Maurice Rollinat

Mostly untranslated until recently, Maurice Rollinat's dark poetry evokes obsessed phantasmagoric images of death and the unpleasant. A disciple of Baudelaire, he joined the literary group Hydropathes ("those who are afraid of water"), an anti-clerical literary group with ties to the decadent literary movement. Many of Rollinat's poems were set to piano accompaniment, as he would attract a number of celebrities such as Oscar Wilde, to the cabaret Le Chat Noir-- infamous for being the bohemian nineteenth-century absinthe-fueled nightclub in the Montmartre district of Paris. Rollinat's friend, and author Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly, wrote that "Rollinat might be Baudelaire superior  in the sincerity and depth of diabolism."

Aside from a couple of poems from magazines and e-zines, English translations of Maurice Rollinat's poems are difficult to come by. Though for the most part dismissed throughout his lifetime, his poetry certainly bears surrealist traits. A collection of his translated poetry would be monumental, as such a collection is long overdue. 

                                                       Maurice Rollinat (1846-1903)




IN THE LIBRARY

It calls up dreams of ancient forests.
Thirteen oblong lamps cast a spectral light,
A sepulchral glare throughout day and night,
On books full of shadows and secrets.

I always shuddered when entering there:
I felt myself, among its railings and haze,
Drawn by the pale arms of thirteen chairs
And watched by thirteen portraits' gaze.

From out of a high window, with midnight near,
I saw floating one night, and disappear,
The goblin who dances at the door of doom,

When suddenly I trembled to the sound of chimes:
The clock had just struck thirteen times
In the gruesome silence of that accursed room. m.


THE SOMNAMBULIST

A hat on his head and a cane in his hand,
His rigid frame squeezed into black frock tails,
He goes to and fro up along the garrett rails,
With a mechanical mien and a step not of man.

Strange stroller, spectre, and sham,
Endlessly repeating his terrible trail.
Against storm-shrivelled skies, parchment pale,
He makes his towering funereal stand.

Suddenly, in the hellish lightning's spasm,
As he teeters toward a channel-side chasm
With the grace of a dancer or tightrope artiste,

Horror seizes my being and congeals my blood,
For a great ebony cat (gnashing Hydrophobe!)
Has come to awaken Monsieur Somnabuliste.


THE EVIL EYE

The Evil Eye's tormenting me:
An eye in which harsh censure gleams,
In which cold hate reverberates,
A glassy, staring eye like that
Of one to execution damned.

Without surcease, relentlessly,
It goes before or after me,
No matter where I go or lurch.
The Evil Eye!

So very vuln'rable am I
To that malignant yellow eye
That even in the dark it glows;
A tamer whose foiled beast I be,
Transfixing, scrutinizing me,
The Evil Eye!