Aloysius Bertrand, The Dead Horse, translated by John M. Bennett

Unlike many of the Bouzingo, Bertrand has been less utterly forgotten in French than in English; Baudelaire positions his collection Paris Spleen as a continuation of the project suggested by Bertrand in the Gaspard de Nuit (1836), the collection from which this poem comes, the Symbolists discussed him as a key developer of the prose-poem, and Breton cites him as a precursor of Surrealism. All of which makes sense after reading this piece...

The beginning is presumably an epigraph from something which I am in the process of tracking down.

Sadly blogger keeps fucking up the formatting for the epigraph, I don't know...

the French:

Le Cheval mort

Le fossoyeur: — Je vous vendrai

de l'os pour fabriquer des boutons. Le pialey: — Je vous vendrai de l'os pour garnir le manche de vos poignards. La Boutique de l'Armurier.

La voirie ! et à gauche, sous un gazon de trèfle et de luzerne, les sépultures d'un cimetière; à droite, un gibet suspendu qui demande aux passants l'aumône comme un manchot.

*

* *

Celui-là, tué d'hier, les loups lui on déchiqueté la chair sur le col en si longues aiguillettes qu'on le dirait paré encore pour la cavalcade d'une touffe de rubans rouges.

Chaque nuit, dès que la lumière blémira le ciel, cette carcasse s'envolera, enfourchée par une sorcière qui l'éperonnera de l'os pointu de son talon, la bise soufflant dans l'orgue de ses flancs caverneux.

Et s'il était à cette heure taciturne un oeil sans sommeil, ouvert dans quelque fosse du champ de repos, il se fermerait soudain, de peur de voir un spectre dans les étoiles.

Déjà la lune elle-même, clignant un oeil, ne luit plus de l'autre que pour éclairer comme une chandelle flottante ce chien, maigre vagabond, qui lape l'eau d'un étang.

and the English:

The Dead Horse

The gravedigger: -- I’ll come to you from the bone to make buttons.

The squawker: -- I’ll come to you from the bone to decorate the stain on your daggers.

The Gunsmith’s Boutique.

The garbage dump! and on the left, under a lawn of clover and alfalfa, the tombs of a cemetery; on the right, a hanging gallows which demands of passers-by some alms like a one-armed beggar.

*
**

Him there, killed yesterday; the wolves have shredded his flesh down his collar in such long strips that one might say he was still ready for the parade with a tuft of red ribbons.

Every night, when the light pales in the sky, this carcass will be flown, mounted by a sorcerer who will spur it on with the sharp bone of his heel, the wind blowing through the organ of his cavernous sides.

And if there were at that taciturn hour any sleepless eye, open in that pit of the field in repose, it closed suddenly, in fear of seeing a specter in the stars.

Already the moon itself, blinking an eye, doesn’t shine the other except to illumine like a floating candle that dog, thin and stray, which laps the water from a pond.


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