Louis Aragon 1897-1982
biography
Louis Aragon met Andre Breton while studying military medicine during World War 1. In 1919, along with Breton and Philippe Soupault, he founded the important review Litterature. An active participant in the French Dada movement, and later one of the principal members of the Surrealist group, he broke with them in 1931 and joined the Communist Party, to which he remained closely attached. Aragon was taken prisoner by the Germans during World War 2, escaped to the Unoccupied Zone, and became one of the leading figures in the Resistance. Much of his finest poetry was written during this time. Louis Aragon was awarded the Lenin Peace Prize in 1954 and for many years served as director of Les Lettres francaises. In addition to his abundant output as a poet, Aragon has written novels, essays, a long study of Matisse, a translation of Lewis Carroll and journalism. Many of his books have been translated into English but may be hard to find.
selected works in translation
The Adventures of Telemachus translated by Renee Riese Hubert and Judd D. Hubert (University of Nebraska, 1988)
The Libertine translated by Jo Levy (Riverrun Press, 1993)
Paris Peasant translated by Simon Watson Taylor (Exact Change, 1994)
selected poems in The Random House Book of Twentieth Century French Poetry edited by Paul Auster (Vintage, 1982)
Treatise on Style translated by Alyson Waters (University of Nebraska, 1991)
writing
excerpt from -poem to shout in the ruins
Let's spit the two of us let's spit
On what we loved
On what we loved the two of us
Yes because this poem the two of us
Is a waltz tune and I imagine
What is dark and incomparable passing between us
Like a dialogue of mirrors abandoned
In a baggage-claim somewhere say Foligno
Or Bourboule in the Auvergne
Certain names are charged with a distant thunder
Yes let's spit the two of us on these immense landscapes
Where little rented cars cruise by
Yes because something must still
Some thing
Reconcile us yes let's spit
The two of us it's a waltz
A kinf of convenient sob
Let's spit let's spit tiny automobiles
Let's spit that's an order
A waltz of mirrors
A dialogue in the void
Listen to these immense landscapes where the wind
Cries over what we loved
One of them is a horse leaning its elbow on the earth
The other a deadman shaking out linen the other
The trail of your footprints I remember a deserted village
On the shoulder of a scorched mountain
I remember your shoulder
I remember your elbow your linen your footprints
I remember a town where there was no horse
I remember your look which scorched
My deserted heart a dead Mazeppa whom a horse
Carries away like that day on the mountain
Drunkenness sped my run through the martyred oaks
Which bled prophetically while day
Light fell mute over the blue trucks
I remember so many things
So many evenings rooms walks rages
So many stops in worthless places
Where in spite of everything the spirit of mystery rose up
Like the cry of a blind child in a remote train depot
please click here for the french text to J'arrive où je suis étranger
please click here for the french text to Vers à danser
return to the library
return to kicking giants