I love cemeteries! They’re usually peaceful (well, the inhabitants are quiet), often have an aura of love arising from memorials, and they can sometimes reveal little nuggets of history. When I was a student, I worked as a gardener and occasional gravedigger in Lawnswood Cemetery, Leeds. After being sent down from University (as the first of our extended family to get to higher education, it seemed like nemesis had really punished my pride) I worked there for 5 months before taking the easy way out and going back to uni. Maybe I left just in time: some of the old gravediggers would talk to the dead, quite naturally. It had started to feel natural that the dead should reply.
Marquein cemetery is quite unlike the majority of French graveyards. It is in the churchyard, rather than separate; it has a wonderful open view of the chain of mountains from Corbières to Pyrénées; and it has an empty tomb for anyone in need. A gesture of hospitality, going above and beyond the norm?
Returning from France to a cool St Albans, catching up with the comic opera of blocked drains and slightly wounded car has led to thoughts of other blockages. I wrote nothing for about 10 years – from headship to civil servant in career terms. It may have been because I had no space left in my head for anything other than work, or because ultimately I lost heart with my work; or perhaps because I had nothing to say. It took a breakdown, followed by voluntary redundancy, to act as a metaphorical laxative.
Our little house in Marquein, bought in 1990, was a bolthole from stress for both of us, and it’s where I eventually started to write again … by chance. I happened upon (don’t you love that phrase!) a little paperback edition of the poems of Paul Valéry; a distant echo of A-level French in the very early 60s, and an echo of something closer: Marquein cemetery. I’d got to know that little resting-place quite well, as it’s been the most reliable site for mobile-phone reception – cyberspace meets spirit-world? One of the residents there is Paul Valéry. Curiosity aroused by co-incidence: the Paul Valéry, poet and polymath, in the illustrious ranks of the Académie Française, was born and was buried in Sète, had nothing to do with Marquein, but I went along with the happenstance and began to read and translate some of his poems.
Finding a structure and a metre in English to match the French was a sort of academic exercise, but I was sufficiently engaged to start writing my own “stuff” again. A bit like unblocking the drain by getting a flow of water running through. I was also lubricated by a little red-wine sentimentality as well as by the sheer delight of co- incidence! These two translations are a salute to Marquein’s own Paul Valéry, sleeping in his narrow cell, with no trophies raised to his memory… apologies to Thomas Gray!
La Fileuse (The Spinner)
Sitting near the window, the spinner in blue
Dozes with the murmuring of the garden;
The old wheel’s humming has made her head bow.
Drunk with the azure light, wearied by braiding
Her tresses, hands tired, all sounds are now hushed.
Her little head droops; soon she is dreaming.
Air, spring-water fresh, sighs through a bush
Which sways, sprinkling its sweet petals slowly
On the sleepy-head’s garden. Another gust
Of the roving wind stirs a branch; it bends low
With a vain bow to her charms, then hands
A rose to the old wheel as if it were holy.
But the sleeper draws out one single strand;
Mysteriously, as if by the pale shade,
A thread is drawn through her sleeping hands.
The dream unreels, and lazily braids
(angelically, to the spindle’s slow whirs)
Her tresses which drift in perfect cascades …
Behind so many flowers the sky turns
Invisible. Spinner of leaves, light now
Around her – the green sky dies, the last tree burns –
Your sister, the rose, from whose bower
Smiles a saint, breathes scent on your forehead,
And you feel faint, fade, lose your power
In the blue of the casement, where you spin the thread
Au Bois Dormant (In the Sleeping Wood)
In her rose-pink palace the princess sleeps
Beneath the moving shadow’s murmurings.
A word, like coral forming on her lips,
Remains unheard; lost birds peck her golden rings.
She cannot hear the rainfall, nor the tears
Which tell of treasures lost, an age forlorn,
Nor flutes whose fading notes throughout the years
Were heard beneath the forest’s hunting-horns.
May that faint echo soothe her in her sleep,
Sweet tendrils caress her as they creep
And gently stroke those heavy-lidded eyes.
Rose petals fall and brush her cheek. Such
Secret pleasures cannot be disguised;
Arousal flickers at the sunbeam’s touch.
