Today I have decided to translate a poem by the French poet Louis Aragon. In fact although a lot of his verses are available in French, I really struggled to find English translations of the poems online as only a few are available. The only version I found was the one from Wikipedia so I thought it would be a good idea to try to make another translation available in English. Moreover it will give me the opportunity to talk about the poet himself and his political commitment since he was a major figure of the French political and literary history.
Louis Aragon was born in 1897 in the fashionable area of 'Neuilly-sur-Seine' in Paris and died in 1982. Poet, novelist, journalist and essayist, his poems and prose writings often deal with his experience of the Second World War and celebrate communist heroism and patriotism, while throwing light on the importance of memory and commemoration. Aragon started his literary career with his group of Surrealist and Dadaist friends but eventually left them to entirely devote himself to communism until the end of his life. His ideological convictions are often reflected in his literary works.
The poem I am dealing with today is called ‘L’affiche rouge’ (literally ‘The Red Poster’) and is taken from Aragon’s autobiographical novel ‘Le Roman Inachevé’ (literally ‘The unfinished novel’) which is written in verses. Louis Aragon wrote it in 1955 in remembrance of the ‘Manouchian group’, a group of foreigners who fought for the French Resistance and were arrested and shot by the Gestapo in February 1944. The one-day trial of these Resistance fighters, known as the ‘Manouchian group’ (after the leader of the Parisian section of the organization, the Armenian poet and activist Missak Manouchian), gave the collaborationist press the opportunity to create a large publicity campaign. The reason behind it was rather simple: in the ‘Manouchian group’, 20 were foreigners and 11 were Jews. The aim of this huge campaign was to use the group in order to draw a picture of the Resistance as something communist, foreign and above all Jewish. Quite significantly the daily France-Soir headlined its coverage of the trial with: “The trial of the 24 Judeo-Communist terrorists/The Jew Rayman and Alfonso, accomplices of Missak Manouchian, tell judges the story of the murder of Dr. Ritter.”But why is the poem called ‘The Red Poster’?
During the few days before the Manouchian group’s execution, the collaborators campaign reached its height through the publication and posting, throughout France, of ‘L’Affiche Rouge’, namely ‘The Red Poster’. The headline of the poster asked ‘Liberators?’ and at its bottom end one could read: ‘Liberation! By the army of crime.’ Then 10 photos showing members of the group were placed in the middle of the poster, along with a summary of their ‘crimes’: “Alfonso — Spanish Red — 7 attacks” “Grzywacz — Polish Jew — 2 Attacks,” “Rayman — Polish Jew — 13 Attacks.” At the apex of the inverted triangle of photos, pointed to by an arrow, were the words: “Manouchian — Armenian — Chief of the Group — 56 Attacks 150 dead 800 Wounded.”
(see the poster below)
Aragon’s poem had a very specific aim: it was written in remembrance of these Resistance fighters and aimed at preventing their story from being forgotten. The poem is specifically dedicated to all the foreigners who fought for France during the Occupation of the country. All through his poem Aragon insists on the simplicity of the Resistance fighters: he suggests that they were not looking for glory and that they died soberly.
Below is the original poem in French: (Taken from an excellent website dedicated to Aragon, ‘Louis Aragon Online’, created by Dr. Wolfgang Babilas, professor at the ‘Romanisches Seminar der Westfälischen Wilhelms-Universität’ in Munich. Available at: http://www.uni-muenster.de/LouisAragon/welcome.html)
Missak Manouchian
« L’affiche rouge » (alternative title: « Strophe pour se souvenir »)
1 Vous n'avez réclamé la gloire ni les larmes
2 Ni l'orgue ni la prière aux agonisants
3 Onze ans déjà que cela passe vite onze ans
4 Vous vous étiez servi simplement de vos armes
5 La mort n'éblouit pas les yeux des Partisans
6 Vous aviez vos portraits sur les murs de nos villes
7 Noirs de barbe et de nuit hirsutes menaçants
8 L'affiche qui semblait une tache de sang
9 Parce qu'à prononcer vos noms sont difficiles
10 Y cherchait un effet de peur sur les passants
11 Nul ne semblait vous voir Français de préférence
12 Les gens allaient sans yeux pour vous le jour durant
13 Mais à l'heure du couvre-feu des doigts errants
14 Avaient écrit sous vos photos MORTS POUR LA FRANCE
15 Et les mornes matins en étaient différents
16 Tout avait la couleur uniforme du givre
17 À la fin février pour vos derniers moments
18 Et c'est alors que l'un de vous dit calmement
19 Bonheur à tous Bonheur à ceux qui vont survivre
20 Je meurs sans haine en moi pour le peuple allemand
21 Adieu la peine et le plaisir Adieu les roses
22 Adieu la vie adieu la lumière et le vent
23 Marie-toi sois heureuse et pense à moi souvent
24 Toi qui vas demeurer dans la beauté des choses
25 Quand tout sera fini plus tard en Erivan
26 Un grand soleil d'hiver éclaire la colline
27 Que la nature est belle et que le coeur me fend
28 La justice viendra sur nos pas triomphants
29 Ma Mélinée ô mon amour mon orpheline
30 Et je te dis de vivre et d'avoir un enfant
31 Ils étaient vingt et trois quand les fusils fleurirent
32 Vingt et trois qui donnaient le cœur avant le temps
33 Vingt et trois étrangers et nos frères pourtant
34 Vingt et trois amoureux de vivre à en mourir
35 Vingt et trois qui criaient la France en s'abattant
The Manouchian Group
Now here is my version of the poem in English with some annotations when I was not sure about the translation:
‘The Red Poster’ (alternative title: ‘Stanza to Remember’)
1 You demanded neither glory nor tears
2 Nor organ nor last rites
3 Eleven years already how quickly eleven years go by
4 You made use simply of your weapons
5 Death does not dazzle the eyes of Partisans
6 You had your pictures on the walls of our cities
7 Black with beard and night hirsute menacing
8 The poster that looked like a bloodstain
9 Because your names are hard to pronounce
10 Was meant to create fear among the passers-by
(In line 9 I did not follow Aragon’s syntax: in the original, it literally says ‘Because to pronounce your names are difficult’, but I thought it sounded a bit odd in English. However I am not sure about my decision since Aragon’s syntactic choice in the original poem would also sound odd in spoken French but is not really shocking since it is poetic language… Should I have kept the same syntax to respect Aragon’s poetic choice or was it a good thing to adapt it for the English translation?)
(Line 10 was difficult to translate because what Aragon is saying is that the poster was meant to have an effect of fear on the passers-by, but talking about an ‘effect of fear’ sounded a bit bizarre. So I chose to skip the word ‘effect’ and to talk about the creation of ‘fear’. I also hesitated to write ‘Was meant to frighten the passers-by’ but this is not exactly what Aragon writes, otherwise he would have said ‘cherchait à effrayer les passants’ and it would have simplified the original verse.)
11 No one seemed to see you French by choice
12 People went by all day without seeing you
13 But at curfew wandering fingers
14 Had written under your photos FALLEN FOR FRANCE
15 And it made the dismal mornings different
(Line 12 Aragon literally says that people were passing by all day with ‘no eyes for you’; yet I decided to use the verb ‘to see’ to translate this idea since I did not think a literal translation would have suited.)
16 Everything had the uniform colour of frost
17 In late February for your last moments
18 And that is when one of you said calmly
19 Happiness to all Happiness to those who will survive
20 I die with no hate in me for the German people
( Line 20 in the original the speaker literally says ‘I die with no hate in me’. I hesitated to translate it as ‘I die with not hate inside’ or as ‘I die with not hate in my heart’ but since it is not exactly what Aragon writes, I chose to translate it literally.)
21 Farewell grief and pleasure Farewell roses
22 Farewell life farewell light and wind
23 Get married be happy and think of me often
24 You who will remain in the beauty of things
25 When everything will be over later in Yerevan (a)
(Line 25 in the original Aragon literally writes ‘when everything will be finished’. I decided to replace the word ‘finished’ by the preposition ‘over’ because I think it is shorter and keeps a better rhythm within the verse.)
26 A great winter sun lights up the hill
27 How beautiful is nature and how broken is my heart
28 Justice will come on our triumphant footsteps
29 My Mélinée (b) O my love my orphan girl
30 And I am telling you to live and to have a child
31 There were twenty-three of them when the guns flowered
32 Twenty-three who were giving the heart before the time
33 Twenty-three foreigners and yet our brothers
34 Twenty-three in love with life to the point of losing it
35 Twenty-three who were shouting France as they fell.
(Line 31 in the original Aragon writes that there were 23 of them but in French it literally says ‘They were 23’. If I had translated it literally in English it could have meant that they were 23 years old, which is not what Aragon says. Thus I had to translate it as ‘There were 23 of them’ which, in French, would have been ‘Il y avait 23 d’entre eux’.)
NOTES ON THE POEM :
(a) Capital of Armenia.
(b) Mélinée Manouchian: widow of Missak Manouchian.
Aragon’s poem was then set to music by the French singer Léo Ferré. I thought it would be nice to listen to it and to see how he chose to sing the poem. The tone of his voice or the melody of the song might help to capture the atmosphere of Aragon’s poem.
REFERENCES
Abidor, Mitch, ‘The Manouchian Group’, from the Manouchian group archive. [http://www.marxists.org/history/france/resistance/manouchian/index.htm]
Block, Marcelline, ‘Louis Aragon’. The Literary Encyclopedia. 13 October 2008.
[http://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=136]
Drake, David, French Intellectuals and Politics from the Dreyfus Affair to the Occupation (Palgrave Macmillan: 2005)
