Victoire Éclair
L'oiseau bêche la terre,
Le serpent sème,
La mort améliorée
Applaudit la récolte.
Pluton dans le ciel!
L'explosion en nous
Là seulement dans moi.
Fol et sourd, comment pourrais-je l'être davantage?
Plus de second soi-même, de visage changeant, plus de saison pour la flamme et de saison pour l'ombre!
Avec la lente neige descendent les lépreux.
Soudain l'amour, l'égal la terreur,
D'une main jamais vue arrête l'icendie, redresse le soleil, reconstruit
l'Amie.
Rien n'annonçait une existence si forte.
— René Char
Lightning Victory
The bird tills the soil,
The serpent sows,
Death, enriched,
Praises the harvest.
Pluto in the sky!
In ourselves the explosion.
There is myself only.
Mad and deaf, how could I be more so?
No more second self, nor changing face, no more season of flame and season
of shadow!
The lepers come down with the slow snow.
Suddenly love, the equal of terror,
With a hand I had never seen, puts an end to the fire, straightens the sun,
reshapes the beloved.
Nothing had heralded so strong an existence.
— René Char (translated by W. S. Merwin)
Tournesol
La voyageuse qui traverse les Halles à la tombée de l'été
Marchait sur la pointe des pieds
Le désespoir roulait au ciel ses grands arums si beaux
Et dans le sac à main il y avait mon rêve ce flacon de sels
Que seule a respiré la marraine de Dieu
Les torpeurs se déployaient comme la buée
Au Chien qui fume
Ou venaient d'entrer le pour et le contre
La jeune femme ne pouvait être vue d'eux que mal et de biais
Avais-je affaire à l'ambassadrice du salpêtre
Ou de la courbe blanche sur fond noir que nous appelons pensée
Les lampions prenaient feu lentement dans les marronniers
La dame sans ombre s'agenouilla sur le Pont-au-Change
Rue Git-le-Coeur les timbres n'étaient plus les mêmes
Les promesses de nuits étaient enfin tenues
Les pigeons voyageurs les baisers de secours
Se joignaient aux seins de la belle inconnue
Dardés sous le crêpe des significations parfaites
Une ferme prospérait en plein Paris
Et ses fenêtres donnaient sur la voie lactée
Mais personne ne l'habitait encore à cause des survenants
Des survenants qu'on sait plus devoués que les revenants
Les uns comme cette femme ont l'air de nager
Et dans l'amour il entre un peu de leur substance
Elle les interiorise
Je ne suis le jouet d'aucune puissance sensorielle
Et pourtant le grillon qui chantait dans les cheveux de cendres
Un soir près de la statue d'Etienne Marcel
M'a jeté un coup d'oeil d'intelligence
André Breton a-t-il dit passe
— André Breton
Sunflower
The traveler who crossed Les Halles at summer’s end
Walked on tiptoe
Despair rolled its great handsome lilies across the sky
And in her handbag was my dream that flask of salts
That only God’s godmother had breathed
Torpors unfurled like mist
At the Chien qui Fume
Where pro and con had just entered
They could hardly see the young woman and then only at an angle
Was I dealing with the ambassadress of saltpeter
Or with the white curve on black background we call thought
The Innocents’ Ball was in full swing
The Chinese lanterns slowly caught fire in chestnut trees
The shadowless lady knelt on the Pont-au-Change
On Rue Gît-le-Coeur the stamps had changed
The night’s promises had been kept at last
The carrier pigeons and emergency kisses
Merged with the beautiful stranger’s breasts
Jutting beneath the crepe of perfect meanings
A farm prospered in the heart of Paris
And its windows looked out on the Milky Way
But no one lived there yet because of the guests
Guests who are known to be more faithful than ghosts
Some like that woman appear to be swimming
And a bit of their substance becomes part of love
She internalizes them
I am the plaything of no sensory power
And yet the cricket who sang in hair of ash
One evening near the statue of Etienne Marcel
Threw me a knowing glance
Andre Breton it said pass
— André Breton (translated by Mark Polizzotti)
The René Char poem I've enjoyed for some time, I can't remember where now but maybe a movie or something I was reading or some show I watched(???) I heard the line, "In ourselves the explosion." from that Char poem and it stuck w/ me.
The Breton poem I came across in the biography of him I just (finally) finished reading, I was caught by his phrase 'emergency kisses' which is the title of a Stereolab song. The poem "Sunflower", is one of his more well known poems so I figured they cribbed it from him. A little while later in the biography a line from another of his poems was mentioned, "The whale and her calf/ in the milky night." which also has a strong Stereolab connection, the 'milky night ' part at least. After seeing that one, I think I started doing some looking on the internet and I found a bunch of interviews from the time of their album "Cobra and Phases Group Play Voltage in the Milky Night" (which is the one that contains the track "The Emergency Kisses"), where Tim or Lætitia mentions reading a biography of André Breton while working on that album. It was after seeing those interviews that I came across the final Stereolab cribbed line from the biography which was something about the Cobra and Phases groups.
