Ten Poems from Le Grand Jeu [The Big Game] by Benjamin Péret

The brief but fascinating interview with the transcendent John Olson, conducted by Giorgia Pavlidou, posted in Sulfur: Surrealist Jungle today, has a reference by Olson to the Surrealist communist poet Benjamin Péret.

So I thought I would post these: Ten poems by Péret that are included in El Misterio Nadal: A Lost and Rescued Book, published in 2018, by Spuyten Duyvil. Edited by Isabel Quiroga and Jorge Mosconi, the book is purportedly (at least in parts) a possible unfinished manuscript by Roberto Bolaño (found after his death), who does indeed write and sign a substantial Introduction to the book.

Vladimir Nadal was a young second-generation Infrarrealista who lived a fascinating life– from Mexico, to El Salvador, to the United States, to Slovenia, to Chile. His mysterious poetic figure and disappearance is the subject of El Misterio Nadal.
The ten poems by Péret were originally translucinated by Nadal into Spanish and later into these English versions by A.B., the translator of El Misterio Nadal.

The book’s Spanish version is planned for publication next year in Santiago, Chile, by Mandrágora Ediciones.

---

Formal Proof

To die, one must ask OK from M. Duhamel, paper wings out-
stretched
on the railing of the pont Rouelle, 1910. Should he assent,
you’ll be
the one named by the Law, the proud one, with the Lion’s Lips,
the liar
shot through with steel and fire, the terrible oracle to change
all maps
into a torrent of flood, the heaven of tar from where miracu-
lous beings
fall, unstuck and dark, whom you meet each evening leaving
the theatre.
Uranium mine: Its tunnels of candles and carnations.
Sex storm:
To confound the hijackers of the Giant Wheel, the biggest one
of France,
from the top of which the spirits of the dead gliding over Paris
are seen,
paper wings spread, the Arabs, caught by ancient thermal
winds.

**

The Marriage of Leaves

People from afar arrive to fields where poetry is circular
spinning at variable velocities now slower now faster on thick
hairy stems.

People notice how poetry in its various velocities
pitches and rolls like botanical waves how it prepares
in such fluctuations its ebbs and flows.

O Colonels and Captains if only each of your heads were a
fleshy
breast dripping milk your signatures for artillery orders would
be
the shapes of hands all thumbs
shaking with alcoholic tremors.
O Colonels and Captains what’s in your hand…
Is it a smaller hand that conceals a yet smaller hand
and so on until all hands become an encompassing mass
in the consummation of all hands?

We will gently caress and suck the nipple of your head.
Dust rises in the solitude in tiny puffs. It desires the solitudes
that
gather in chambers inside the bigger solitude.
The boxes are metallic and they glow with their inner minimal
light. They want to be admired by the phantoms of future time
whose muffled voices are passed through rotten trunks
covered in snow. Old men come down from the mountain
struggling through great drifts of snow in the great slack
mountains. These are the scribes of poetry from afar.
Here you are. Welcome back. Let’s walk among
the pretty spinning disks for a while.
Long live the Red Army.

**

Honor Your Dead

To Raymond Queneau
In your hand
there’s a shovel
in the shovel
there’s the hat head torso feet
and the dream of the viscera
of the Avant-Garde Salon
in Chicago there’s also
the hope and compassion of little lights
that do not fear the contagion
there’s still a nervous shudder though
it’s the contagion
and a slick granite slope
which could hide swallows
but it does not hide them
because to the right
there’s a dark stain like the music of guns
it’s oil

**

Twisted Neck

–to Michel Leiris

Let the stream flood thickened by great branches of wind
let it flood to the height of the Eiffel
let it flood without stop. It is raining inside a book.

A little girl from the streets flies in her dream.
The steam shoots with a whistling sound from your heart
Michel Leiris.

Discover the father of steam and your laughter will shake the
network of
model trains that puff on the tracks laid down by
Maurice Barrès
with the help of his monstrous factotum
Anatole France.

**

Without Tomatoes no Artichokes

My tomatoes are plumper than your hooves
and your artichokes look like my daughter who lives in
Lourdes
At the market
a tomato and an artichoke were seen
dancing around a turnip which they seemed to have mistaken
for a Maypole
which in turn as if to humor their misplaced identification of
her nature
spun slowly on its hairy root
Go tomato go artichoke dance around the turnip pole
and the day of your marriage shall be fair and severe as the
inward stare of the bream.
The wooden clogs which are made of wood regard us from a
distance
they cry for us like hungry kids with tears of clog potatoes
and they sing they make a dry coffin noise
a coffin that bursts so that a kid’s corpse pops out.
And the corpse claps her hands like two clogs
and the living in their stylish hats can hear her scream through
the window pane
the backwards words are written across her face
“Café Guillotine. Lunch 50 Centimes.”
She screams:
“No you will not have my tomato at that price!”

**

When There’s No More Hay in the Haystacks

Should all the hay I’ve cut be piled upon my head
all the hay that I’d split
I’d have a head of hair of dawn and fresh cream
but the cut hay flows down the stream
like golden feathers in the wind
it bobs up it bobs down
not knowing or heeding where it goes
and the boats that try to hunt it down
with their hay hooks will never catch up to the hay
because the cut hay has wings with black veins
veins like tributaries that fork this way and this
into palaces and prisons the hay branches
into the mouths of priests
into the ears of the deaf
into the neck of those to be guillotined
upon the piled-up tombs of him or her
the hay-haired who know at their last breath the secret of hay
and into the subsidized theatres of Literature and its under-
ground sewers
it branches and branches this way and that the hay it goes its
own black
way for it is the color of the sun and it has its own mind
it has a mind of hay

**

A Bird Shit on My Coat Bastard

–to Pierre Naville

Empty-handed and foot in air
the good child on paired plates
was dying to laugh at a lonely
horse
at the moon
at the cops
Instead of dying
he could have laughed
he liked to pound his fist like a deaf man
on the corner tree
The tree moaned like a cat
T.S.F T.S.F.
The radio telegraph bit him on the right foot
and a bear bit him on the left hand
Since he was young he survived
They gave him Academy laurels
made him an Ambassador
Paul Claudel

**

Mystery of My Birth

–to Colette Iaual

And when I answered him 19
he answered me 19
22 if you have the leisure to be rich
30 and 40 for the comedy in two steps
50 for your coffin suit
100 for the products of spring
For the rest I am ghost-pale and hypnotic
but tend to your medications dear physician
and leave to pure water the panic of becoming foul water

**
My Late Misfortunes

–to Yves Tanguy

270 The birches are worn out by looking glasses
441 The young pope lights a candle and pulls off
905 How many corpses lie on the most ergonomic mass graves
1097 The eyes of the bravest carried off by the last storm
1371 It’s possible the elderly will forbid the young to claim the
desert
1436 First memory of pregnant women
1525 The foot dozes in a bronze jar
1668 The heart exposed to the aorta journeys from west to east
1793 A map watches and waits for the dice
1800 Varnish: Surely it’s about something else
1845 Caressing the chin and washing the tits
1870 It is snowing in the stomach of Paul Éluard
1900 Beards of the children of invalids have been trimmed
1914 You will discover a substance not meant for you in Milwaukee
1922 We incinerate the phone book Place de l’Opéra

**

Portrait of André Breton

–for Mario Santiago*

The gazelles caress the memory Mlle. has of them
Out comes a whole crew or team
And elegant ladies with blue eyes devouring bream
A very clear and handsome face
Face of a horse whose ears fill and fill with a clopping sound
Boredom cultivated in priceless hoard
Becoming captain of the pirate sloop Poetry Forever
The sewers are full of come
I’m on board
full steam ahead

*[This is the dedication on the “translation.” Obviously, it is Nadal’s and not Péret’s. All other dedications on the poem translations are accurate, as per Péret’s originals.]

[clockwise, below: Breton, Eluard, Peret, Tzara]