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FOREWORD
by Edmund White
Whereas
Genet's fiction is lucid, his poems, which he wrote at the same time,
are sometimes obscure, although his language is always so seductive that
one scarcely notices the difficulty. Often poem and novel treat the same
theme, even if in very different ways. For example, in Miracle of the
Rose a persistent fantasy of being a cabin-boy on a pirate ship keeps
cropping up, a theme that also haunts the poems, if glancingly. Or the
prison colonies in Guyana, abolished before Genet began writing, are major
erotic sites in both his poetry and his fiction. As the ultimate hell
holes where incorrigible prisoners condemned to life sentences were sent,
these colonies obviously appealed to a writer who sought beauty in filth,
goodness in evil, peace in desperation.
Although Genet later came to admire the
abstract splendors of Mallarmé's poetry, his own verse is too passionate,
too lavishly lyric, too impulsive to suggest such a model. In fact, he
is obviously indebted to both Cocteau and Rimbaud. From Cocteau he derived
his way of mixing classical diction with lowlife contemporary characters
and situations, though Genet, to be sure, pushes this contrast much farther
than Cocteau ever dared. From Rimbaud Genet derives the knack for interjecting
sudden releases of lyric violence into patterned narratives, the sea imagery,
the longing for escape and transformation as well as Romantic conviction
that carries the reader through the thickets of dense, obscure language.
Mark Spitzer has worked on these translations
with a monastic patience and a martyr's zeal, and they require both ardor
and dedication, since they are dense, heavily coded, daringly pornographic
at times, and at other times far more lushly over-the-top than English
comfortably tolerates. To my ear, at least, he has invented eloquent,
viable English poems -- the first test if these verses are to find a new
audience. His versions are far more accurate than the other attempts at
Englishing I have read, partly because Spitzer has been more attentive
than his predecessors to Genet's gnarled syntax. Finally, he has carefully
researched Genet's use of prison argot, especially the private language
that was spoken at Mettray, the reform school where Genet was imprisoned
as an adolescent and the main station of the Cross of his imagination.
For instance, only someone privy to this dialect would know that "une
biche dorée" is not only "a gilded doe" but also (at least for
the inmates of Mettray) a young boy who is sodomized for the first time.
Genet was always inspired by poetry in the
literal sense of the word -- he inhaled it, he breathed it as naturally
as other people breathe the air. At Mettray he discovered the poetry of
Ronsard, an encounter that electrified his sensibility and gave him the
ambition to become a writer. In his twenties and early thirties he was
too poor to buy poetry, but he tore Rimbaud's "Bateau ivre" out of a book
to send to a German friend and he was arrested once for stealing a fine
edition of Verlaine's Fêtes galantes. In his fiction he often
buries paraphrases of lines he knew by heart. He could quote from memory
whole scenes of Racine's verse dramas. At the end of his life he gracefully
and spontaneously referred to death using Mallarmé's phrase, "this
shallow stream" (ce ruisseau peu profond).
No reader can truly understand Genet's plays
or novels without grasping his poetry -- which Mark Spitzer has made available
in a convincing, accurate translation for the first time in English.
- Edmund White
Paris, 1994.
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