Robert Desnos: Seven poems translated by Louis Simpson

American Poetry Review, The, Jan 1996 by Simpson, Louis

One day, so the story goes, a Nazi high official was having dinner with some sympathetic Frenchmen. The Nazi said that among the prisoners at Compiegne there were several interesting men, even a poet, Desnos. He would probably not be deported. "Desnos]" one of the French guests shouted, a man named Alain Laubreaux. "Not deported] You ought to shoot him. He is a dangerous man, a terrorist, a Communist."

Desnos was sent to Buchenwald and from there to other concentration camps. At Auschwitz, in May of 1944, the poet Andre Verdet, who was also a prisoner, saw Desnos standing in the rain in a crowd of men who were emaciated and dying of hunger. The crematoria were belching smoke, and the S.S. guards as they walked by would say, "You are all going to die." Verdet saw Desnos going from one group to another. Taking a man by the arm, he would read the lines in his hand. Then, Verdet said, a miracle happened: Desnos spoke to the men of their future with such confidence that they forgot where they were and their faces lit up with hope.

After Germany surrendered, a young Czech medical student named Josef Stuna volunteered to attend to the prisoners at the Terezin concentration camp. Among the names of prisoners he came upon the name Desnos, and he recalled that before the war he had seen the name as that of a French poet whose poems had been translated into Czech. He went to the man who was lying on a paper mattress, among a hundred others. He opened his eyes. Stuna asked him, "Do you know the poet Robert Desnos?" Stuna would not forget the extraordinary expression on his face as he said, "I am the poet Robert Desnos]"

He had contracted typhus and was still running a fever. There were no medical supplies in the camp, not even enough water. He died on the th of June. His ashes were sent to Prague where meetings were held in his honor. They were then sent to France.

*Theodore Fraenkel and Samy Simon, "Biographie de Robert Desnos." In Marie-Claire Dumas, ed., Robert Desnos. (Paris: l'Herne, 1987), 317.

** Idem, 315.