The Serbian poet Vasko Popa was born in 1922 and died in Yugoslavia in 1991.

First Hitler and then Stalin — Popa’s youth was a surreal time and the reaction to that is very much evident in his poetry, as Ted Hughes points out in his introduction to a translation of Popa’s work (London: Penguin Books, 1969) by Anne Pennington.

Perhaps anyone growing up in such circumstances would see imagination as little more than a tainted luxury. And yet Popa created poetry that rose above both the crisp snapping of sickled flags in the wind and the memories of a world forever lost.

The following lines are from the volume Secondary Heaven (1968).

The yawn of yawns

Once upon a time there was a yawn

Not under the palate not under the hat

Not in the mouth not in anything

It was bigger than everything

Bigger than its own bigness

From time to time

Its dull darkness desperate darkness

In desperation would flash here and there

You might think it was stars

Once upon a time there was a yawn

Boring like any yawn

And still it seems it lasts

François Rabelais (born circa 1490), a dissenter against and enthusiast of human folly in all its forms, created giants who roamed first and best in France, the author’s home country. The adventures of Gargantua, his son Pantagruel, and Pantagruel’s good friend Panurge make up five books.

Scholars today yet bicker over whether the man himself wrote the fifth book. Behind the curtain time has drawn over most of this debate we would surely find Rabelais, doubled over with genial laughter. In every scene from his books, from within every character, and in every word he had pass from their lips flows that same unmistakable, good-natured humor – even when he shrouded it in whatever muck would suffice for time enough to stay the threat of some form of ecclesiastical denunciation.

Rabelais was a truly funny guy who also liked to laugh; and the courage that comes with true erudition allowed him to bring his sardonic talent to bear on those issues of his age which both vexed and amused him most: old-fashioned religious thought; the monastic life; the legal and the educational systems of France, and whatever else large or small happened across his rambling mind.  

The modern reader in search of plot will be hard-pressed in dealing with Rabelais. His characters traverse the hills and plains of absurdity with the easy convenience that only a born satirist could map. And they talk. Words tumble on top of one another as characters are shaped, dismantled, and reconfigured. After one particularly mindless exchange between philosophers from several rival schools, an exasperated Gargantua exits the group, allowing no one else to follow after him.

Hardly shaken from the lather of babble that preceded his father’s departure, Pantagruel takes note that:

 “Plato’s Timaeus counted his guests at the beginning of the feast. We, on the other hand, will count ours at the end.”

The count is taken. Another friend is found missing, a respected district judge of forty-plus years service to his country who has been called to explain himself to a group of politicians. Pantagruel takes this news hard and vows immediate action:

“If now in his old age he has been cited to appear in person after performing his duties blamelessly throughout the past, some disaster must certainly have occurred. I should like to help him in every way I equitably can. The world has grown so wicked today, as well I know, that honest justice stands in great need of support. I’m resolved to appear there immediately, for fear that some accident may occur.”

“After this the tables were removed, and Pantagruel gave his guests precious and honorable presents of rings, jewels and plate, both of gold and of silver. Then, after thanking them most cordially, he retired to his room.”

On the way to his room, his vow forgotten, Pantagruel finds Panurge “in a state of deep reverie, mumbling and nodding his head.”  

We are left to presume that Panurge is distressed at the plight of the judge. Perhaps this is the reason for Pantagruel’s counsel:

“All your efforts to escape from the noose of your perplexity only leave you the more firmly caught than before. I know of only one remedy. Listen, I’ve often heard the vulgar proverb quoted, that a fool may well give lessons to a wise man. Now since you’re not fully satisfied by the answers of the wise, take counsel of some fool.”

Pantagruel recounts historical precedent in support of his proposal, balancing that enumeration with the following:

“Hence it is, so astrologers assert, that the same horoscope may preside over the births of a king and a fool.”

Pantagruel ends with this old tale, which many readers will recognize in its bare form as a story from the folklore of various cultures. J.M. Cohen, who also translated the lines given above, (London: Penguin Books, 1955) captures the spirit:

[The case is this: In Paris, among the cook shops by the Petit-Châtelet, a porter was standing in front of a roast-meat stall eating his bread in the steam from the meat, and finding it, thus flavoured, very tasty. The cook let this pass, but finally, after the porter had gobbled his last crust, he seized him by the collar and demanded payment for the steam from his roast. The porter answered that he had done no damage to his meat, had taken nothing of his, and was not his debtor in any way. The steam in question was escaping outside, and so, in any case, was being lost. No one in Paris had ever heard of the smoke from a roast being sold in the streets. The cook replied that it wasn’t his business to nourish porters on the steam from his meat, and swore that if he wasn’t paid he’d confiscate the porter’s pack-hooks. The porter drew his cudgel and prepared to defend himself. The altercation grew warm. Gaping Parisians assembled from all quarters to watch the quarrel and, fortunately, among them was Seigny John, the town fool.

When he saw him, the cook asked the porter: “Are you willing to accept the noble Seigny John’s decision in our dispute?”

“Yes, by the goose’s blood I am,” replied the porter.
 

Then, after hearing their arguments, Seigny John ordered the porter to take a piece of silver out of his belt; and the porter thrust an old coin of Philip’s reign into his hand. Seigny John took it and put it on his left shoulder, as though to feel as if it were full weight. Then he rang it on the palm of his left hand, as if to make sure that it was a good alloy. Next, he held it close up to his right eye, as if to make sure that it was well minted. All this took place in complete silence on the part of the gaping mob, while the cook watched in confidence, the porter in despair. Finally, the fool rang the coin several times on the stall. Then, with presidential majesty, grasping his bauble as if it were a sceptre, and pulling over his head his ape’s fur hood with its paper ears ridged like organ pipes, after two or three sound preliminary coughs he announced in a loud voice: “The court declares that the porter who ate his bread in the steam of a roast has civilly paid the cook with the chink of his money. The court orders that each shall retire to his eachery, without costs. The case is settled.” This decision of the Parisian fool seemed so equitable, so admirable even, to the aforesaid doctors that they doubt whether a more judicial sentence would have been given if the case had been tried before the High Court of that city, or before the Rota of Rome, or indeed before the Areopagites … Consider, therefore, whether you won’t consult a fool.]

A universe gone terribly wrong. From this supposition comes the poetry of the Frenchman Jules Laforgue (1860-1887). His study of values by way of Hartmann’s “Philosophy of the Unconscious” convinced him that a collective decision to reject the will to live would be the result of the human race reaching its most enlightened state. His study of science in its Darwinian connotation convinced him that there was no purpose to life – only the anguished desire for purpose.

Laforgue was born in Uruguay, the son of a banker. At the age of eight he was detached from his family to attend boarding school in Tarbes. Seven years later he was reunited with them when his family returned to France. Two years after that his mother, Pauline, died of a bronchial infection brought on by the miscarriage of that which would have been her twelfth child. His father passed away four years later, on the same day Lafourge received the happy news that he had been appointed official reader to the Russian aristocrat Augusta, Empress of Germany. Life was easy at the court and he had time to read, write, study English with a young Anglo-Saxon woman, exhaust his generous salary, and pine away for a return to France.

Lafourge arrived there virtually penniless. He made his way to London where his English teacher, Leah Lee, became his wife on New Year’s Eve, 1886, in London. It was a very cold night.

Lafourge returned to Paris soon after with little more than his bride and a cough. He died of tuberculosis on August 20. His wife followed soon after, a victim of the same infirmity.

All this from Graham Dunstan Martin, who also tells us that Laforgue carried around his copy of Hartmann’s book with him at all times. This was because, as Mr. Martin notes, “of what Hartmann says about the function of art. All artistic production is the result of inspiration by the Unconscious, but, since the Unconscious is the ground of all being, art is – excitingly – a direct reflection of it. So when the poet observes his own passing moods and inner impulses, he is observing fundamental reality.”  Whatever.

Mr. Martin’s introduction precedes his prose translations of a selection of Lafourge’s poems (London: Penguin Books, 1998). To read the first before the second is like sipping a glass of cool lemonade before eating a stale hot dog.

William Jay Smith’s translation of the following poem (New York: Grove Press, 1956) is more deferential to Lafourge’s stated predilection for [detached brief poems without any distinguishable subject … but vague and motiveless as the wave of a fan, ephemeral and equivocal as make-up, which make the bourgeois who has just read them say ‘So What?’]

The Cigarette