Ulysses: Variant II
I left behind one city’s sidewalks for other city sidewalks,
millions of men for other millions of men,
I left behind one city’s sidewalks for other city sidewalks,
millions of men for other millions of men,
the same ones without end,
I never had enough.
So why had I moved on?
Words die away, passing from mouth to mouth
and luck wears out, always supplying the dice.
What a curious voyage I have made among men,
we have traveled so many roads, Oh my eye,
and were amazed at each new turn
to find that mornings were the same
that men had the same faces,
old dinghies tied to rotting wharves,
yellowed existences—
did I not know their roots buried
in the earth—the useless voyage, and the thirst?
The novelty was in their tubercles.
Miracles of hunger, of cold,
you are filled with faces.
The world was full when we left port.
Did we see truly, or was it only a vision?
And now that the seas have salted my lungs
an ancient seagull, my hope chipped and worn
I close the old book and ask what’s the use,
why so much water multiplied by so much water,
and so much land?
Men may be king of this world, but I,
but you, shadows worn down by anger,
pity and the desire to be nowhere at all,
what are we looking for? Did I invent you? My eyes
are tired. What can men do? Absent from themselves,
or rather, consumed like us by secret fevers
and having returned from a voyage where they too
saw people, ports and the senseless seas,
eternal things, that are so dull to the palate,
and feeling, tender, perishable things
—so dear.
Benjamin Fondane (1898–1944) was a Romanian Jew who emigrated to France in 1923 to pursue his love of French poetry and culture. While at law school in Bucharest, he spent most of his time writing for avant-garde literary periodicals. In Paris, Fondane worked at an insurance company and for Paramount Pictures, while establishing himself as a poet and philosopher writing in French. Under the guidance of the Russian émigré philosopher Lev Shestov, Fondane became a leading exponent of existential philosophy in the 1930s. He also spent time in Argentina, at the invitation of Victoria Ocampo, lecturing on avant-garde film and directing a surrealist comedic film. In 1944, he was deported from France and killed at Auschwitz. In addition to Cinepoems and Others, New York Review Books publishes a volume of his selected essays, Existential Monday.
Nathaniel Rudavsky-Brody is a translator living in Brussels. He studied math in Chicago and medieval French and Occitan literature in Poitiers and Paris. He has published translations of Benjamin Fondane and an article on the philosophy of sailing.
