Blaze in a Desert

Victor Serge, James Brook

Description

Victor Serge (1890–1947) played many parts, as he recounted in his indelible Memoirs of a Revolutionary. The son of anti-czarist exiles in Brussels, Serge was a young anarchist in Paris; a syndicalist rebel in Barcelona; a Bolshevik in Petrograd; a Comintern agent in Central Europe; a comrade of Trotsky’s; a friend of writers like Andrei Bely, Boris Pilnyak, and André Breton; a prisoner of Stalin; a dissident Marxist in exile in Mexico...

Like Serge’s extraordinary novels, A Blaze in a Desert: Selected Poems bears witness to decades of revolutionary upheavals in Europe and the advent of totalitarian rule; many of the poems were written during the “immense shipwreck” of Stalin’s ascendancy. In poems datelined Petrograd, Orenburg, Paris, Marseille, the Caribbean, and Mexico, Serge composed elegies for the fallen—as well as prospective elegies for the living who, like him, endured prison, exile, and bitter disappointment in the revolutions of the first half of the twentieth century:

Night falls, the boat pulls in,
stop singing.
Exile relights its captive lamps
on the shore of time.

Throughout A Blaze in a Desert, Serge draws on the heritage of late- and post-Symbolist writers like Verhaeren, Rictus, Apollinaire, Blok, and Bely—themselves authors of messages of a more general resistance by the human spirit—to express the anguish of the failure of the Russian Revolution and to search out glimmers of hope in the ruins of the Second World War.

A Blaze in a Desert comprises Victor Serge’s sole published book of poetry, Resistance (1938), his unpublished manuscript Messages (1946), and his last poem, “Hands” (1947).

Sujets

• WW2
• Segunda Guerra Mundial
• Russian Revolution
• World War II
• Surrealism
• Révolution russe
• Arthur Rimbaud
• Seconde Guerre mondiale

Informations

• Publié par: PM Press
• Date de parution: 01 mai 2017
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781629633992
• Langue: English

Extrait

PRAISE FOR A BLAZE IN A DESERT
The voice of Victor Serge is needed now more than ever, and James Brook provides a fine edition and translation of his poems, bringing out the close relation between poetic expression and sensibility, and humane, revolutionary political engagement. History and the cosmos, individual and collective hopes, dreams and loss trace a subtle dance in this moving collection.
-Bill Marshall, author of Victor Serge: The Uses of Dissent and Guy Hocquenghem: Beyond Gay Identity
In these dark times, the poetry of Victor Serge illuminates the deep continuum of revolutionary history. As all great work, it shows the power of both resistance acceptance. Serge is noted for his prose but his poetry is in many ways more moving. It inspires the reader to stay true to the revolutionary spirit and will in its compassion, defiance, and outrage.
-David Meltzer, author of San Francisco Beat: Talking with the Poets , When I Was a Poet , and Two-Way Mirror: A Poetry Notebook
In this meticulously translated collection of Victor Serge s poetry, emotion is the force that swells beneath the poet s acute observations and his reasoning, sobriety, and restraint.
-Summer Brenner, author of Nearly Nowhere and My Life in Clothes
An international rebel with a cause, ever the champion of the downpressed and foreclosed, and of all the broken young wings, Victor Serge-deported, exiled, hounded from country to country and continent to continent-inhabited a planet without visas. But in A Blaze in a Desert Serge s poetry, which witnessed the rise of modern totalitarian political ideologies and ideologues, comes home to Walt Whitman s band of brothers. And James Brook s erudite introduction guides us well through Serge s engagement with poetry and poets and the enduring struggle for justice.
-Gloria Frym, author of Mind over Matter and The True Patriot

A Blaze in a Desert: Selected Poems by Victor Serge
Translation and edition copyright 2017 by James Brook
Afterword copyright 2017 by Richard Greeman
This translation is based on Victor Serge, Pour un brasier dans un d sert , Jean Ri re, ed., published in France in 1998. The new translations of R sistance and Mains in A Blaze in a Desert supersede the translations in the 1989 City Lights edition of those poems.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be transmitted by any means without permission in writing from the publisher.
ISBN: 978-1-62963-382-4
Library of Congress Control Number: 2016959587
Cover drawing copyright 1978 by Vlady
Cover design by John Yates / www.stealworks.com
Interior design by briandesign
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PM Press
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Printed in the USA by the Employee Owners of Thomson-Shore in Dexter, Michigan.
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Contents
PREFACE
Mourning the Fallen, Mourning the Revolution James Brook
I. Resistance
Frontier
People of the Ural
Old Woman
Somewhere else
Just Four Girls
The Asphyxiated Man
Tiflis
Crime in Tiflis
Russian History
Boat on the Ural
T te- -T te
Dialectic
Be Hard
Constellation of Dead Brothers
Max
City
26 August 28
Death of Panait
Why Inscribe a Name?
Cassiopeia
Song
Trust
Sensation
II. Messages
Sunday
B rang re
Suicide of Dr. C.
Marseille
The rats are leaving
Out at Sea
Caribbean Sea
Our Children
Death of Jacques Mesnil
Altagracia
Mexico: Idyll
Mexico: Morning Litany
Mexico: Churches
Outbreaks
Philosophy
We have long thought
Note
It takes
After that splendid Notre Dame
It s salt water that quenches
III. Mains/Hands
Mains
Hands
NOTES TO THE POEMS
AFTERWORD : The Odyssey of a Revolutionary Poet Richard Greeman
Preface
Many years ago, friends pressed me to read Victor Serge s writings, especially Memoirs of a Revolutionary and the novels. These books turned out to be among a handful that preserved and helped recreate the human texture of an era of revolt, revolution, and darkly tragic counterrevolution that still weighs on the present. The writing was vivid, stirring, tense, modern-a source of divided pleasures in our night with its stars askew.
I came to the poetry much later, stumbling across Fran ois Masp ro s 1972 reprint of R sistance (retitled Pour un brasier dans un d sert ) in a bookshop in Paris one day. The poems, many of them written during the immense shipwreck of Stalin s ascendancy, struck me as strange, oblique, and often beautiful: they were charged with anger, hope, disappointment, irony, and passion, and they quickly shifted from clear-eyed realism to lyricism to the crack-up of the real, and back again.
A Blaze in a Desert includes translations of R sistance (1938), Serge s sole published book of poems, and of Messages (1946), a manuscript left unpublished until 1998. In addition, it contains a translation of Serge s last poem, Mains (Hands) (1947), also left in manuscript. Throughout, I have relied on Jean Ri re s superb edition of the poems: Victor Serge, Pour un brasier dans un d sert (1998); his annotated edition also includes uncollected and unpublished poems and drafts of poems.
I owe a debt of gratitude to Mitchell Abidor, Claudio Albertani, Lori Fagerholm, and Georgia Smith for their encouragement and help over the years that this project took. Special thanks are due to Christopher Winks, Donald Nicholson-Smith, Ren e Morel, Richard Greeman, and Summer Brenner for their crucial readings and comments when such were most needed. Richard Greeman, the translator of most of Serge s novels, also contributed the afterword. El Centro Vlady, at the Universidad Nacional Aut noma de M xico (UNAM), graciously authorized the reproduction of the sketch that Vladimir Kibalchich Russakov (Vlady) made of his father s hands in death.
Lori, this book is for you.
James Brook November 2016
Mourning the Fallen, Mourning the Revolution
James Brook
All my life I have seen only troubled times, extreme divisions in society, and immense destruction; I have taken part in these troubles.
-Guy Debord, Panegyric , vol. 1
Victor Serge (1890-1947) is best known for Memoirs of a Revolutionary and a series of novels based on his experience of prison in France, a failed insurrection in Spain, the early hopes and abysmal failure of the Russian Revolution, the fall of France to the invading German army, and the epic chaos of the Second World War. 1 But from his anarchist youth in Belgium and France till his dying day in Mexico after the Second World War, Serge was also very much a poet. Elegiac, satiric, sometimes lyrical, his poetry speaks of experiences almost incomprehensible to us, because we are so distant from Serge s world and our sense of history is often so weak. As he asks in his wartime notebooks, What remains of the worlds I ve known, in which I ve struggled? 2 As with his memoirs, one of the tasks of Serge s poetry is to preserve and transmit the memory of those densely populated worlds.
Serge wrote much of his poetry in exile. As a prisoner of Stalin, Serge spent the years 1933-1936 in internal deportation in Orenburg, near the Russian border with Kazakhstan, where he wrote most of the poems published in Resistance (1938). Later, in his flight from the Nazi invasion of France, Serge found refuge in Mexico, where he lived from 1941 until his death in 1947. He began writing the poems collected in Messages (1946) in Paris and Marseille, with others datelined Martinique, Ciudad Trujillo, the Atlantic, and Mexico. 3
For Serge, exile meant more than geographical displacement. As a core member of the Left Opposition to Stalin from the late 1920s on, Serge lived amid intense ideological conflicts that often put his life in jeopardy. From his early days as an anarchist in Belgium and France, through his participation in the Russian Revolution, and till the end of the Second World War, Serge lived the great hopes and the bitter disappointments of social revolution in the first half of the twentieth century. He witnessed the rise of first Stalinist, then Nazi totalitarianism, and he saw the world utterly transformed by a war in ways that he struggled to comprehend, all of which left their imprint on his poetry, as in Marseille (1941):
Planet without visas, without money, without compass, great empty sky without comets,
The Son of Man has nowhere left to lay his head,
His head a target for mechanical shooters,
His Remington portable and his last suitcase
Bearing the names of fifteen fallen cities
Serge was a lifelong outsider. As the child of anti-czarist Russian exiles in Belgium, he was born into the bitter estrangement from bourgeois society that would lead him to individualist anarchism and to the intoxications of poetry in vogue in that milieu. 4 Serge was a poet partly due to the curse of self-awareness and his conviction that the world did not have to be impoverished, unjust, and unfree. He was in effect a po te maudit in the tradition of French poets that stretches from Villon to Baudelaire and up through Surrealism. This conscious alienation, so evident in the anarchist writings of the young Serge, 5 evolved to include rebellion against the stifling bureaucratic collectivism of the USSR.
Serge s poetry has roots in the fertile Symbolist soil that nurtured Guillaume Apollinaire s and mile Verhaeren s poetry, a soil that had been enriched by Walt Whitman s long line and large spirit. Like Apollinaire, Serge can write dense, enigmatic lyrics; like Verha