Part Three: Les versets simplifiés du soleil levant/The simplified verse of the rising sun by Maggy De Coster
Danielle Legros Georges admits that the final section of Blue Flare, Maggy De Coster’s Les versets simplifiés du soleil levant/The simplified verses of the rising sun, was “the most challenging” for her to translate. The poems’ “elevated use of abstractions, mixed metaphors, and prosaisms—especially in explorations of the realm of the psyche” presented particular translation problems. Indeed, the poems range widely and employ a wide range of lexicons and tones. From the epistemological to the hortatory. From the Romantic to the existential. From the journalistic to the oracular. I hear echoes of Wordsworth, the biblical psalms, the Surrealists, ancient Greek tragedy. And I locate a through-line by understanding the poems as descriptive of a process. The poet-speaker is grappling with the question of how to live in this troubled, troubling world while remaining grounded in a self and in a loving space. Born in Jérémie, Haiti, poet and writer Maggy De Coster emigrated to France in 1988. She currently lives in Paris.
Les versets simplifiés du soleil levant (Paris, Éditions du Cygne, 2017) is a poetic sequence consisting of 40 poems, the shortest of which are six lines, the longest 16. The sequence begins with a paradox and a list of imperatives:
March hands up on freedom’s road…Resist
Break from the crooked mockers
Be like the tree that sinks its roots into the stream (1)
The paradox? That resistance is marching with one’s hands up. Not only peacefully but with a gesture of surrender. Surrendering to what? Or to whom? The poem doesn’t say. Next the speaker counsels, be like the tree, planted, lavishing its shade on the “hassled walker.” So, walk with hands-up and yet remain grounded, rooted, taking up space. Another paradox. If the sequence is, as I suspect, an epistemological exploration of how to live and be, the speaker is speaking first to herself. The opening poem ends with the image of a vortex in which “so many points remain suspended/Like grains of sand swept away by the tides” (1). Against which or in the midst of which the tree stands rooted.
The images do tumble and swirl, as in a vortex, enacting the very dynamic the poet seeks to interrogate, the news cycle, one event following another, the constant drama, sound bites, the often misleading statements of leaders: “the absurd infecting life’s living rooms,” even as people’s actual lives are affected—and infected—by injustice, violence, “endless war” (2) When reality is “a chill/to be fled at full speed”, how is one to exist? (6)
The only constant is change:
Night drives out day and everything begins again
…
The cup empties into the void
And the void fills itself with container and contained (2).
The cup not only empties, but drops itself into the void, breaking apart only to be remade the following day, and the next. The human world exists in tension, in struggle:
The cries of innocents
Do not shake their assailants
To the blind and disordered conscience
Emptiness on a grand scale” (4).
Not merely the shattering of a single cup, but of a warehouse of dishes, an ongoing chorus of shatter.
And yet, walk with hands up. Surrender.
Like the Romantics before her, the poet-speaker finds grounding in nature and through the imaginative power of poetry:
Aerial, I sail from space to space
From nature’s bounty
I draw the sap of my being (8)
Shadowing these lines, one might hear, as I do, “I wandered lonely as a cloud….” Over and over, remembered experiences of and in the natural world counter, but do not resolve, the political-social frictions and strife which form the counter-narrative. The beauty found in the non-human realm of fields, plants, celestial bodies, gives the poet-speaker a way to express her conviction, a conviction shared with Évelyne Trouillot, that life can be beautiful:
I get drunk on the honey of summer moons
I wrap myself in the folds of hope’s green wheat fields
And drink from the chalice of morning dews
Before the death dance of crows at sunrise (22)
The long lines enact the abundance the words and images express. There’s a spiritual dimension to the natural world. Held in a chalice, the dew becomes sacramental. The crows have a power beyond themselves. They are harbingers, even agents, whose death dance, comes at sunrise—another paradox.
The word dream appears in eleven of the 40 poems. Because the poems travel so widely, in terms of image, tone, mode and diction, I thought it might be worthwhile to track how and when the word dream shows up. In French, le rêve and le songe both mean the dream. And of course, dream doubles as a verb in English, as does rêver in French, while songer has mostly lost its association with dreaming and tends to mean to reflect, think about or consider. Le songe as dream tends to be employed in literary contexts. In addition, De Coster employs the word onirique which Legros Georges translates as dreamlike. The word les chimères—chimeras—also appears. But in most instances, De Coster uses le rêve and rêver.
The presence of the dream and dreaming tips the sequence toward the surreal. The dream is diurnal and nocturnal, describing aspiration and possibility as well as the night-scape of the self, the mind’s activity in sleep. The absence of certain specificities, such as place names or indeed any concrete sense of place, creates a timeless dreamlike atmosphere throughout the sequence. Haiti is never mentioned. Nor is Paris, its suburbs, the social tensions the poems refer to but do not name.
“The fluids of my being will circulate/On the spectral field of dreams” (3) connects the body to the dreamscape. The blood keeps circulating, the heart keeps pumping, the digestive system keeps processing while we sleep and dream. Lost in translation, however, is the sense of the French graviter. The original reads: “Et les fluides de mon être graviteront/Autour du champ spectral des rêves.” Graviteront autour de—will revolve around—the way stars and planets revolve in the heavens. With the verb circulate, Legros Georges chooses to focus on the body alone. For De Coster, the body acts as medium between the heavens and earth. Dreams are conduits between the two. Later, in 7, the dreams of the speaker’s life, their “innate treasures” trace “the portent of sensible things.” Dreams lend meaning to the sensible, material world.
The dream also points to expectation, that which one hopes for: “The fisherman’s net is empty/His boat shipwrecked far from the dream” (10). Dreams, too, can be “fossilized” (24). Unspoken, unrealized, or seemingly impossible, they die, and when they do, angels bleed:
Confusion of feelings reddened with the blood of angels
In watering fragile gardens
The conjuring of motionless stars in a dismayed sky (24)
The motionless stars of a dead or dying dream recall the revolving heavens of dreams that are able to be expressed, through poetry, through art, meaningful work, a full belly, a full net. De Coster lets images do the heavy-lifting, the way they do in dreams.
In 27, a spider weaves a web, and “dreams of the sun for its completion/Before time runs out.” The artist, the poet, creates out of the dark and often secret space of her imagination; the work is only complete when given away to the light. And finally, “I travel in the galaxy of my dreams/To fetch the seeds of the stars” (33). The poet-speaker is able to honor her dreams, to collect them, and plant them with the words she writes. Night, a time for gathering and sowing “At the rising moon.” These poems are shot through with energies both earthy and astral, employed in the service of resistance to “the infernal machine” (32)—an image which echoes with surrealist music, Éluard’s “le doigt posé par hazard sur les commandes d’un appareil brisé.”
As the sequence draws to a close, the cadence and language become psalm-like. The “machine” has not been overthrown, “Horror spreads its tentacles/It enters the doorway of our cities,” (29), yet the poet-speaker has found a way forward, and through. She’ll wait for night to turn to day, the tide to change, the moon to wax and wane and wax again, the birds to return in spring. She’ll root herself in the rhythms and cycles of the earth and moon, the days, the seasons. Like the psalmist, she looks to the hills:
Splendid is the hill in the rising sun
Let’s go there so I may declare peace to you
We will take as witnesses the thousand-year-old olive trees
And the candid dove will offer us one of her feathers…
We will give a burial to war
And build citadels of light
For the survivors of darkness (37)
The vision has been given. The poet-speaker moves through the world, knowing trouble, pain, war and injustice are recurrent, persistent, but also in their way temporary. Adopting a hortatory tone, she calls on us to finish the unfinished work of the missing and dead, both the ancestors and victims of violence across the globe and in our streets. If we hadn’t accompanied her on this journey of 40 poems, inhabiting paradoxes and following her associative leaps of language and meaning, this tone might seem forced, out-of-place. But because the poet-speaker has made this existential inquiry, in all earnestness looking for meaning in a world which often seems meaningless, she’s earned the privilege of exhortation. We could do worse than listen, we could do worse than engaging in our own search.
Works Cited
Éluard, Paul. “Yves Tanguy.” La Vie immédiate, Éditions Gallimard, 1992, p. 61.
Legros Georges, Danielle. “Blue Flare: Three Haitian Poets.” Blue Flare: Three Haitian Poets, Zephyr Press, 2024, pp. xiv-xv.