Translator’s Introduction

Whoever would gauge the literary legacy of Émile Verhaeren must reckon with what is his most shocking, explosive, and internationally most famous collection of poetry, Les Villes tentaculaires (1895). Although Verhaeren intended it as the centerpiece of a loose trilogy that includes Les Campagnes hallucinés (Hallucinated Countrysides, 1893) and concludes with the play Les Aubes (The Dawns, 1898), it is by itself an entirely coherent work, wrought with a strong internal organization and a remarkable unity of vision. In sum: the collection portrays the modern, industrial European metropolis by mapping its various locales, its social relations, and the moral character of these same. From the docks and brothels of the port, from the industrial factories to the stock exchange and the marketplace where the speculators speculate and where wares are traded, from the ancient holy cathedrals to their secular counterpart, the music halls, Verhaeren stands witness and scribe to the city’s awesome and terrifying dynamism. He is witness to the factory workers, “Wearing themselves so thin in their effort / On the flesh-hungry matter, / That they leave behind each instant / Fingerprints of rage, spatters of blood”; to the bankers and stockbrokers, with their “brains, cyclone-blasted by the whirling millions”; to the streetwalkers who cross soundlessly in their promenades in “mourning for their souls”; to the dancer in the music hall, with “drowned eyes and shocking haunches […] tense as an animal trampled underfoot”; to the “precise merchants, haggard scribes” and office accountants who descend “in black crowds / Like broken dogs at twilight’s end” to the brothels of the old port; even to the children, “grown weary of their listless blood / Who beg and sell themselves by the side of the road.”

The British critic and translator Arthur Symons observed that Verhaeren is an accomplished master of the “art of presenting a thought like a picture”. This particular faculty of distilling ideas into memorable images may be seen throughout Tentacular Cities. The collection’s exaggerated, “hallucinated” imagery is in the service of Verhaeren’s ambition to see through the fabric of urban space down to the social relations and forces that structure it. This perspective — which at times seems almost inhuman or suprahuman in its estrangement — sees the city’s machines and technological and social structures as possessed of not only life, but agency. Verhaeren’s city is the mechanized city run amok, operating on its inhabitants and on itself in a destructive, autonomous, and cacophonous manner. As such, it seems to anticipate not only the Ballet Mécanique score (1924) of composer George Antheil but also the Dadaists’ and the Futurists’ jubilant embrace of an aesthetic of mechanization.

This attitude and approach are not without problems. They are bound up with and dependent upon an attitude of scorn and disgust which predominate in many of the poems — disgust for urban vice and squalor, human lust, human greed. From such a vantage point, the city’s inhabitants appear not as individuals but as grotesque representatives of their class or professional role. In a manner that resonates with his avowed socialist sympathies, Verhaeren is capable of evoking the reader’s pity by conjuring up the manifold woes of the cathedral-goers, but he also seems intent on inflaming his own and our spleens. What can be said of the shocking brothel poem, “l’Étal”, but that it is harrowing, absurd, and cartoonish, all at once? How can we appreciate “les Spectacles”, with its superior, moralistic condemnation of vice and lust, and its grotesque racial and sexual fixations? Les Villes tentaculaires is a nasty and lurid collection, and we should not discount the possibility that prudishness was an important factor in preventing it from being translated into English sooner than now. In such poems as “la Bourse”, “la Révolte”, and “les Usines”, an apocalyptic and nihilistic atmosphere prevails, nauseating at times. Meanwhile, the poems “l’Âme de la ville”, “les Idées”, “la Recherche”, and “Vers le futur” gesture toward a messianic future that is both grandiose and glorious, but whose political and social dimensions are as yet ambivalent, unrevealed, indeterminate. Who is this “new Christ” who will raise up humanity and baptize it “in the fire of new stars”? and need we fear Him? To an observer familiar with the history of the twentieth century, these questions are merely rhetorical. Verhaeren’s vision of “the future appearing as a country in flames” (“les Idées”) seems to anticipate the air wars of the twentieth century, and the treatment of the technological sublime in “la Recherche” is likewise attuned to the terrible and destructive power of scientific advances in a way that seems to presage the uniquely twentieth-century horrors of chemical warfare and the atomic bomb. In 2022, these visions still may prove prophetic in ways we are unable to predict but which may still occasion our dread. What is certain, is that Les Villes tentaculaires endures as a testament to the simultaneously creative and destructive forces of urban modernity.

—Jacob Siefring

Four poems from Tentacular Cities [Les Villes tentaculaires], translated from the French by Jacob Siefring. Tentacular Cities will be published in early 2023 in Sublunary’s Empyrean Series.

THE SOUL OF THE CITY

The roofs look as though lost, and
The bell-towers and gables all molten,
When by these red, sooty mornings
The gas in the signals flickers.

A bend in the ungodly viaduct
Sits athwart the drab and uniform docks;
A massive train shudders off, hassled.

In the distance, behind a wall,
A steamer’s foghorn lows.

And by the drab and uniform docks,
And along the bridges and streets,
Jostling each other in the crush of the crowd
Upon screens of crude brumes,
Shadows upon shadows.

A gas of sulphur and naphtha is diffused,
A smeared and monstrous sun sprawls out;
The mind suddenly takes alarm
At the impossible and the bizarre;
Crime or virtue, does it yet see
What stirs in these environs,
Where, before it, in the squares, 
Rises up out of the mist
A golden headstone, or a wan palace,
For what giant, unimagined dream?

O the centuries upon centuries upon this city,
Great with the embers of its past,
Ever glowing—and traversed,
As now, by ghosts!
O the centuries upon centuries upon it,
With their immense, criminal life
Beating—for how long now?—
Every dwelling and every stone 
With mad desires and bloodthirsty rages!

A few huts first, and some priests.
Refuge for all, the church and its windows,
Letting the safe light of dogma come streaming in,
With its naivety for gloomy brains.
Many-geared dungeons, massive palaces, barbaric cloisters;
Popes’ crosses lie there for the taking;
Monks, abbots, barons, serfs, and villains;
Orphreyed miters, silver helmets, linen vestments;
The struggle of instincts, far from the struggles of the soul
Between neighbors, for the vain pride of an oriflamme;
Hatreds handed scepter to scepter, and monarchs ruined
By their counterfeit coin fanning out their fleurs-de-lys,
Carving the block of their justice with strokes of the sword,
Installing it and imposing it: crude and abrupt.

Then, slow to emerge, the outline of the city:
Forces one would wish to stake in law;
Nails of the people, and jawbones of kings;
Snouts nervous in the shadows, and a subterranean barking
At who knows what ideal buried in the heavens;
Alarm bells ringing, in the evening, rages untold;
Texts of deliverance and of salvation, standing
In the abominable atmosphere wherein revolt seethes;
Books whose pages, suddenly intelligible,
Burn with truth, as formerly the Bibles;
Divine and bright men, like gold monuments
From which events flow forth armed and strong;
Volitions clean and new, fresh awarenesses
And mad hope, in every brain,
Despite the scaffolds, despite the structure fires
And bloody heads, at the end of clenched fists.

The city’s a thousand years old,
The city so deep, so cruel;
And endlessly, spite of the onslaught of days,
And the people eyeing its heavy pride,
It resists the world’s usury.
What an ocean, its hearts! what a storm, its nerves!
What knots of will tied tight in its mystery!
Victorious, it absorbs the earth;
Vanquished, ’tis the woe of the universe:
Always, in its triumph or its defeats,
Giant it appears, and its cry pierces, and its name gleams,
And the brightness of its surfaces in the night
Travels far, reaching planets!

O the centuries upon centuries upon it!

Its soul, by these haggard morns,
Circulates in each atom
Heavy with vapor and sparse mist;
Its enormous, vague soul, as well as the great domes
That blur away in the fog;
Its soul, straying, in each and every shadow
That crosses its somber districts,
With fresh ardor at the end of their thoughts;
Its dreadful, convulsing soul:
Its soul, where the past and the curt present
Adumbrate our future still awry.

O this world of fever and indefatigable increase
Kicked, with burdened, panting lungs,
Towards who can say what alarming ends?
World yet subject unto golden laws,
Mild laws, of which it is heedless still,
But which, one day, will needs must be exhumed,
One by one, from the depths of the brumes.
World today stubborn, tragic and pale
Which puts its life and soul into the effort
It expends, from day to night,
Hour upon hour, toward the infinite.

O the centuries upon centuries upon this city!

The old dream is dead and a new one forming.
’Tis fuming in thought and in sweat
Of arms, proud of handiwork, of foreheads, proud of shine,
And the city hears it rising up from the throats
Of those who carry it inside them
And want to shout and sob it to the skies.

And from all directions, the people are setting out for it,
Some from the market towns, some from the fields,
Always the same, distantly drawn yonder;
And the eternal roads are the witnesses
To these marches cross time,
That pulse steady as their pounding blood,
And fan their fires, continually.

The dream! higher still than the poisonous fumes 
It releases ’round it, toward the horizon;
Even in fear or boredom,
It is there, presiding, nights,
Like unto these bushes
Of golden stars and of black crowns,
That light up of an evening, evocative. 

And what matter the pains and the insane hours,
And the vats of vice wherein the city ferments,
If, some day, from within the fogs and veils,
There bursts forth a new Christ, sculpted in light,
Who raises up humanity
And baptizes it in the fire of new stars.

THE FACTORIES

Regarding each other out the split eyes of their windows
And mirrored in water of pitch and saltpeter
Along a narrow canal, pulling one’s bar to infinity.
Face to face along the quays to infinity,
All across the heavy faubourgs
And the misery in rags of those faubourgs,
Snore night and day the ovens and the factories.

Granite rectangles, brick cubes,
And their black walls stretching for miles,
Immensely, through the banlieues;
And on their roofs, in the fog, sharpened up
Irons and lightning rods,
The chimneys.
And the uniform hangars that smoke;
And the inner courtyards, where men, torsos in the sun
And arms bared, stir up lightning bolts
And ardent tridents, pitches and tars;
And soot and coal and death;
And souls and bodies one twists
In basements more surd than Averni;
And lines, always the same ones, of lanterns
Leading the slaughterhouse sewer to the barracks.
Regarding each other with their black 
and symmetrical eyes
In the banlieue, to infinity,
Snore day and night 
The ovens and factories.

O the rain-rusted neighborhoods and their big streets!
And the women in their rags cropping up
And the parks, where cavities open
Onto bits of plaster and scoriae,
O pale and rotten flora.

In the intersections, doors ajar, the bars:
Tinware, copperware, haggard mirrors,
Dressers of ebony and insane flagons
Where alcohol glimmers
And its lightning bolt, sidewalk-ward.
And pints that instantly glow,
On the counter, in pyramids of crowns; 
And drunken persons, standing,
Whose large tongues lap up, speechlessly,
The golden ales and the whiskey topaz.

Across the heavy faubourgs,
And the keening misery of these faubourgs,
And the troubled and doleful neighborings,
And the hates between this people and that people
And of household against household,
And the robbery of indigents by indigents,
Drones ever on, in every courtyard,
The panting, deaf snoring
Of the symmetrical factories and plants.

Here: between walls of iron and stone,
Suddenly rises up, haughtily,
The force of matter in rut:
Jaws of steel bite and smoke;
Huge monumental hammers
Mash golden blocks against anvils,
And, in a corner, make cast-irons flare up
In angular blazes one nurses.

This way: the meticulous fingers of the nimble metiers,
With minor sounds, small movements,
Are weaving sheets, with needles that vibrate
Light and fine as fibers.
Along a hall of glass and iron,
Bands of leather run slantwise
From end to end of the rooms
And the large and violent flounces
Turn, like unto wings in the wind
Of mad mills, by gusts blasted.
One greedy and low day
Accosts, over the damp and greasy pane 
Of a basement window,
Each task.
Automatic and meticulous,
Quiet workers
Direct their movements
With a universal clickety-clack
That ferments fever and folly
And with its obstinate teeth
Tears to pieces the canceled human word.

Farther on: a racket of pounding shocks
Rises from the shadows in a row of blocks;
And, of a sudden, interrupting the violence,
Walls of sound seem to crumble
And be quiet, in a pool of silence,
While the intensifying bursts
Of crude whistles and signals
Scream incessantly at the beacons,
Stretching their wild flames,
In bushes of gold, cloudward.

And all around, like a belt,
Over there, nocturnal architectures,
Here the docks, the ports, the bridges, the lighthouses
And the stations clanging their tintamarres;
And farther still, roofs of other factories
And vats and forges and kitchens
Dreadful with naphtha and resins,
Whose scattered flames and warped gleams
Betimes do shear the sky, with their baying fires.

Along the old canal to infinity,
Across the immensity of misery,
Black byways and stone streets,
The nights, the days, always,
Drones the continual surd beating,
In the faubourgs,
Of the symmetrical plants and factories.

Dawn dries itself
On those sooty blocks;
Noon and its sun, haggard
As a blind man, stray by their brumes;
Only, when the weeks, in the evening,
Let their night in tenebrae fall,
The gruntings of the colossal effort suddenly draw down,
Like a hammer on an anvil,
And a shadow in the distance over the city emerges
From within the golden fogs that are lighting up.

THE UPRISING

The street, in an eddy of footsteps,
Bodies, and shoulders, arms outstretched,
Savagely branching towards insanity,
Seems to go flying by—and yokes
Itself to hatreds, to sobbing, to hopes:
The street of gold
The street in rouge, at the end of the evenings.

All of death
In booming belfries is raised;
All of death, precipitate in dreams,
In flames and with swords
And heads, upon the stem of a sword,
Like flowers heinously cut.

Only the coughing of heavy cannons,
The strained hiccups of deafening cannons,
Measure out the tears and screams of the passing hours.
The white dials of oblique crossings,
Like eyes in their lids,
Are staved in by blows of stone:
Normal times being ended
For the mad and resolute hearts
Of those outrageous crowds.

Rage leapt from the earth
Onto a pile of grey cobblestones,
Rage into the light, with cries
And new blood in every artery,
Pale and panting
So awfully
That its moment of energy to it alone is worth 
The time of a century orbiting
Around its hundred year wait.

All that was formerly dreamed
Has been made futurely to pass
By the daringest brows;
What the souls brandished,
What the eyes implored,
What the whole silentious
Human sap held back,
Sprays forth, in the thousand
Weaponed arms of the crowds 
Rising like a tide, swelling like their hates.

’Tis the feast of blood setting up,
Led by terror, with standards of joy:
The people surge forth drunk and ruddy,
People trod upon the dead;
The soldiers gleaming copper-helmed,
No longer recking who is right or wrong,
Tired of obeying, charge flabbily forth,
The citizenry enormous and vehement
That want at its head to shine
The bleeding and violent golds of conquest.

—To kill, to rejuvenate and to create!
Just as insatiate nature
Frantically gnashes at the goal,
Through the horrible folly of a moment:
To kill or immolate oneself to tweak life!—

Here some bridges and houses are burning,
Blood-covered façades, against the black 
backdrop of crepuscule;
The water of the canals reflect its smoking splendor
Entire, down to its deepest depths;
Enormous towers obliquely goldenized
Distantly bar the city with outsize shadows;
The arms of fire, opening their deathly hands,
Sprinkle embers golden in the gloaming;
And the blazing roofs shoot up in wild leaps,
Beside themselves, reaching the clouds.

One guns them down en masse downtown.

Death, with its precise and mechanical fingers,
With the rapid and dry firing of its heavy guns
Against the intersection façades cuts down
The standing bodies;
Whole rows keel over like boards.
Leaden silences weigh over fistfights.
Shirtless cadavers, by bullets mangled,
Display to the world their baroque skins;
And the dancing reflection of phantasmal lanterns
Seizes with laughter the final shout over these sundry masks.

And, heavily, the black tenor bells are swinging in the air:
A hoarse and ferocious battle of sounds
Proceeds by anguished screams to the
Horizons haggard as the sea.
Beating and panting, the alarm sounds,
Like a heart in combat,
When, of a sudden, like voices asphyxiated,
This bell that bitterly rang,
In its incinerated tower,
Falls silent.

In the old public palaces, in which gold’s own aldermen
Formerly brought the city to heel
and beat back the movement 
And the cresting tide of multitudinous wrongs,
The people penetrate, ramming open the doors;
The keys jump, the bolts shake;
Armoires of iron open themselves up,
Where are filed laws and harangues;
A torch licks them, with its tongue,
And all their black past flies off and spreads out,
While in the cellars and the attics one ransacks
And flings far, from the haggard balconies,
Human bodies scything the void with their scattered arms.

The same furies in the churches:
The stained glass windows, where virgins are seated,
Litter the ground and crumble as straw;
Christ, staking fast his death and ghost to the walls,
Is lacerated and hangs, like a piece of scrapwood,
From the last nail that still pierces his cross;
The tabernacle, where the chrism’s kept,
Is broke open, by clenched fists and curses;
The Saints, standing by the altars, are soundly slapped,
And all up and down the great nave, 
—What a snowfall—they have strewn the hosts
So they go, trod ’neath the raging heels, to waste.

All the jewels of murder and disasters
Sparkle thus, under the stars’ watch;
The entire city bursts
Into a golden land by scarlet flames coiffed;
The city, in the depths of evenings, to stormy hinterlands
Proffers its own crown consumed in flame;
Night itself and madness
Stir life, with their dregs,
So forcefully, at instants the ground seems to shake,
And the air to burn,
And the death rattles and frights 
from their messy jumble to take flight,
To sweep clean the great, cold skies.

—To kill, to be young again and to create,
Or to fall and to die, what should it matter!
To triumph, or bloody one’s brow at the gate!
And then—whether one’s springtime be green, or red—
Is it hardly in the world, then,
Panting, breathless, through every day,
The lethal, profound power, which acts!—

FUTUREWARD

O human race, by golden stars knotted,
Have you felt by what fearsome, pounding labors,
Suddenly, for one hundred years full,
Your immense strength is shaken? 

From the seafloor, cross earth and sky,
To the wandering gold of lost stars,
From night to night, expanse to expanse,
Up there, still fair, the voyage of our eye.

While down here, the doleful years and the centuries
Lying in the stratified graves of the times
Are explored, from continent to continent,
And emerge powdery and clear from their shadows.

Eagerness to know all, to weigh all,
Sifts through the thick and shifting forest of beings, 
And in spite of the brush where man’s step is tangled,
Man conquers his law of rights and duties.

In the ferment, in the atom, in the dust,
Hulking life is sought and appears.
All is caught in an infinity of snares,
Slackened or pulled tight, by immortal matter.

Hero, scientist, artist, apostle, adventurer,
Each in turn pierces the black wall of mysteries,
And thanks to these joint or solitary efforts,
The new being feels itself a universe entire.

And it’s you, you, cities,
Vertical
In the distant distances, from one to the other end
Of the plains and the domains
That concentrate in you humanity enough,
Red strength enough, fresh clarity enough,
To inflame with fertile fever and generous rage
The patient or violent brains
Of those 
Who discover the rule and reassume, inside themselves,
The world.

The spirit of the countrysides was God’s own;
At research and in revolts he quailed, and
He fell; and here he dies, under your axletrees
And under the burning chariots of the new harvests.

Ruin sets in and whistles in every cranny
Where the winds stir ferocious, over the finite plain,
While the city supports from afar
What of its ardor still remains, in its agony.

The red factory erupts where fields had shone before;
Smoke in black waves grazes the church rooftops;
The mind of man advances and the setting sun
No longer is the golden, divine, enriching host.
Will they be born again one day, the fields, exorcised
Of their errors, their suffering, their madness;
Gardens for weary efforts and labors,
Cuts of virgin clarity and health fulfilled?

Will they, one day, with the good sun of old, 
With the wind, the rain, and the servile beasts,
In hours of jolted liberty and reveille, show the way 
To a world at last free from the grip of the cities?

Or will they become the last paradises,
Purged of gods and freed of their portents,
Where wise men will come to dream, 
at dawn and by noontides,
Before drifting to sleep on clear evenings?

In the meantime, spacious life is satisfied 
To be a human joy, frantic and fruitful;
Rights and duties? Manifold dreams of the 
World’s youth, before each new hope.

Jacob Siefring is an editor, translator, and library professional residing in Ottawa, Ontario. His translations from the French include several books by Pierre Senges, such as The Major Refutation, Studies of Silhouettes, and Rabelais’s Doughnuts. In his role as coeditor of the Empyrean Series of Sublunary Editions, he is dedicated to editing and republishing lesser-known works from the history of world literature.