The House of the Dead / La maison des morts
The House of the Dead / La maison des morts
by Guillaume Apollinaire, translated (by me) from the French
For Maurice Raynal1
Stretched out along the sides of the cemetery2
The house of the dead embraced it like a cloister
Inside of its glass fronts
That looked just like shop windows
Instead of standing and smiling
The mannequins grimaced for eternity
Having arrived in Munich fifteen or twenty days before
For the first time and by chance I had entered
This almost deserted cemetery
And my teeth were chattering
Before all this bourgeoisie
On show and dressed in their best
Waiting to be buried
Suddenly
As quick as my memory
Light reappeared in their eyes
From windowed cell to windowed cell
The sky filled with apocalypse3
Everlasting
And the earth flat to infinity
As before Galileo4
Was wrapped in a thousand unmoving mythologies
An angel of diamond smashed all the glass
And the dead accosted me
With demeanors from that other world
But their faces and bearing
Soon seemed less funereal
The sky and the earth shed
Their air of phantasmagoria
The dead were rejoicing
To see their deceased bodies between them and the light
They laughed at their shadows and observed them
As if truly
These had been their former life
So I counted them
There were forty-nine men
Women and children
Who were growing in beauty before my eyes
And were looking at me now
With such cordiality
Such tenderness even
That feeling friendly towards them
All at once
I invited them for a stroll
Far from the arcades of their house
And all arm in arm
Humming military songs
Yes all your sins are absolved
We left the cemetery
We crossed the city
And often encountered
Friends and relatives who joined
The little troop of recent dead
Everyone was so gay
So charming in such good health
That it would take a keen eye
To distinguish the dead from the living
Then in the countryside
We spread out
Two men of the light cavalry joined us
We gave them warm welcome
They cut wood from viburnum
And elder5
From which they made whistles
That they distributed to the children
Later at a country dance
The couples hands on shoulders
Stepped to the sharp sound of the zithers
They hadn’t forgotten how to dance
These dead men and women
There was drinking too
And from time to time a bell
Announced that a new barrel
Was about to be tapped
A dead girl seated on a bench
Beside a barberry bush
Allowed a student
Kneeling at her feet
To speak to her of engagement
I will wait for you
Ten years twenty years if need be
Your wishes will be mine
I will wait for you
All your life
Replied the dead girl
Children
Of this world or the next
Sang these nursery rhymes
With words absurd and lyrical
Which undoubtedly are what is left
Of the oldest poetic monuments
Of humanity
The student slid a ring
Upon the ring finger of the dead girl
Here is the token of my love
Regarding our engagement
Neither time nor absence
Will make us forget our promises
And one day we will have a beautiful wedding
Tufts of myrtle
On our clothes and in your hair
A beautiful sermon in the church
Long speeches after the banquet
And some music
Some music
Our children
Said the bride
Will be more handsome more handsome still
Alas! the ring was broken
Than if they were of silver or of gold
Of emerald or of diamond
They will be brighter and brighter still
Than the stars of the firmament
Than the radiance of the dawn
Than the light in your eyes my groom
They will have a fragrance better still
Alas! the ring was broken
Than the lilac in new bloom
Than thyme than rose than a spray
Of lavender or rosemary
The musicians having gone away
We continued the promenade
At the lakeshore
We had fun skipping
Flat pebbles over water
That was lightly dancing
Some boats were docked
In a small harbor
We untied them
Once the group had embarked
And some of the dead were rowing
With as much vigor as the living
At the front of the boat that I steered
A dead man spoke with a young woman
Clothed in a yellow dress
With a black bodice
With blue ribbons and a gray hat
Adorned solely with one tired little feather
I love you
He was saying
As the pigeon loves the dove
Like the nocturnal insect
Loves the light
Too late
Replied the living one
Reject reject this forbidden love
I am married
See the ring that shines
My hands tremble
I cry and I would like to die
The boats had arrived
At a place where the horsemen
Knew that an echo responded from the shore6
We never tired of questioning it
There were queries so extravagant
And answers so spot on
That we all died laughing
And the dead man said to the living woman
We would be so happy you and I
The waters will close over us together
But your hands shake and you cry
None of us will go back ever
We touched land and it was time to return
The lovers loved each other
And in pairs with lovely mouths
Walked at unequal distances
The dead men had chosen the living women
And the living men
The dead women
A juniper tree sometimes
Had the look of a ghost
The children rent the air
Huffing hollow cheeked
Into their whistles of viburnum
Or of elder
While the military men
Sang Tyrollean folksongs
Answering each other as they do
In the mountains
In the city
Our troop diminished bit by bit
We said
Goodbye
See you tomorrow
See you soon
Many entered the beerhalls
Some of them parted from us
In front of a dog butcher7
To buy their evening meal
Soon I was left alone with those dead
Who were heading straight
For the cemetery
Where
Under the Arcades
I recognized them
Laid out
Motionless
And well dressed
Waiting for burial behind the glass
They were unaware
Of what had come to pass
But the living kept the memory
It was an unhoped for happiness
And so sure
That they had no fear of losing it
They lived so nobly
That those who but the day before
Saw them as equals
Or even something less
Now admired
Their power their wealth and their genius
For there is nothing that elevates you
Like having loved someone dead
We become so pure that we manage
In the glaciers of memory
To meld with that remembrance
We are strengthened for life
And we have no need of anyone anymore
A French art critic and strong proponent of Cubism, in the same Parisian circles as Apollinaire.
The architecture described could belong to the Nordfriedhof, a cemetery in Munich with a large edifice containing a chapel and mortuary, extending two covered arcades along the sides toward the graveyard. This chapel also features in Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice.
Ápokálypsis is Greek for revelation, or disclosure, and is often used to describe the end of the world, after the Book of Revelation in the Bible. (When we lived in Greece, the grandeur of all that borrowed language came down considerably, starting as soon as we headed toward the exodos in Athens airport. I spent a lot of time looking up words I thought I knew in my Greek-English dictionary for fun, and there I discovered that apokalypsis also means taking off your hat.) The resurrection of the dead in the flesh plays a large part in Christian eschatology.
Slight correction to Apollinaire: Galileo found evidence against not the earth’s flatness (thought spherical since ancient Greece) but its placement at the center of the universe. However, the image of the earth wrapped with “mythologies” well describes the astronomical schematic of the earth surrounded by a “celestial sphere” in which the stars, often represented marked out in constellations based on mythology, are fixed.
In folklore, viburnum, also known in English as the “wayfaring tree,” protects travelers from harm. Elder branches, easily hollowed out, are commonly used to make simple instruments. (The tree’s Latin name, sambucus, means flute or harp.) Druids were said to communicate with the dead with flutes of elder wood.
This is probably a reference to the famously loud echo associated with the Lorelei, a 132-meter-high rock on the River Rhine, though it is nowhere near Munich.