This is not a confession. Nor a judgment. Who could claim to judge one’s life equitably, or to gauge it? That would be to record it on index cards. To prosecute or to plead. Self-criticism is most often a hypocritical way of finding alibis for oneself. Life has, for its appointed counsel, only its acts — which are always civil-status acts in poor condition, badly put together like mine. How does one go about translating oneself into the present, into the future? It is that one belongs first, body and soul, to one’s past. Mine comes out of a rat hole, a hole in the cellar that sheltered me for a time and saved my life during the war. What also saved me, on the other hand, is the contrary of a memory lapse: a spontaneous reaction of recollection, in the form of a song. As a policeman asked me, during the roundup of 16 July 1942, where I was born, I had the presence of mind not to tell him the truth (to answer: in Warsaw would have had me taken away on the spot). What came into my head and onto my tongue was the refrain of a popular song of the time, performed, I believe, by Mistinguett. And I tossed out: “I was born in the faubourg Saint-Denis,” provoking the policeman’s hesitation and a respite that allowed my mother and me to slip away. An anecdotal detail, no doubt, but one that shows that life, at times, can hang by a thread — and by the thread of a song… My childhood knew the apprenticeship of clandestinity, of humiliation, of death lying in wait on every side. “I wore the yellow star / driven in up to the hilt”: this line punctuates my chronicle, my first steps in poetry. Perhaps I discovered poetry as a way out, the only means of escape from an inhuman condition?
It was another state, a second nature — I have even spoken of a “second birth” — that radically modified the landscape of the first and gave it a meaning. At that time, assuredly, I did not know what poetry was. And I am not certain that I know it any better today. My passion consisting in seeking it, possibly where it is not, where it is not yet, where it is not supposed to be found. In certain words or certain folds of reality. Nothing defines the poet, except what he writes — he who is at once a “deep-shaft dreamer,” as I like to call it, and a rouser of forms. Science, attuned to our dreams, opened to fiction the field of hypotheses and hyperboles. It seemed to me the obligatory passage, the means of presaging and preparing the future: “The young of this time have no mal du siècle / The malady of the future stands them in for a secret,” I wrote then, willingly confounding scientific fiction — since I was a devotee of science fiction — with reality, in the name of a thirst for the absolute that was no doubt in me only an avatar of an innate messianism, clinging to the founding word of Rimbaud: “One must be absolutely modern.”
In the mid-fifties, the myth of “pure and hard” socialism that Stalin had embodied (provoking there too a messianism that was otherwise blind) began to crumble under the battering blows dealt by Khrushchev. I had been among those who had believed, almost religiously, in the inevitability of the social and human liberation that was to follow our liberation from Nazi slavery. Its symbols were charged with a magnetism so powerful that they had held me, since adolescence, within an invisible, almost metaphysical circle. After the time of certainties, of visions, of propaganda and alienating fabrications, despite the supposed grandeur of the cause, came the time of questionings and of an excruciating revision. It was indispensable to analyze and reevaluate the system that had molded our thoughts to the point of anesthesia and reduced our commitment to gesticulations and approvals. The idea of the new man that had fascinated me and oriented my writing toward a naïve incantation proved to be a fable, not to say a deception. Had nothing really changed in this world where we hoped to change life? At the same time as a dark page of the past was turning, with the allegorical figure of oppression and the lie, there began the epiphany of man in space, through which perhaps the book of the future was at last opening.
And it is there that my poetry, after having sacrificed too much to circumstantial solicitations, wished to draw breath again. Through the writing of a modern chanson de geste, in the Opéra de l’espace (Opera of Space), I sketched another reflection — still confused and subject to the inebriation of baroque metaphorism — on the conquest of the inner world. One of the stakes of the conquest of space was perhaps the becoming of the species, even more than that of the technology of which it incarnated the major ambition. On the one hand, with Gagarin (who would soon be followed by Armstrong and the other “moonwalkers”), the myth of Icarus revived and brought the unknown within reach of our probes — but the probes, as we see, could themselves undergo the fate of Icarus! — and on the other hand, in the course of a trial in which the mask of stupidity stuck itself onto the face of a recurrent despotism, mingled with antisemitism, the Russian poet Joseph Brodsky was put under accusation. I knew nothing, or almost nothing, of the future Nobel laureate, but the iniquity of the trial revolted me, and I wrote: “Open Letter to a Soviet Judge.” From meditation before the mystery of the cosmos to protest against the injustice of men, from the epic form of the Opéra de l’espace to the pamphleteering form of my “Open Letter,” I was trying to construct for myself, through a still uncertain discourse, an ethics of commitment and a poetics that would be practicable and livable for me.
Inscribed in the future, the utopia of a golden age nourished voluntarism. Since everything seemed determined by the designs of men, it only remained for poetry to weave a message of it. I had come, by dint of naïveté, to a narrowly instrumentalist conception: “The future is the sum / of what we want and of what we are.” Architect of its own cathedral, ideology metamorphosed into theology. And this theology substituted, for the mystery of beings, the mystification of appearance. I sensed it without admitting all its consequences, retaining the problematic but always renewable hope that the church and its ponderous orthodoxy could in the end be reformed. I had identified myself with a mysticism, forgetting or relegating to the background my own original mystery and the evolving sentiment that flowed from it. I was unaware of the waverings of an identity that faith had blurred or muddled — faith in a universalism that nowhere really prevented antisemitism from resurging, there even where it ought to have been forever eradicated according to its own canons.
At the origin, then, I returned as one returns to one’s source, by the means of a language, my mother tongue, of which I had not entirely lost the use: Yiddish. I devoted myself, through translation, to transmitting at least a part of its poetic heritage. It was a vital experience, a mission, a commitment that I had set myself as my personal reparation in relation to the annihilation of Yiddish culture not only by the Nazis but also in that socialist world in which I had once invested my hopes.
I filled myself with the awakening, the still-diffuse murmur of a thousand other selves who, without resembling me, were in a certain way my fellows, my brothers, recovered from the dust of their speech. I filled myself with the vast rumor of a people that refuses absence from the world and resists effacement. A people for whom the sacred word is the irreducible kernel of its survival and its perenniality. This survival took on a new meaning in the land of Israel. But from this land, could the promises really be realized without the necessary dialogue being engaged, through which would be established the recognition of the other, of his reasons and his rights? This dialogue was for me that of Jérusalem (Jerusalem), which I composed as echo and as reply to the drama of the Yom Kippur war.
Among the living and the dead — those I had loved and those who were no more, those whom the quicksands of history had engulfed — I pursued my search for paternity. It began in the vestiges of the fortress of Masada overlooking the Dead Sea, there where the last believing Jews, called Zealots, had given one another death in order to escape the slavery of the Romans. Other martyrs emerged from memory: the pleiad of Yiddish writers and poets whom Stalin had executed without trial in the month of August 1952. My whole universe tipped over into that zone of silence that only prayer can cross — but which, sometimes, as we have seen, profaners come to remind us that even the dead are not safe from hatred.
How to cross the desert of memory where the letters have vitrified their desert roses? The Hebrew alphabet, which is, give or take one or two variants, the one that Yiddish uses, was restored to me at the age of maturity, as if in the ocean I had found again an anonymous wave, exactly identical to all the others and yet destined for me alone — having either the power to drown me, to erase me from the mirror of the days, or to allow me to escape the shipwreck of my most illusory reflections.
Buried letters, letters relegated to lost property, letters nailed by their own points in a minuscule and transparent sarcophagus. In the Parisian neighborhood of my childhood, by the banks of the Ourcq canal, I discovered an old cemetery, no bigger than a mourning handkerchief, embedded in the inner courtyard of a modern building. There, in former times, the remains of the Jews — long forbidden burial within the walls of the capital, as were, on the other hand, the actors, cast by the Catholic Church into the outer darkness — were clandestinely interred. Thus, for the Jews, even beyond death, the comedy of their exile continued in a funerary ghetto. And to glimpse their tombs, covered with Hebrew inscriptions and not visible from the street, one had to climb to the third floor of the building. One day, through the masked window of that cemetery, I was able to enter into the language that does not die, onto that secret territory where, from each letter, as from beneath a tree, surge the entangled roots of a being. Blurred or rusted, no matter, the stelae changed for me into receivers, into a screen of sealed visions. They became the pages of a book, Alphabase (Alphabase), in which thirty-two poems intertwine with the thirty-two letters or signs of the alphabet.
Poetry holds no hidden truth and sustains no thesis. It is itself only through the perpetual calling into question of what we are. I wished myself multiple, the interpreter not only of an other but of several, at once contradictory and complementary, including in the crossings and the excavations of writing. In this broken prism some of my reflections shattered, some of my edges. I alternated between scattering and unity, shadow and light, permanence and disavowal. Possessed by what I believed, I was slow to recognize a lure in it, having long shared the objectives of a struggle for the renewal of culture; I did not see that the truth I was defending could find itself altered or mortgaged by the aftereffects of Stalinism. The struggle seemed to me just, and I have no cause to regret it. Later, I ended by breaking with the great illusion of a strategy whose disastrous results are patent. Nothing, however, will make me renounce the conviction that the vocation of man is to invent a truly human society, not subjected to the tyranny of money — a society that remains to be conceived and built, taking experience into account and rejecting the utopias that were its caricature or its imposture.
Can poetry play any role whatever in this perspective? In any event, its role is first of all to pose the true questions, to extend our field of perception and of knowledge, to be the conscience that objects to all that attempts to reduce us to resignation and passivity. In short, poetry is what must kindle us, above all if our ember grows cold. I have seen in the questions that life poses to us the steps of a staircase that sinks into the unknown and leads us perhaps toward the unrevealed. In this quest, it happens that profane love and the sacred come together, and it is legitimate, as I have done, to associate them in a liturgy. What I am attempting to put into practice is a prosody capable of drawing from all the sources of its heritage as from all its virtualities of renewal. No taboos. No dogmas. No formal recipes or school formulas!
To give to life a meaning and an amplitude that are polyphonic. To produce a plural reading of the time we live in. My time of poetry passes in readjusting and reinserting the missing pieces of the puzzle of life. The guiding thread of time runs through writing as well. My mutations in writing have each time been a birth to myself and to the world. It is only through their intermediary that the path of an identity to be conquered in fraternity and difference has been drawn. And which in the end can only be defined as the sole legitimate liberty and the sole challenge to all the prohibitions.