84
PARTISAN REVIEW
a
pathetique
equally as valuable as the sublimity, wit, irony, malice
and corrosive rhetorical splendors with which that literature has
always been so well supplied. Apollinaire combined this pathos
with wit; he has moments which go hack to Villon. Pathos alone,
or in combination, is contrary to the self-conscious, anti-sentimental
and synthetically tough spirit of the time; but it is a valuable civil–
ized and salutary element, none the less. That Eluard's gifts should
have been forced, by the fashion or neurosis of his period, to dis–
guise themselves as "unconscious" (so that their true imaginative
flights will not lie open to scorn), and be reduced to the level of a
word game, is peculiar enough. That they should have been twisted
into the use of propaganda, and made to function under mani–
festoes, literary and otherwise, will certainly amuse future critics
and diagnosticians of his era.
·
TRANSLATIONS OF POEMS QUOTED IN THE TEXT
A fine fire in the fireplace
A good carpet on the floor
Chairs around the table
Brushes ploughs bugles laces
All smoothly covered with bird-lime
THEIR EYES FOREVER PURE
Slow-passing days, days of rain,
Days of broken mirrors and lost needles,
Days of eyelids closed to the seas' horizon,
Of hours all alike, days of captivity.
My spirit which still
glitt~rs
on the leaves
And the flowers, my spirit is naked like love,
Its forgotten dawn makes it lower its head
And look upon its obedient and vain body.
Nevertheless, I have seen the most beautiful eyes in the world,
Silver gods who hold sapphires
in
their hands,
Actual gods, birds in the earth
And
in
the water, I have seen them.
