from The Poems of Malcolm de Chazal, translated by Sara Nicholson
Forthcoming from Free Poetry, Fall 2024
Introduction
Malcolm de Chazal is a freak of world literature. In English, he is known as the author of Sens-plastique, a famously uncategorizable collection of short poetic sayings. Aphoristic we might call it, but that doesn’t always feel quite right. Chazal himself called it a “cosmogony of the Invisible.”
He wrote much more than just this one book. There is La vie filtrée, a 400-page philosophical companion piece to Sens-plastique, a poetics of sorts, in which he attempts to abolish the exterior world and refashion it into “an X-ray telescope of the human in order to see God.” There is a “novel,” Petrusmok, which imagines a mytho-cosmic origin for Mauritius, the remote island nation off the coast of Madagascar where Chazal was born and spent most of his life. There are books about Moses and Judas; dozens of parable-like pieces he calls “apparadoxes”; several frankly baffling essays in which, so far as I can tell, he tries to disprove Einsteinian physics by way of a homegrown theory of perception, light, shadow, and “immobilité palpitation”—palpating or trembling immobility. You can imagine how excited I felt in discovering that he also wrote poems.
For those who’ve never read Chazal, I’m not sure these poems are the right place to begin. They can be exasperating, even goofy at times, as often as they are (and they are) charming and profound. They’re best appreciated not in isolation but as part of a life’s work, one person’s lovingly eccentric dedication to rethinking perception anew.
As W. H. Auden writes in his preface to the 1971 edition of Sens-plastique: the French have a long, venerable tradition of moral aphorists, and Chazal is not one of them. This is not to say, however, that there is no ethical dimension to his work. I think of the ways he approaches the object-world with childlike wonder; his cosmic thinking is always grounded in the material. Flowers make him laugh. Objects in motion seem to move him to tears. “Personification” feels like a poor word to describe what he’s doing, for example, in the following: “The / White / Daisy / Breastfed / The / Lunar / Light” or “Tonight / The pale / Moon / Got / Its period.” He’s never bleak, or ironic, or nihilistic. He’s too busy looking at the world. In a certain sense, I think of him as a religious writer. The verb voir is his God.
When in de Chazal’s world, it’s best to remember that the laws of physics work differently here. His thoughts—and these poems are, if nothing else, little thought experiments—form a vrille. It’s a word with no English equivalent: often translated as “tendril,” it can be used to describe the curly feelers that help vines cling, a spiral plane dive, a gymnastics twirl, a corkscrew, a boar’s tail. Chazal uses vrille to describe a bone eating its own marrow; I translate it, there, as “whorl.” You can feel the twist of image transforming into an impossibly fragile truth.
It is this vrille at the heart of things that Chazal is a tireless observer of. It’s what he elsewhere calls sens magique, a perpetual turning in an instant of time, a state of continuous renewal, which is the foundation of everything. Our magical sense of the world.
Quand
Passe
La vent
Les herbes
S’allongment
Pour
Faire
L’amour.
L’eau
Mordue
Par
La vague
Poussa
Un cri.
Sur
Le balcon
Du goût
L’odorat
Prenait
L’air.
Tous
Les animaux
Mangent
À
La carte.
Le rose
Marié
Au jaune
Prit
Du ventre.
Nul
N’a
Vu
La vulve
De l’eau
Sauf
le vent.
Les
Échos
Se
Téléphonaient.
La
Lumière
Blessée
Par
L’éclat
Se
Faisait
Des
Points
De suture.
La
Marguerite
Blanche
Allaitait
La
Lumière
Lunaire.
La
Bouche
De
Près
Devient
L’œil
À
Distance.
La
Toile
D’araignée
Pleine
Se mouchait.De mouches
Quand
Le feu
Se balance
L’ombre
Fleurit.
Les mots
Depuis
Les temps
Immémoriaux
Cherchent
Leur
Signification.
L’oiseau
Chante
Vers
Le soir.
Au matin
Il
Fait
Ses gammes.
Taillez
Une
Pierre
Et
Elle
Devient
Égoïste.
Sans
Le
Blanc
De l’œil
Comme
Presse-papier
Le regard
S’envolerait.
La gelée
Polkait.
La rivière
Change
De
Déshabillé
Avec
Chaque
Tournant.
Chaque
Oiseau
A la couleur
De son cri.
L’œuf
Est
Tout
En menton.
Les ossuaires
Sont
Des tombolas.
Le bleu
Pâlit
De bonheur
C’était
Le printemps.
Le
Fer forgé
Balbutiait
Des
Sentiments
Tendres.
La pluie
Barbouillée
De vent
Alla
Se laver
Les yeux
Dans l’étang
L’ombre
Est
Le poids
Du temps.
When
The wind
Blows
The grass
Lies down
To
Make
Love.
Water
Bitten
By
A wave
Cried
Out.
On
The balcony
Of taste
Smell
Seized
The air.
All
Animals
Eat
À
La carte.
Married
To yellow
Pink’s
Belly
Swelled.
No one
Saw
The water’s
Vulva
Except
The wind.
The echoes
Rang
Each other
Up.
Light
Cut
By
A
Sparkle
Stitched
Itself
Up.
The
White
Daisy
Breastfed
The
Lunar
Light.
The
Mouth
Up
Close
Becomes
An eye
From
A distance.
Full
Of flies
The
Spider’s
Web
Blew its nose.
When
Fire
Sways
Shadow
Flowers.
Words
Since
Time
Immemorial
Have sought
Their
Meaning.
Birds
Sing
Toward
Evening.
In the morning
They
Practice.
Cut
A
Stone
And
It
Becomes
A narcissist.
Without
The
White
Of the eye
Like
A paperweight
Vision
Would fly away.
Jelly
Did the polka.
The riverOf time.
Continually
Undresses
With
Each
Turn.
Each
Bird
Has the color
Of its song.
The egg
Is
All
Chin.
Ossuaries
Are
Lotteries.
Blue
Paled
With happiness
Now that
It was spring.
Wrought
Iron
Mumbled
A few
Tender
Sentiments.
The wind-
Spattered
Rain
Washed
Its eyes
In the pond.
Shadow
Is
The weight
Sara Nicholson is the author of three books of poetry, most recently April, all from The Song Cave. She teaches in the MFA Program at Boise State University.
Malcolm de Chazal (1902–1981) was a writer and painter from Mauritius. He is best known in English as the author of Sens-plastique, a vast collection of poetic observations and aphorisms he himself called a “cosmogony of the Invisible.” He also wrote poems, essays, pensées, parables, a novel, and many other uncategorizable texts, among them La vie filtrée, a 400-page philosophical companion piece to Sens-plastique, in which he attempts to abolish the exterior world and refashion it into “an X-ray telescope of the human in order to see God.” This selection comes from The Poems of Malcolm de Chazal (Free Poetry, forthcoming Fall 2024).
Malcolm de Chazal (1902–1981) was a writer and painter from Mauritius. He is best known in English as the author of Sens-plastique, a vast collection of poetic observations and aphorisms he himself called a “cosmogony of the Invisible.” He also wrote poems, essays, pensées, parables, a novel, and many other uncategorizable texts, among them La vie filtrée, a 400-page philosophical companion piece to Sens-plastique, in which he attempts to abolish the exterior world and refashion it into “an X-ray telescope of the human in order to see God.” This selection comes from The Poems of Malcolm de Chazal (Free Poetry, forthcoming Fall 2024).