by Robert Desnos [The real ‘last poem’, 6 April 1944]
Translated by Timothy Adès
Day 514 of the daily new poems, and Timothy Adès writes: My biggest book is: Robert Desnos, Surrealist, Lover, Resistant. This is his last poem, 6 April 1944. Arrested and sent east, he is at Compiègne. On 30 April he will arrive at Auschwitz; then three more camps, slave labour, and a death march to Terezin, where he dies in June 1945. ~ Another poem was wrongly assumed to be his last: a fragment, translated into Czech and back into French, of an old love poem, taken to be for Liberty or for France. It was for the uncaring Yvonne.
Rrose Sélavy, beyond these bounds you stray.
Meanwhile the waters and the earth ferment;
The rose on fortress-walls pours out its scent;
Love has its sweats and springtime is their prey.
The rose has torn the stone-limbed dancer’s side.
While others plough and sow, he treads the boards.
The public, blind and deaf and dumb, applaud
This rite of Spring, when he has danced and died.
The word that’s writ in soot is wiped away
At the wind’s whim by fingers of the rain.
Nevertheless we hear it and obey.
Down at the wash-place where these waters run,
A cloud portrays both soap and hurricane,
Retreating when the thickets bloom in sun.
by Robert Desnos [The real ‘last poem’, 6 April 1944]
Translated by Timothy Adès