On The Blue Summer Evenings

Sensation

On the blue summer evenings I shall go down the paths,
Getting pricked by the corn, crushing the short grass:
In a dream I shall feel its coolness on my feet.
I shall let the wind bathe my bare head.

I shall not speak, I shall think about nothing:
But endless love will mount in my soul;
And I shall travel far, very far, like a gipsy,
Through the countryside — as happy as if I were with a woman.

Par les soirs bleus d'été j'irai dans les sentiers,
Picoté par les blés, fouler l'herbe menue:
Rêveur, j'en sentirai la fraîcheur à mes pieds.
Je laisserai le vent baigner ma tête nue.

Je ne parlerai pas, je ne penserai rien:
Mais l'amour infini me montera dans l'âme,
Et j'irai loin, bien loin, comme un bohémien,
Par la Nature — heureux comme avec une femme.

ARTHUR RIMBAUD March 1870

Translated by OLIVER BERNARD

The Continuing Saga Of Telfour Tremble

Telfour Tremble

You may remember my excitement recently when I discovered a rare volume of the poems of obscure French Symbolist poet, Telfour Tremble. And perhaps you are wondering if there is not even more to this unbelievable story. Well, you would be right: there is more, much more. But I won't leave you in suspense, or even in suspenders. Let me take you back to 1st March, a week after my post on the shadowy M. Tremble stirred the imaginary waves of this great cyber-ocean of ours.

I was relaxing at home that evening — as you do, with a cup of wine at your elbow, a copy of War And Peace on your knee and a Downton Abbey replay on the telly — when my mobile's familiar ringtone of John Adams's Shaker Loops gently tickled my tympanic membrane. I gave a start — for, indeed, I'd been half asleep — and pressed the green button. A voice at the other end announced, in an accent reminiscent of Inspector Clouseau's in the Pink Panther films, 'Good evening, Monsieur Robert. My name is Théodore Marie Tremble, grandson of Telfour Tremble, the great if obscure nineteenth-century French poet!'

Imagine my state of shocked surprise, quickly followed by a rush of rapturous and euphoric delight! To cut a long story short, we arranged to meet up in the bar of the Ibis hotel in London's Euston Road the very next weekend. And to cut an even longer story short, Théodore furnished me with many hitherto-unknown facts about his grandfather's short but colourful life, facts which had never surfaced before in the annals of French literary history.

It seems that a few years before his untimely death on 1st April 1900, Tremble had decided on a whim to cross the Channel and visit England for a few months, following in the footsteps of his legendary compatriot and fellow Symbolist Arthur Rimbaud, who'd been to London (Camden Town to be exact) with Paul Verlaine in 1872, and had later returned there, dragging his doting mother and sister with him ('drag' being the operative word, as you shall see in a moment). But here the similarity between Rimbaud and Tremble ends. Rimbaud had been ill-tempered certainly, and on a short fuse, and prone to drinking bouts and violent arguments — but, as far as we know, he'd always been dressed, albeit cheaply, albeit shabbily, as a man. It now emerges, my dear and curious readers, that Tremble arrived on these shores garbed in women's clothes. Yes, the secret is out: our poet's most clandestine desire, undocumented till now, was to be a transvestite, like some Grayson Perry of the French Romantic era.

Chalk Farm Underground Station

Of course, the urge for cross-dressing is hardly avant-garde; indeed, it stretches far back into the dim and distant reaches of human history. The uncontrollable desire for women to wear the pants and for men to wear the dresses is no longer earth-shattering news. But what is sensational is that no one seems to have exposed Tremble at the time, and that he seems to have carried off with great panache this boldly successful deception, this unexpected reversal of habillement, for the whole period of his five-month sojourn in a stinking, rat-infested basement flat in London's Chalk Farm, just a stone's throw from Chalk Farm Underground Station.

The other amazing fact about Tremble revealed to me by his grandson was that during this unconventional and free-spirited period he started to write poetry which was revolutionary in both style and subject — poems more like the 'concrete poetry' originated sixty years later by Augusto and Haroldo de Campos in Brazil. Théodore gave me copies of these poems, written in a shaky, alcoholic hand, and they are now amongst my most treasured literary possessions. In an inspired moment the other day I took the liberty of translating one of these extraordinary poetic curiosities, and I present it to you below:

Sometimes I feel like the Queen of Sheba

and sometimes like Julius Caesar

and am confused whether to rule the celestial blue

like the Sun God Apollo or to conspire

with Phoebe Artemis and Selene

in the Moon's eternal soft mysterious embrace

There is talk, too, of another volume of verse Tremble published just before he died, a book so rare that only one or two copies are known to exist; but who owns them is shrouded in mystery. Some say Danny La Rue used to possess a copy, but where it went after Danny's own death in 2009 is anyone's guess. A further rumour circulating amongst the glitterati is that Boy George may have one, but so far he's denied it. There's no doubt that these books would fetch an enormous price at auction. Apparently the title is Une Saison en Purgatoire and Tremble uses the nom de plume of Marie Antoinette Bellerose. How I set about tracking down one of these books, books which have become the Holy Grail of French literature, is, however, a story for another day . . .

In Memoriam Telfour Tremble (born 1st April 1869, died 1st April 1900)

The Strange Case Of Telfour Tremble

Paris: home of the unfortunate Telfour Tremble.

If any of you followed the extraordinary story of Dominic Rivron unearthing the neglected work of little-known English poet Margery Clute, you may also be intrigued by my own similar tale of literary detection.  

I was rummaging through some dimly-lit poetry shelves in the basement of a local second-hand bookshop the other day when, as chance or perhaps destiny would have it, I came upon a slender, leather-clad volume of verse bearing the gold-blocked inscription: Signes et Symboles: Poèmes Melancholiques. A closer inspection revealed the name of the author printed below the title in much smaller Gothic letters — a certain M. Telfour Tremble, Poète. Immediately a sharp frisson of excitement ran from my coccyx up my spine then into my neck. Just to be doubly sure, I took this rather tattered-looking book from the shelf and turned over a few mildewed pages. A short foreword written by none other than Paul Verlaine confirmed my original suspicion that this was an incredibly rare copy of the only published work of obscure French Symbolist poet Telfour Tremble, contemporary of Rimbaud and Mallarmé, and close friend of Jean Moréas, author of the Symbolist Manifesto of 1886.

I knew from my specialised knowledge of the period that Tremble had lit up the Parisian literary salons like a shooting star when this, his first and only collection of poems, was published; but the initial excitement seemed to quickly wear off and, after a particularly malicious review of the book had appeared in the literary journal, the Mercure de France, sales of the small print run plummeted, and Tremble vanished without trace. It was generally assumed that he joined the ragged ranks of the army of down-and-out poets who thronged the whorehouses and drinking dens of Paris at the time, and that he died in squalor — a poverty-stricken, absinthe-addicted dipsomaniac. All we know for sure, however, is that he expired, coincidentally, on his thirty-first birthday, 1st April 1900, and was buried in an unmarked grave in a remote suburban graveyard — not, as you might think befitted the status of a gifted Symbolist poet, in the cemeteries of either Père Lachaise or Montparnasse.

I bought the volume at a ridiculously cheap price from the unsuspecting bookseller and returned home gleefully with my prize. The collection contained forty-six poems in all, and I began at once the pleasurable task of translating them. Indeed, I have high hopes that eventually these English translations of mine may eventually be published in their own right — perhaps in a bilingual edition. At any rate, come what may, I'm delighted to present in this blog a sample of the work of the late M. Tremble, thereby rescuing him from obscurity at last.           

Idyll In A Sylvan Hut

How can I leave it all behind?

This slice of moon —
This wedge of Camembert —
This hot and clamorous night

With its chorus of frogs
And symphony of mosquitos
And angelic choir of nightingales?

This sturdy cabin at the woodland edge,
Its windows open
To the still air, heavy with thunder?

This humble, splintered table,
This slick knife
Which hacks at a stale baguette,

Then scores an orange skin
Quarter-wise — peasant thumbs
Peeling it like unfolding petals?

This bitter wine,
Cinnamon-spiced, with a hint of gall,
And thick and red as oxblood?

This sultry woman by my side,
Her skin gleaming with sweat,
Sticky as the summer night itself?

Her body, slight as a young boy’s,
With buttocks scarcely rounded
And breasts like tangerines?

Her animal eyes
Darting from moon to table
Then back to moon again?

This moonlit path
Winding through forests
On and on and on

And even further —
From this cabin’s portal
To the mighty Pyrenees?

How can I leave it all behind?
Yet leave it I will
For when the morning sun

Bathes the east in a diaphanous pink glow,
I’ll lift the latch and set off in the dawn
Whistling a melancholy tune.

Telfour Tremble (1869-1900)

Translated from the French by The Solitary Walker