kvetchlandia:Robert Desnos, Last Known Photograph, Taken in the Theresiendtadt Concentration Camp 19
kvetchlandia:Robert Desnos, Last Known Photograph, Taken in the Theresiendtadt Concentration Camp 1945Robert Desnos was not only an active member of the Parisian Dada and Surrealist circles, and a marvelous poet, but during WWII, he was also an active member of the French Resistance. As an armed underground resistant in Occupied France, Desnos was tracked by Nazi intelligence and was caught during 1944. He was deported to the Auschwitz, Buchenwald and Theresienstadt concentration camps. He died in Theresienstadt from typhoid, a few weeks after the camp was liberated.No, love is not dead in this heart and in these eyes and in this mouthhereby announcing the opening of its own requiem.Listen, I’ve had it with picturesqueness, colorfulness, and charm.Love’s what I love, its tenderness and its cruelty.Still, the one whom I love has but one name and form.Everything’s transcient. Mouths may plaster themselves against my mouthBut still, the one whom I love has but one name and form.And if some day you happen to think of itOh you, exact form and name of my love,Some day, on the seas between America and Europe,When the last ray of sunlight is flashing off the surface of the tossing waves,or on a stormy night beneath a tree in the country, or in a speeding car,One spring morning on the Boulevard Malesherbes,Or on some rainy dayAt dawn just before getting into bed,Tell yourself, I insist of your innermost soul, that I loved you more than anyother man did, and that it’s a shame that you didn’t realize it.But tell yourself, too, that there’s nothing to regret: long before me Ronsard andBaudelaire sang of the sorrows of old women and thoroughly deadwomen who despised even the purest love.But as for you, when you die,You’ll still remain both beautiful and desirable.I may already be dead by then but incorporated in your timeless and immortal body, in your incomparableimage present forever among the wonders of human life and eternity, on the other handshould I outlive youYour voice and its intonations, your gaze and its radiance,The fragrance of you and of your hair and many, many other things about you,will still go on living in meYes in me, a poet who’s neither Ronsard nor Baudelaire,Just Robert Desnos who, for having known you and loved you so wellHave become their equal.Just me, Robert Desnos who except for loving you, doesn’t want to be remembered for doing anything elsehe’s ever done while walking the surface of this miserable, despicable earth.—Robert Desnos, “No, Love Is Not Dead” 1926 -- source link
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