jacques darras | bruno grégoire | olivier apert An Autobiography of Human Species Jacques Darras First I must go through my own death And that won't be a small business. Eighty-six kilos of my flesh To see them vanish at a go, Tilted on the edge of a hole In a churchyard somewhere somehow, Slipping down a knotty rope That 'll burn the hands of a docker, Careful for fear he might mangle The oaky angle of my bier, While my own kids in sable dress Daughters wearing their mourning veils In their swooning will be upheld By their husbands, my son stiff-jawed Stiffened on his own skeleton Lest he should follow in my wake, What a hard thing to undertake! I have no idea in what earth They will bury me, little know In what country I had rather Come quiet, at choice, whether Ailly Round the corner of my plains, Or Iona with all its kings Duncan, Malcolm, Macduff, Macbeth, But by what right? I'd love the sea The salty wetty sea were in At the uncapsizeable time When the boat of my bones will sink And I have folded up my mast, And am pulling in at slow pace Into harbour like a coaster Back from fishing. On that first night Lying among the other dead Shivers will run along my spine, Of feverous cold and all in spite Of that beautifully named sheet Suaire said to mop up the sweats Of those whom awe of Death disquiets More than the very Death itself After they have hardened. I will Then feel unbelievably cold Cold of a cold gripping in ice The spring of imagination Hardly springing from its fountain So that it will not breathe a scum Not e'en a cloud nor a vapour On the surface of its mirror A dead echo of my vision, As if my sight were resounding And pleased itself sounding its sound. I'll have to walk through my own death, Though the difficulty will be To enter while my corpse walks through The door of my hanging senses, The dull door of the oiled hinges In oil of neverheard silence. O how difficult that will be! Ulysses had his shades, Dante Virgil for a guide, I only My puzzled ego to survey A map become utterly blurred Within its bounds of watered ink Through lack of habit as if Death No more inhabited its earth z Its old recognizable land, A democratic wanderer Outside the ring of its own crown, Being banal being banished By universal consent, by Communitarian sharing up, An equal part per citizen. A Democrat Death is indeed! And yet I wonder if His reign Has not increased or expanded After He has been guillotinned To resurrect like a Hydra In a crowd of many necks. What Does the crowd tell us in the street Where it struts around royally Be it pedestrian or car-driven? My death moves me, my death dies me, It matters more that it carries Me in that universal street Than I should care where it takes me, Where it takes me doesn't matter For in that street we are several, Several beings of the same sort, The more we be and the closer We shall press up against the door At the exit, squeezed together Into the little room left us The more we 'll have the clear feeling We prevent Death from entering By sheer numbers. It stands a bit Like an army at war that crowd Milling around, a secret war Against a foe hid in the shade, Number versus number. Death is Cipher through which the naughts go blank. Now let's figure up: forty-three Billion people have come on earth In forty-thousand years, from the Stone age to Saint-Peter's. And then The flow accelerates. Follow Nine billion in a thousand Years until A.D. One Thousand, Three point three in eighteen-hundred, Seven point nine this century. Forecast are for the twenty first, Twelve billion men. Demographers Humourlessly predict to us That things by then should be stable. I in the rows of that mortals' Army am not an accountant But a fragile man from Sumer Summarizing the lines he broke And broke again being bad at sums Just able to multiply eight By eight times eight lines sixty-four Octets in all journeying into The night of soldierly death. Who will explain why war with Death Allied itself from origin? Poetry counts as well although It knows not how to count as far. It's a novel She writes linked up Through its branches, its family Into collaterality. The breaks she glues, she calls, she "colle", Laterally, having at her Disposal always a spare rib Of a novel line she may add And match with the previous linkeage, Tinkering tottering tittering along. Let me not forget my own death As if I were Miss-Poetry Commendable without end By its middle! Half way through my Age am I and nothing will mend The before-end with the after- Butt provided it follows. I am now my own digression, Driving my car down to Montreuil With Laurence Serne the Irishman, That Sentimental Journeyer. An inn, let's stop. What circumstance? The BBC (say bibici-- Our counter says six syllables Are spent) has me record the Reith Lectures one thousand nine hundred Eighty nine. A feat! Please, cheer me Up! First Frenchman ever to fence Up in recorded duel with Shakespeare! On twenty-eighth of March. We--meaning friend Daniel Snowman My producer and me--have just Roamed through all Picardy From River Maye down to the sea Blue sky young wheat new leaves on trees Montreuil-sur-Mer in March is dead. Jacques Darras, "An Autobiography of Human Species", 1993 Here Darras has adapted an extract of Canto II of his Autobiography of Human Species that is part of Le Petit Affluent de la Maye, 1993 (Le Cri). The Autobiography consists of ten Cantos composed in octosyllabic meter. Jacques Darras was born in 1939 in Picardie, France and is professor of Anglo-American Literature at the University of Amiens. He has translated Walt Whitman, Ezra Pound, Malcolm Lowry, Basil Bunting, Geoffrey Hill among others. He has published La Maye, 1988 (Trois Cailloux); Le Petit Affluent de la Maye, 1993,William Shakespeare sur la Falaise de Douvres, 1995, andVan Eyck et les Rivières, a novel in verse, 1997 (Le Cri). jacques darras | bruno grégoire | olivier apert