James Brook is a poet and translator living in San Francisco. His poems have appeared in Exquisite Corpse, City Lights Review, Pharos, Inkblot, Blind Date, and elsewhere. He recently translated, with Sasha Vlad, Zenobia by Gellu Naum and he edited, with Iain Boal, Resisting the Virtual Life: The Culture and Politics of Information. He's now editing a book of essays on San Francisco. He can be reached at jbrook@ix.necom. com.






STANZAS ON THE DEATH OF GUY DEBORD


contemplando
como se passa la vida,
como se viene la muerte

tan callando;
cuan presto se va el plazer. . . .

--Jorge Manrique, Coplas por la muerte de su padre



1.

wages murder the first caress
resplendent in the portal
salt on my cheek
dry timber set ablaze
each night robbed of all that I love


2.

the photograph in evidence
as many Hitlers as wanted
the lamp the piano the lecture
having replaced the map
wine breast written down


3.

the diagram of the village
constrains one to anguish
the bird flits into the dance
under a Western-movie sky
there's that echo for every shout


4.

we had the dream of water
we didn't come up for air
we could see clearly
you said strip me
you said pull me close


5.

a bitter draft from a broken cup
O countrymen washed tall
naked in sunlight in innocence
reclaimed to the warm embrace
genocidal recurrent thanksgiving


6.

"C'est un homme
ou une pierre
ou un arbre
qui va commencer
le quatrieme chant."


7.

from the rubble of information
from the bottom of the raised glass
came this one man speaking
"la belle langue de mon siecle"
no more



NOTES


Guy Debord (1931-1994), filmmaker, writer, and revolutionary, was one of the founders of the Situationist International. He is best known as the author of The Society of the Spectacle (1967)[translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith, Zone Books: New York 1994]; his other books include Comments on the Society of the Spectacle (1988)[translated by Malcolm Imrie, Verso: London 1990] and Panegyric (1989)[translated by James Brook, Verso: London 1991]. Debord made the first French translation of Jorge Manrique's Coplas por la muerte de su padre (Jorge Manrique, Stances sur la mort de son pere, Editions Champ Libre: Paris 1980). The text of the sixth stanza is taken verbatim from the fourth canto of Les Chants de Maldoror by Lautreamont, a favorite writer of Debord's: "A man or a stone or a tree is going to begin the fourth canto." The penultimate line of the seventh stanza is from Debord's Memoires (privately printed in 1958; reprinted by Belles Lettres: Paris 1993), the last line of which reads: "Je voulais parler la belle langue de mon siecle." [I wanted to speak my century=92s beautiful language.] In his collage text, this was the only line that Debord himself authored.

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