Jules Superveille's "Haute mer" 于勒. 蘇佩維埃爾的『大海』

Read a poem by a French poet Jules Supervielle last night. It's also about the sea, which Yu Guangzhong also wrote about. But in this poem the feeling is entirely different. It is far more purely descriptive, and far less imbued with any morals. Perhaps in China, the tradition is very strong that the word must always carry a message (文以載道) and be a vehincle for teaching people how to live. In the west, the poem is more purely a means for recording certain emotional experience that the poet may have about one or another aspect of his life. The following poem is typical of this very different attitude.

            Haute Mer                                        High Sea                                          大海

Parmi les oiseaux et les lunes           Amidst the birds and the moons          在那些縈繞水底的

Qui hantent le dessous des mers    Which haunt the underside of the seas 雀鳥與月亮中

Et qu'on devine à la surface              And which one detects upon the surface在哪可在水面

Aux folies phases de l'écume,          the crazy phases of the foam    依稀可見泡沬之各種狂態

 

Parmi l'aveugle témoinage                Amidst the blind witness     在成千上萬不見容顏

Et les sillages sous-marins               and the undersea tracks       及將其路線隱藏起來的魚類

De mille poissons sans visage        of thousands of facelss fishes 及其水下軌跡的 

Qui cachent en eux leur chemin,     which hide in their paths within themselves盲目見証中

 

Le noyé cherche la chanson        the drowned man searches for the song  那被溺者正尋找          

Où s'était formé son jeune âge,    where his youth was moulded,     塑造他年青的那首歌曲

Ecoute en vain les coquillages     listens in vain to the shells           聽著白費心機的海螺殼

Et les fait choir au sombre fond.  and makes them drop to the murky bottom使它們掉下那混濁不清的海底..

The sea, the crazy foams upon its surface, the undercurrents, the fishes, their paths here may refer to something rather more than the physical sea and what was in there. He may well be talking about the sea of his emotions and the movement deep within his subconscious, possibly with sexual implications (the bird, the curves of the moon, the sea shells or conch and the currents, the fishes, the crazy foam, the madness of love-making in his youth? ). It may well be the interior seascapes of his psyche.

According to the Wikipedia, Jules Supervielle (16 January 1884 – 17 May 1960) was a Uruguay born French poet and writer who was most concerned about the interior world of his psyche but who refused to join the automatic writing of the surrealists dominant in his days in the first half of the 20th century and who refused to submit to the so-called "dictatorship of the unconscious". But he was also heavily influenced by the poetry of Baudelaire, Rimbaud and Apollinaire and adopted certain of their writing techniques. He anticipated the movements of the years 1945-50 back to lyricism of René Char, Henri Michaux, Saint John Perse and Francis Ponge. Amongst his admirers are René-Guy Cadou, Alain Bosquet, Lionel Ray, Claude Roy, Philippe Jackotett and Jacques Réda 

He had a banker father, a Basque mother, lost his parents whilst young and was intially raised by his grandmother in France and then later in Uruguay by his uncle and aunt as their own son and he always thought of himself as their son until 9 and he began to write fables and in 1894, his uncle and aunt brought him to settle in Paris where he got his secondary education and there he disovered such romantic writers as Musset, Hugo, Lamartine, Lecomte de Lisle and Sully Prudhomme and started to write poetry in secret.. In 1901, he published certain poems entitled Brumes du Passé.( Mists from the Past)  He spends his summer holidays in Uruguay in 1901, 1902, and 1903 and from  1902 to 1906: Jules continuedhis studies, from the baccalauret to the licence of literature. He makes also his military service but, of fragile health, he badly supports the life of barracks.In 1907, he married Pilar Saavedra in Montevideo. From this union will be born six children, born between 1908 and 1929. In 1912, after manay voyages, he settledin Paris, in an apartment where he would stay for the next 23 years. He was conscripted for the war from 1914-1917 and did certain work for the Ministry of War, thanks to his linguistic abilities. Since 1917, he reads much and discovers Paul Claudel, Arthur Rimbaud, Stéphen Mallarmé and Walt Whitman. And in 1922, he published his first collection of poems, Débarcadères ( Jetties) and in 1923, got to know Henri Michaux and published his first novel L'Homme de la pampa (Man of the Grassland)  and then in 1925 published Gravitations and then  in 1927, he became close friends with one Jean Paulhan who would thereafter edit all his future publications  and in 1931, he publsihed his first collection of fantastical short stories L'Enfant de la haute mer ( The Child of the High Seas) (5 texts between 1924- 1930) . At this time, he is devoted to many literary activities and acquires the recognition of criticism, including in Uruguay. He then wrote a play La Belle au bois (The Beautiful Lady in the Wood) .Then because of his political leanings, he was exiled from Uruguay for 7 years starting 1939 and was declared a bankrupt the following year because his uncle's bank failed. Then he devoted himself to translation of the works of Guillen, Lorca and Shakespeare. He won several literary prizes during such mature years. In 1946, he  returned to France and published some mythological tales under the title of Orphée (Orpheus). In 1947, he published a play Shéhérazade, directed by Jean Vilar at the first festival d'Avignon. In 1951, he published another poetry collection called Boire à la source (Drink from the Spring) and in 1959 published his last poetic collection Le Corps tragique (The Tragic Body) .He was elected Prince of Poets by his peers in 1960 but died later the same year.