in for especially harsh excoriation in Breton’s Second Manifesto of that month. Desnos replied soon after with his own “Third Manifesto of Surrealism,” which was less a programmatic statement than a recitation of grievances against Breton and an accusation that the latter’s hypocrisy and other sins disqualified him from claims to being the custodian and arbiter of the movement’s ideals. If Breton’s comments on Desnos in the Second Manifesto betray Breton’s hurt and disappointment, Desnos’ “Third Manifesto” responds in kind. It is a remarkable document of unconcealed pain, anger, and disillusionment, and Desnos biographer Katharine Conley is surely right to characterize the tone of Desnos’ reaction to Breton’s denunciations as involving emotions akin to those “often associated with romantic breakups.” Desnos had more or less idealized Breton, and even as late as the 1940s, he is reported to have described Breton as the man he most admired (Conley, p. 68).

During the same time that his troubles with Breton and the Surrealist group were playing out, Desnos found himself under the spell of an intense yet fruitless romantic infatuation with the Belgian-born cabaret chanteuse Yvonne George, née Yvonne de Knops. George inspired Desnos to write the famous “J’ai tant rêvé de toi,” a love poem that obsessively idealizes its object. Desnos’ friend Théodore Fraenkel, a medical doctor and early adherent of Dada and Surrealism, described Desnos’ love for George as “extreme, violent, painful, and tirelessly attentive…For almost a decade he lived only for her and did errands for her which were at times dangerous” (quoted in Conley, p. 48). These “dangerous” errands consisted of procuring the drugs she was addicted to. Despite George’s not reciprocating his feelings for her, Desnos remained dedicated to her until she died, weakened by morphine, opium, and alcohol use, of tuberculosis in Genoa in 1930.

It was against this emotionally volatile background of unrequited love and a broken friendship that Desnos wrote “The Night of Loveless Nights.”

“The Night of Loveless Nights”

Begun in 1926 and finished 1928-1929, “The Night of Loveless Nights” — Desnos titled it in English — was composed in collaboration with painter Georges Malkine, Desnos’ closest friend at the time, who provided drawings to accompany Desnos’ verse. Much of it is written in the classic French twelve-syllable rhymed alexandrine, a form Desnos was fluent enough in to have used while hypnotized. (It’s notable that in the Second Manifesto Breton rather spitefully condemned Desnos’ alexandrines as “bad (false, padded, and empty).”) But it also includes prose-like passages and sections of free verse; taken as a whole, it is a sequence of disparate and sometimes abruptly juxtaposed elements that represents an amalgamation of the classical and the everyday, of elements drawn from both high and low culture. Desnos’ imagery can run to the extravagantly surreal, but much of the poem, particularly the sections approaching conventional love poetry, is direct in its expression. Desnos’ affinity for traditional poetic structures and writing for a popular audience was a point of tension between Desnos and the Surrealist group: one of the factors contributing to Desnos’ break with Breton was the former’s pursuit of journalism, which Breton anathematized, and what Conley called Desnos’ “desire for clearer communicativeness” rather than for letting language associate freely in the wild territory between waking and sleeping. Desnos was in fact moving at this time “toward more concrete modes of poetic and surrealist communication, in more sensual, material forms.” (Conley, p. 61). “The Night of Loveless Nights” reflects this orientation toward concrete and sensual—and yet at the same time surreal — communication.

Warsh’s translation doesn’t attempt to replicate the rhyme or syllabic schemes of the original, but instead focuses on Desnos’ handling of language and imagery, which set the poem’s overall tone. Here, for example, is the opening:

Hideous night, putrid and glacial,
Night of disabled ghosts and rotting plants,
Incandescent night, flame and fire in the pits,
Shades of darkness without lightning, duplicity and lies.

Who sees rivers crashing inside himself?
Suicides, trespassers, sailors? Explode
Malignant tumors on the skin of passing shadows,
These eyes have already seen me, shouts resound!

In the original, the long initial section consists of the rhymed quatrains of classical alexandrine verse. Warsh forgoes rhyme here as he does wherever it occurs, but he brings Desnos’ images over vividly, and his diction and phrasing have an effective, natural rhythm.

These first two stanzas set the poem’s emotional tone and introduce some of the figures that will recur throughout. Ghosts; rot and decay; darkness; suicide; images of marine life and ocean-going, particularly of shipwrecks — Desnos returns again and again to these motifs and their variations. It is hard not to read them as reflecting the turmoil he was undergoing — with George, certainly, and with Breton as well–at the time he was writing the poem. As Mary Ann Caws has noted in her reading of the poem, the recurrence of certain images and symbols is one of the factors that gives a sense of continuity to this long collage pieced together out of formally diverse parts.

One such image, the overriding image that defines the poem’s affective environment, is of night:

Night of nights without love strangled from the dream
Night of blood night of fire night of war without truce
Night of a lost path among the stairs
And of the feet falling too heavily onto the landing
Night of luxury night of the fall into the abyss
Night of the chains ringing in the room of the criminals
Night of naked ghosts gliding in the beds
Night of waking when the sleepers are weak

Night is the poem’s setting just as it was the setting of Desnos’ hypnotic sleeping fits, which these lines obliquely recall.

Hands, too, are a constant refrain, which Desnos makes the centerpiece of a long, repetitive and incantatory passage:

There are terrible hands
Hand black from the ink of a sad schoolboy
Hand red on the wall of the room of crime
Hand pale as death
Hands which hold a knife or a revolver
Hands opened
Hands closed
Wretched hands grasping a pen holder

The hand here is an ambiguous symbol of one or more personae, perhaps different facets of a single personality; later on, the image of the hand carries the memory of the loved one that leads to a disturbed outburst:

I can still remember some white hands in the darkness
outspread on the table in expectation
I can remember hands whose embrace was dear to me
And I don’t know anything
There are too many traitors too many liars
Ah the very hand which writes
A knife! an arm! a tool!
All except writing!
In blood in blood!

Here Desnos seems to describe a hallucinated conflation of the white hands on the table. They may belong to the object of desire or to the poet as he sits expectantly at a table waiting to write (waiting for a flow of automatic language to erupt?). The hand is at once an implicit threat (“a knife”) and at the same time the instrument through which the poem can come to be.

In addition to its obsessive circling about the image of the hand, this passage is notable for its fascination with crime, weapons, and death. This tendency toward the macabre overhangs the entire poem and is the reverse side of an emotional coin whose obverse is of erotic longing.

The Affinity of Ironies

Given the circumstances surrounding the poem’s composition, it isn’t surprising that longing dominates several long sections. Some of these are structured as rhymed quatrains or couplets, and some are cast in freer form, most notably a long italicized sequence of four-line groupings beginning with “to sleep with her” (“coucher avec elle”). Warsh’s translation of that sequence, as well as of other sections, demonstrates an improvisational flair — something that Desnos, an early enthusiast of jazz, would surely appreciate. He seems to have let the sensual dimensions of Desnos’ language — its sounds, shapes, physical resemblances to English words — suggest translations other than what a stricter reading through context ordinarily would determine. For example, for Desnos’

Coucher coucher avec elle
Pour l’amour absolu
Pour le vice pour le vice
Pour les baisers de toute espèce

Warsh gets:

To really sleep with her
For the absolute love
For the true vice
And the embrace of all species

A more literal translation would be: “To sleep, to sleep with her/ For absolute love/ For vice, for vice/ For embraces [or kisses] of every kind.” Warsh’s version is more colloquial and carries a more natural rhythm, which isn’t at odds with the more direct, popular approach to poetry Desnos was moving toward during the time he wrote “The Night of Loveless Nights.” As the last line, with its marked transformation of Desnos’ meaning shows, Warsh’s is almost a translation through punning — a free play driven by words’ suggestiveness rather than their meanings. Such free play turns up at various points and is a kind of signature of Warsh’s translation, marking it as uniquely his in the way that a signature authenticates the identity of the person whose mark it is.

What this punning translation shows is that what otherwise would seem like a misreading is in a fact a creative reading when we consider it as a dialogic encounter between Warsh’s particular way of inhabiting language, with its sensitivity to the poetic potential of the extra-semantic qualities of words, and Desnos’ own language. (And it is one of the virtues of the book that it presents Desnos’ original French facing Warsh’s English.) Gadamer’s idea that an interpreter’s own horizon of understanding is decisive not only in determining the possibilities available to interpretation, but is something the interpreted text can put at risk, comes to mind here. Warsh’s translation represents the realization of certain interpretive possibilities made possible by his own poetic sensibilities, which Desnos’ text both draws out and challenges.

If Warsh’s deviations from the given as literally constituted take liberties with Desnos’ meaning, as sometimes happens, they also give his translation a deliberate hanging-looseness that in its hints of spontaneity not only rings true to the sensibilities of its own time, but also isn’t too far in spirit from the automatism that was the hallmark of Desnos’ early Surrealism. David Rosenberg, poet and editor of The Ant’s Forefoot from 1967-1973 and the figure responsible for the original publication of Warsh’s translation, wryly notes in his Afterword that Warsh in effect reimagined Desnos’ “opium-irony” of the late 1920s through the “pot-irony” of the early 1970s. And it may be through this convergence of ironies in Warsh’s translation that words’ secret affinities, as Breton called them in “Marvelous versus Mystery,” could reveal themselves through the extra-semantic, non-utilitarian associations implicated in language that are there to be discovered — or invented — by those able to find or concoct them. For it may be by loosening the restrictions imposed by meaning—by short-circuiting the semantic lucidity that Breton described as “the major enemy of revelation”–that new, associative meanings may be established or latent meanings brought out, or non-meanings made into meaning. And perhaps therein lies the “whiff of automatism” Rosenberg suggests pervades Warsh’s translation, which in its way may have made for a translation truer by its own lights than one more literally true.

Other sources:

André Breton, “Marvelous versus Mystery,” in Free Rein, tr. Michel Parmentier and Jacqueline D’Amboise (Lincoln, NE: U of Nebraska Press, 1995).
___________, “The Mediums Enter,” in The Lost Steps, tr. Mark Polizzotti (Lincoln, NE: U of Nebraska Press, 1996).
___________, Second Manifesto of Surrealism, in Manifestoes of Surrealism, tr. Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan Press, 1972).

Mary Ann Caws, The Surrealist Voice of Robert Desnos (Amherst, MA: U of Massachusetts Press, 1977).

Katharine Conley, Robert Desnos, Surrealism, and the Marvelous in Everyday Life (Lincoln, NE: U of Nebraska Press, 2003).

Mark Polizzotti, Revolution of the Mind: The Life of André Breton, Revised and Updated (Boston: Black Widow Press, 2009).

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Daniel Barbiero is a double bassist, composer, and writer in the Washington DC area. His reviews of poetry and essays have appeared in Heavy Feather Review, periodicities, Word for/Word, Otoliths, and Offcourse. He also writes on the art, music and literature of the classic avant-gardes of the 20th century as well as on contemporary work. His music reviews have been published in Perfect Sound Forever, Point of Departure, Avant Music News, and elsewhere. Barbiero has performed at venues throughout the Washington-Baltimore area and regularly collaborates with artists locally and in Europe. His graphic scores have been realized by ensembles and solo artists in Europe, Asia, and the US. He is the author of As Within, So Without, a collection of essays published by Arteidolia Press.

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