Henri Michaux 1899-1984
biography
When in 1941 Andre Gide published the lecture he never delivered, Decouvrons Henri Michaux, the poet was far from being unknown in France. It is true that he had not reached a large public, but already by that time he was one of the most highly esteemed poets, the one who has created in his work a world totally different from the real world. Maurice Blanchot calls him, in the few pages he devotes to Michaux in Faux Pas, "l'ange du bizarre," a most apt title for one of the really authentic poetic talents of today who is taking his place beside those writers who investigate the strange and the unusual and who, therefore, more than others, transpose or even upset the literary perspective. The relationship which Michaux has established between the natural and the unbelievable has created a surreal world which has become the familiar world of his poetry. More than any other contemporary writer, far more than the authentic surrealists many say, he has willed the invention of a new land, and unlike Swift, never uses it for any edifying or didactic purpose. His is a gratuitous creation, one that invites no comparison and no justification. it demands of the reader that they enter this extravagant world without any hope of discovering its meaning, that they enter it as if they were entering the void.
selected works in translation
A Barbarian in Asia translated by Sylvia Beach (New Directions, 1949)
By Surprise translated by Randolph Hough (Hanuman Bookss, 1987)
Meidosems translated by Elizabeth R. Jackson (Moving Parts Press, 1992)
Selected Writings translated by Richard Ellman (New Directions, 1968, 1984)
selected poems in The Random House Book of Twentieth Century French Poetry edited by Paul Auster (Vintage, 1982)
writing
excerpts from - i am writing to you from a far-off country
i.
We have here, she said, only one sun in the month, and for only a little while. We rub our eyes days ahead. But to no purpose. Inexorable weather. Sunlight arrives only at its proper hour.
Then we have a world of things to do, so long as there is light, in fact we hardly have time to look at one another a bit.
The trouble is that nighttime is when we must work, and we really must: dwarfs are born constantly.
ii.
When you walk in the country, she further confided to him, you may chance to meet with substantial mases on your road. These are mountains and sooner or later you must bend the knee to them. resisting will do no good, you could go no farther, even by hurting yourself.
I do not say this in order to wound. I could say other things if i really wanted to wound.
iv.
I add one further word to you, a question rather. Does water flow in your country too? (I do not remember whether you have told me so) and it gives chills too, if it is the real thing.
Do I love it? I do not know. One feels so alone when it is cold. But quite otherwise when it is warm. Well then? How can I decide? How do you others decide, tell me, when you speak of it without disguise, with open heart?
v.
I am writing to you from the end of the world. You must realize this. The trees often tremble. We collect the leaves. They have a ridiculous number of veins. But what for? There is nothing between them and the tree any more, and we go off troubled.
Could not life continue on earth without wind? Or must everything tremble, always, always?
There are subterranean disturbances, too, in the house as well, like angers which might come to face you, like stern beings who would like to wrest confessions.
We see nothing, except what is so unimportant to see. Nothing, and yet we tremble. why?
Nothing, and yet we tremble. Why?
xi.
She writes to him again:
You cannot imagine all that there is in the sky, you would have to see it to believe it. So now, the... but I am not going to tell you their name at once.
In spite of their air of weighing a great deal and of occupying almost all the sky, they do not weigh, huge though they are, as much as a newborn baby.
We call them clouds.
It is true that water comes out of them, but not by compressing them, or by pounding them. It would be useless, they have so little.
But, by reason of their occupying lengths and lengthsm widths and widths, deeps also and deeps, and of puffing themselves up, they succeed in the long run in making a few droplets of water fall, yes, of water. And we are good and wet. We run off furious at having been trapped; for nobody knows the moment when they are going to release their drops; sometimes they rest for days without releasing them. And one would stay home waiting for them in vain.
return to the library
return to kicking giants