Suzerain (Lord) by René Char - translated by Eliot Cardinaux

Suzerain (Lord)

We begin our lives always in an admirable dusk.  All that will help rescue us later assembles around our first footfall.

          The behavior of men in my childhood was always like a smile of the sky, addressed to the charity of earth.  One treated evil like a prank of evening, the fall of a meteor moved us to tenderness.  I can account for the child I was, prone to love, prone to be hurt, and in all this I had so much luck.  I walked on the mirror of a river filled with coiling snakes, with dances of butterflies.  I played in orchards in which robust old age bore fruit, crouching in the reeds under the care of beings strong as oaks and sensitive as birds.


                              René Char, from Fureur et Mystère
                              Translated by Eliot Cardinaux, 12/19, ’10