A Monarchy of His Own Imagining

American ????G Rauschenbusch continued from previous page Literature is a shelter here, but one which must be shattered. It survives only at the margins, at Montale's "verges." His is, by the way, a powerful influence on Malroux's work, subliminal at times, at times trumpeted. "Erosion" addresses at the end the reader ("toi") as the Other or the Selfas Other: "And you, what do you regret / As you lean against the doorframe, all that's / Left standing?" These poems are portals, cellars, attics, windows, ways to store memories or jettison them, places to hide or from which to flee. A wartime childhood perhaps makes this concept richer and fuller, for we can't quite grasp that every safe domestic place may become a caved-in ruin. At times, Malroux's tone and consistency of image make her poems remarkable. "Even when masked with snow or hail" is one ofthese, especially in its echoes ofbattle and triumph, an unusual subject for this poet: Even when masked with snow or hail light advances Night's bivouacs surrender insomniac phantoms lighthouses brighten on their islands to guide it to the wharf Fraternal signals are exchanged One by one, light whisks off the slipcovers of houses in mourning raises the flag again on the roof-peak and in the liberated windows Takes its place beneath the highest portal of the triumphal arch. Even Malroux's earliest poems in this book, some of which are quite surreal, survive because of her originality of language, her unsparing use of imagination to craft her images, which forbids her to stop with the line "[t]he hours drop like a pleated curtain." Instead, the curtain must fall on a standing statue, and then a fallen statue overgrown with ivy, while the tree trunks are "laid...out in their everyday clothes" and "the man on the roof of his brain is busy / raising the metal yard-arms." Before we fully understand these scenes (straight out of George Baselitz oils of soldiers intertwined with forest trees), Malroux switches to a mermaid who uselessly "thrashes / in her aquatic antique shop / dashes from coral to coral. . .." "[T]hrashes" for "peut bien se démener" is one of Hacker's many spot-on flashes of inspiration in her translation and creates an internal rhyme with "dashes." Literature is a shelter here, but one which must be shattered. One of the most striking sections of Birds and Bison is "La femme sans paroles," which Hacker translates as "The Wordless Woman." (I prefer "The Woman without Words" for its sounds and its reverberations with other poems and novels.) This woman appears in seven poems as she "contemplates the rain / Beyond her lowered blinds. Leaves / Choke up the railings, obstruct her throat." She is "submerged in any music," devoured by hearing: She knows no lullaby to Cajole her grief, no steely rhyme To tame it. She uses it like a carpet An armchair into which her tired body drops Under the lamplight, a stained pillow Melancholy is her annuity. Her life is a "discourse never quite uttered" ("Uneparole uniquejamais achevée. . ."). At night, "Swarms of ghosts descend on her." She "hails the dawn," as does her creator in a later dawn poem, "Alba," full of rhythmic repetitions and a kind ofjoy both ecstatic and sexual: It's dawn again and once again its dawn And its dawn again, drawn bow toward which the target Tightens, eye forgetting its darkroom Theater where from lines colors textures reemerges Under the sun's direction, deceptively distant, Unfailingly for a while, how long, this stageset . (Note the sensation of unreality and falsity, of inauthenticity , conjured up by these habitual images of stages and theaters.) The prince, whom the "wordless woman" awaits behind the draperies, has the sun's face or death's face, as ifeven dawn cannot assuage herfears and nightmares. In the last poem of this series: The wordless woman calls for a verb With the consistency of iron and lead To resurrect the sword's keenness The art of rose-windows A tender, fragile verb Like the undersides of eyelids Where the world's childhood could be reborn. The last poem in Birds and Bison is "Solemn...