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Postcards

...ten poems by Henry J.-M. Levet (1874–1906)

translated by Kirby Olson

Introduction

In a letter from 1950, Edmund Wilson wrote to Christian Gauss about André Gide’s new anthology of modern French poetry. ‘He has produced some amusing modern poets — such as Franc-Nohain and Henry J.-M. Levet, of whom I had never heard. Do read these, if you don’t know them.’
      On a lark, I decided to look them up in my local library.
      Levet was only a couple of years older than Leon-Paul Fargue, and they knew each other as young men in the café scene in Paris. Fargue related that Levet loved maps, compasses, and wore beautifully cut English-style suits. He was always willing to help out those with less money. In order to indulge his eagerness to travel, Levet joined the consular service and served in India, Vietnam, the Philippines and finally in Argentina. He sent his charming verses home to be published in popular journals. In the introduction to the French edition of Levet’s Poèmes (Maison des Amis des Livres, Paris, 1921; Gallimard 2000), the great French poet Valery Larbaud relates that he read and memorized Levet’s verses, and hoped to meet him when he came back to France on leave.
      Levet came home sooner than expected with a disease that left him unable to speak. He tried to recuperate on the Riviera, but his strength left him and he died soon after.
      Fargue and Larbaud made a literary pilgrimage to Levet’s parents’ home in Menton (a small city between Italy and Nice), some five years after Levet’s demise. Larbaud commented that if one is too late to meet someone, one can be met instead by a pale featureless head on blind white stone. Nevertheless, he felt that something of Levet remained in his parents’ house, especially in the room set aside for memorabilia. There were photographs from Maharajas with dedications in English, and a flag from a nearly unknown country.

Valery Larbaud

Fargue and Larbaud considered Levet to be the next important link in the chain of modernism that runs from Whitman to Rimbaud to Laforgue. Larbaud wrote, ‘I dreamed of a poet, a fantasist, sensitive to the diversity of race, peoples, countries, for whom everything or nothing would be exotic (it amounts to the same thing), very ‘international,’ a humorist, capable of doing Whitman tongue-in-cheek, giving a comic note of joyous irresponsibility, which was lacking in Whitman. At bottom, I was looking for a successor to Laforgue, Rimbaud, and Whitman. And here I seem to have found him ... Henry J.-M. Levet.’
      Globe-trotting cosmopolitan poets such as Blaise Cendrars and Paul Morand, or so says the Larousse Dictionary of Contemporary Poetry, ‘cannot hide what they owe him.’  Even the surrealists, particularly Philippe Soupault and Paul Eluard, seem to have taken a cue from Levet.

Henry J.-M. Levet

Levet wrote a novel called The Benares Express, but it was withheld from publication by his parents, and is now presumably lost. Other than that novel, what is all the more astonishing about Levet’s influence is that, aside from a few garbled pages of juvenilia along symbolist lines, Levet’s mature work amounts to 11 pages. Those 11 pages, known as ‘Cartes Postales’, or ‘Postcards’, are all published here in Jacket magazine for the first time in English in their entirety. They are in the same order that they were originally published by Maison des Amis des Livres in 1921.
      ‘Outwards’ and ‘Homewards’ originally appeared in Partisan Review Winter 1989.
      ‘West Africa’, ‘Japan — Nagasaki’ and ‘French Possession’ originally appeared in Common Knowledge Fall 1992.

— Kirby Olson

Postcards — Tropical Sonnets

Voyages (triptych)

I

Outwards

To Francis Jammes

The Armand Behic (of the Maritime Freight)
Speeds along at fourteen knots over the Indian Ocean
The sun sets in a jelly of crimes,
On this sea flattened as though by hand.

— Miss Roseway, who is returning to Adelaide,
Towards Home Sweet Home and her Australian fiancé,
Miss Roseway, alas, who has no cure for my ennui;
Her lorgnette fixed on the Laccadives, so far away...

— I go to get myself ready — without joy! — for tonight’s
Party: on the bridge, lanterns, dances, ballads,
(I must accompany Miss Roseway who asks

— Very gently — after the families of shipwrecked
Sailors!)  Oh, that in a slow waltz, her back
In my right arm, I might sweep her away without violence

To a deserted isle where God would recognize his own...

* The Laccadives (Fr. Lacquedives): A group of islands in the Indian Ocean off the SW coast of India, and belonging to India. Since 1973, this territorial unit has been known as Lakshadweep.

II

British India

To Rudyard Kipling

The offices close at four o’clock in Calcutta;
In the palace park the tennis court stirs;
In Eden Park grinds the spicy music of the sepoys;
The brilliant carriages salute each other on Red Road...

On his throne of gold, sparkling with rubies and emeralds,
His highness the Maharajah of Kapurthala
Longs for Liane de Pougy and Cléo de Mérode
Their autographed photos nearby...

— Benares, squatting, dreams along its stretch of the river;
The Brahmin, candid, tired of his trials, sits
In lively repose amidst the perfumed abstraction...

— At Lahore, 120 degrees Fahrenheit,
The doctors Grant and Perry play cricket, —
Railroads crawl through the sunlit jungle...

III

Homewards

To M.P. Bons d’Anty

At the Waterloo Hotel, I have had my lunch,
And, my bill paid, I steer myself toward the wharf.
Here is the Indus (of the Maritime Freight)
And the idiotic sorrow of ‘homewards’.

— Some French officers returning from Indochina
To spend a leave of six months in Europe,
Comment on the boarding of young misses, sufficiently divine,
With whom I will certainly never flirt!

On the bridge my future traveling companions
Size me up...
Then we undergo a summary health inspection —

(This year the plague has caused considerable ravages!)
— Finally there is the bell for departure,
And so I bring home, piously wadded,

The flower of my Anglo-Saxon melancholy...

French Possession

To the memory of Laura Lopez

One recalls the Goyaves chapel
Where two thousand Antillean Sundays sleep
The harmonious widowhood of the port,
And the music, quaint antiquities of leaded glass...

— Colony from which the adventurer returned poor!
Half-nude children played, and their cries
Deafened, familiar as mauve bougainvillea,
From the verandah and terrace to the heavy gray walls...

— And the picnics on Sunday at the Gros-Morne?
— They once lived, the good old novels the Young Creole
Adorned, heavy, with light morals...

Those children have left and their parents are dead —
And now in the little moribund colony,
Nothing remains but a few bureaucrats...

West Africa

To Leon-Paul Fargue

On the verandah of his hut, at Brazzaville,
By sweltering Congolese moonlight
A minor colonial bureaucrat
Thumbs the ‘Poèsies’ of Alfred de Musset...

For he still thinks of that pretty Chilean
That he should have left behind on disembarking at Luango...
— It’s true that she said to him ‘Paul I love you’,
Aboard the City of Pernambuco.

Under the punkah which keeps away mosquitoes,
He deplores ‘this shore where he’ll find greatness,’
Gives a sigh for his transatlantic amours,
Complains of the roughness of Monsieur the governor
And reproaches energetically
The barbarity of the officers towards the blacks...

The young and sensitive bureaucrat
Closes his eyes and tries to forget...

‘Do you miss the time when the sky on earth
Walked and breathed in a heavenly people,
When Venus Astarte, daughter of the bitter wave...?’

Algeria — Biskra

Under the terraces of the Royal the ghoums file past
To take part in the fantasia:
On his proud horse that disturbs the noise of the zornas,
We admire the presence of the Caid of Touggourth...

At the little brown café where the goumbre sings
Monsieur Cahen d’Anvers orders a cahouha:
R.S. Hitchens chats with the beautiful Messaouda,
Whose lips have the savor of rhat-loukoum...

The sun, the palm trees, spread their numerous rays
On tubercular shoulders;
Baron Traurig buys an amber necklace;

The comtesse of Pienne, born Mac-Mahon,
Strolls along the boulevard Mac-Mahon...
— ‘What? Such beautiful weather! Who would believe it
          at the end of December?’

Argentine Republic — La Plata

Neither the most agreeable Argentines,
Nor the race tracks on the Pampas,
Have the power to distract from his bad mood
The Consul General of France to La Plata!

We whisper the poor man’s story:
His life was crossed by a fatal love,
And he was swept up in the disastrous opium craze;
At that time he occupied the post at Singapore...

— He loves to gallop on our bitter plains,
He envies the wild life of the gaucho,
Then he returns to his Consular Palace,
And his sadness drapes him like a poncho...

He never notices, I am quite sure,
How Lolita Valdez smiles at him at every feast,
In spite of his graying temples, and his face
Ravaged by the fevers of the Far East...

Egypt–Port Said — En Route

To Gabriel Fabre

One looks at the brilliant fires of Port Said,
As the Jews looked at the Promised Land;
Because one cannot go there; it is forbidden
— It seems — by the Convention of Venice

To those in the yellow quarantine pavilion.
We will never calm our anxious desires on this shore
To provide ourselves with the obscene photos
And the excellent tobacco of Latakia...

Poet, one would have loved, during the short call at port
To spend an hour or two treading the soil of the Pharoahs,
Instead of listening to Miss Florence Marshall
Sing ‘The Belle of New York’ — in the salon.

Cote D’Azur — Nice

To Francis Jourdain

Scotland is veiled with its classic mists,
Our beaches and our lakes are abandoned;
November, supreme judge of the tubercular
Has exiled me on the banks of the Mediterranean...

I will have a wheelchair ‘full of soft scents’
That a well-groomed valet will slowly push
A sweet sun will varnish my last hours,
This winter, on the Promenade des Anglais...

Meanwhile Jane, who is now the companion
Of a healthy and fierce sheep farmer
Adorns with her grace an Australian prairie
Of more than forty thousand acres, they tell me,

And when the pale and cold blood of my twilight
Will have tarnished my Mediterranean beat,
Down there, in New South Wales,
The dawn of a new summer day will arise... How sweet!

Japan —Nagasaki

To Auguste Brunet

The city has closed its many colored eyes
And shushed its clowns, gongs and tam-tams;
On the calm water the captain of the port
Takes the oars of a sampan and glides...

Since the last cholera epidemic
When his daughter was brusquely swept away
— It is just a year ago today
Captain Kio-tsu has greatly changed.

After the event — and he such a worldly navigator!
He broke with all his relations
And lived in his sad, solitary cottage:
(For a time, there was even fear, for his sanity...)

His despair seems to detain him like a pillory
As he lowers his anemic head in rowing,
He circulates among the boats at anchor,
Cargo-boats, steamers, coal-burners...

How the calm of this beautiful night weighs on him!
Ah suddenly the wounded father
Curses this Japanese night,
As in its cloak Nagasaki sleeps...

An hallucination from his sick spirit
Makes him hear the sinister voices of sirens
From all the boats asleep there, in the swell,
Lamenting in concert the death of his Yu-len!

Yes, they cry for the young Departed
Like the mourners at ancient burials:
Their shrieks of bewitched Valkyries
A choir of strident and piercing clamor,
The sorrowful whistling of somber departures,
— Ah, what an anniversary for a sailor’s daughter!

— This is what is heard in the senseless woe without remedy
Of Nagasaki’s Port captain;
When nothing disturbs the moonstruck tepid night
But the slow bubbling of teriyaki...

Kirby Olson teaches philosophy and literature at State University of New York at Delhi. He is the author of Comedy after Postmodernism: Rereading Comedy from Edward Lear to Charles Willeford (Texas Tech U. Press, 2001) and Gregory Corso: Doubting Thomist (Southern Illinois University Press 2002). He is married to the Finnish poet Riikka Olson.
All Poems by Henry J.-M. Levet, translated by Kirby Olson, Assistant Professor, Evenden Hall 707
State University of New York at Delhi, Delhi, NY 13753, USA

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