After the long battle, rest in peace, my heart,
Sleep in the midst of carnage as would a proud conqueror,
Among the battlers of briefly known dawns.
After the long battle, rest in peace, my heart.
From La Cloche pour les Morts, ( The Bell for the Dead)
I have a very old book which is a large volume of French, Nineteenth Century Poetry. The final chapter of the compilation is devoted to those poets who wrote in French, but who were not of French nationality- those things mattered more in those days!
Within this section, I came across Hélène Vacaresco. She is the final poet selected in the collection, and the only one who did not live within a recognised Francophone area. The introductory preface introducing her section paints a beautiful portrait of Romania in the Nineteenth Century as a cultivated bastion of the French language, where one often hears French spoken with more sophistication and clarity than within France itself! Quite a compliment.
Hélène Vacaresco was of Romanian, aristocratic background, and wrote lines such as those cited above. I feel that her heart must have once been permanently broken thus enabling her to produce lines and works of such enduring poignancy. She seems to be deathlessly betrothed to melancholy and the result is wondrous, and a condolence to those others who need poetry for life.
My translation fails to parallel the elegance and subtlety of the original French. Nonetheless, I sincerely hope that it conveys a portion of the longing, the seemingly frozen, enduring melancholy.
I wonder if she ever used Romanian for her oeuvre.
