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Sleeping with the moon in one eye and the sun in the other
Love on your lips and a beautiful bird in your hair
Adorned like the fields the woods the roads and the sea
Beautiful and adorned like a trip around the world

Flee across the landscape
Among branches of smoke and all the fruits of the wind
Legs of stone wearing sand stockings
Grabbed around the waist by all the stream's muscles
One last worry on a face now transformed


from Rehearsals (1922)






Some Poets Went Out

to Philippe Soupault


As in the olden days, from an abandoned quarry, like a melancholy man, the fog, sensitive and stubborn as a strong and sad person, descends on the street, spares the houses, and mocks all encounters.
          Ten, a hundred, a thousand cheer for one or several silent singers. Treesong and birdsong, a lovely fable, and moral support.
          An emotion is born, weightless as hair. The fog gives way to sunshine and who is there to admire it, like a tree stripped of all its leaves, its shadow? O memories! The ones that cried out.


From The Necessities of Life and the Consequences of Dreams






In Broad Daylight

for Gala


Come on up. Soon the lightest feathers, deep-sea divers of the air, will grab you by the throat.
          The earth brings only the basic necessities and your beautiful species of birds, a smile. Instead of sadness, like a shadow behind love, the landscape covers everything.
          Hurry, run! And your body is faster than your thoughts, and nothing, do you hear me, nothing
can outrun you.






From Dying from Not Dying


Unknown, she was my favorite shape,
She freed me from the worry of being a man,
And I see her and I lose her and I endure
My sadness, like a flash of sunlight in cold water. 






From Poems for Peace (1918)


All the delighted wives have
Found their husbands.
It's as if he came from the sun,
He brings so much warmth.
He laughs and says hello so sweetly
Before kissing his miracle.

*

For so long I had a useless face,
But now
I have a face that can be loved
I have a face that can be happy.

*

I fantasize about every beauty
I see strolling at night,
They are so calm,
Under a racing moon.

*

The flowering fruit lights up my garden,
The ornamental trees and the fruit-bearing,
And I work and I'm alone in my garden,
And the Sun, a dark fire my hands are wearing.


Translated from the French by Zack Rogow




Paul Éluard (1895-1952, born Eugène Émile Paul Grindel) was one of the founders of the surrealist movement, and an original signer of Surrealist Manifesto in 1924. His many books of poetry include Capital de la douleur [Capital of Pain]. A lifelong political activist, Éluard has the unusual distinction of having written a book, Poésie et vérité [Poetry and Truth], including the famous poem "Liberty", that was parachuted from Royal Air Force planes behind German lines in World War II to encourage the resistance to the Nazi occupation.


Zack Rogow was a co-winner of the PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Translation Award for Earthlight by André Breton, and winner of a Bay Area Book Reviewers Award (BABRA) for his translation of George Sand's novel, Horace. His translations include Arcanum 17 by André Breton, as well as poems by Joyce Mansour, Léopold Sédar Senghor, and others. His co-translation of Shipwrecked on a Traffic Island and Other Previously Untranslated Gems by Colette was published by SUNY Press.