Jarry?  In the medical museum?  It’s a funny place to find him, but there he is: the following prose poem, “Les Cinq Sens” (“The Five Senses”), is taken from his first book, Les Minutes de sable mémorial (Minutes of memorial sand, 1894).  In it, the narrator makes his way through a natural history museum into a medical museum; according to my edition (Gallimard), the former is probably the one at the Jardin des plantes, and the latter the Dupuytren.

Whether Jarry actually worked there, I can’t say.  But I can offer a caveat.  Those unfamiliar with Jarry, or who know him only through that splendid and heraldic monarch, Ubu, may be flummoxed by the burlesque and gothic symbolism of his early work.  Don’t fuss: take him with a grain of the proverbial (or, better yet, with a swig of intoxicant), and watch him go.

The translation, as usual, is mine.

(Posted by Doug Skinner)

THE FIVE SENSES

I. TOUCH

I carry it, wrapped in a cloth like a mummified monkey in a tiny shroud, through the thick shadows, whose soft curtains part at my passage.  And I must tense my muscles to walk through this darkness, which repels bodies as water cork.  My feet brush painfully against the flagstones, and the granite file bites into my soles.  I stretch my arms to push the shadows to the walls; and my fingers strike long irregular cylinders.  Branching bones must be reordered to my right and left, and my hand occasionally starts at the flaccid contact of withered torsos: the bark of mummies drops off in sheets, as from a sycamore; skeletal dryads might burst from those weathered trees to fasten onto me.  But their clawed palms spare me.  It is still there, the Fetus I have been given to carry to its honorable place among its peers; and its body, not long ago a shrivelled medlar, seems to my hands that have just brushed bone, as smooth as enamel.  And, as my shoulder cleaves the shadows like a bowsprit, I bear it respectfully, squatting in my clasped hands like a porcelain Buddha.

II. SMELL

I carry it through the formless, colorless trembling of the dead dust.  The air is haunted by spirits, invisible but not immaterial: a fine powder rises in effluvia from the bones, preceding me like the mystical pillar of fire.  The folds of the cloth in which I bear it lash the air with their simoon; and the irritated sandstorms turn to smother me.  The rhythm of my footsteps on the endless stairways punctuates the dance of the sands; and the incubus atoms come to drum at my nostrils at regular intervals, like the swell of the sea; and corrode them with the pungent sting of ammonia.  It is the muffled accompaniment of an Indian procession; and, bobbing at the end of my careless arms, the squatting Fetus rolls up and sleeps, lulled by the rolling gait of the dromedaries.

The dry dust chokes my throat; I must have drunk long ago, drunk great swigs from a full canteen.  For I still hold it, that crumpled canteen, sunken and puckered in my hands; and whiffs of dessicated things rise from it.  Give me air, at least, the moist air blocked by the heavy sky of those impenetrable vaults!  And the window turns its rudder in a sea of black oil.  All is black, the stars have irreparably fled the sky, and darkness is absolute all around, without the least faint flutter.

III. HEARING

The joyous wind rushes in through the open window, and crosses the shadows with a low rumble, as if on the string of a double bass.  It shivers as it passes over furs and bone piles, whose presence I divine from their reedy clatter; and night, locked in the nearby parrot cages, hums like the air in hooped barrels in which caskets are nailed.  It gently stirs the leafy antlers of a giant stag, and the foliage quivers like the wings of a skull.  And the long aeolian flutes of the cetaceans, chains of vertebrae linked with copper ferrules, await their player.  Dislodged spiders flay the ground with their tiny claws; and my perception of all of these sounds is so keen, that I can still distinguish among them the skeletons’ empty eyes shifting in their sockets.

An oblique breeze whistles in the key of the open jar; it is the pure and liquid sound of alcohol, with its little waves.  And, as I am forbidden to strike a match, I will accomplish my mission in the dark, with true remorse, like he who throws a passerby from the steep banks of a ravine.

Like diving seals, who gulp hoarsely at each plunge, black bottles filling up, it tumbles into its humid glass prison.  And after a splash on the flat springboard of the surface, it sinks gently, gently, like a landing balloon.  I seem to have tossed it into a well, and am weak enough to be proud that I can cover a well with a wax-sealed lid.

IV. SIGHT

The lantern yawns and breathes light, and high ceilings and bare walls appear; stairs and their shadows separate, alternating black and white, like a piano.  And around the bend of the circling path reappears that huge stag, where I heard the wind.  Behind it, as far as the eye can see, trots heavily a pack of skeletal mastiffs, for whom I instinctively make way.  A herd of behemoths gathers, with bestial heads and various numbers of tusks; but their cloven hooves cannot clatter on the tiles, for invisible grooms keep them shackled to the wall with copper leads and collars.  Copper stocks paralyze all of their limbs, and more copper chains arrest the great stag on its straining hocks, the great stag that surges before them with its extravagant antlers.  Their empty sockets follow us like the circular gaze of an overly photographic portrait; the fleshless leviathan, Raphael’s “carcass,” would turn to snap at us; but five bronze hands, sprouting from the ground like cathedral pillars, hold rigid its long spine, like a ship in construction.  The creatures of the sabbat are fixed in their convulsions: but man has despaired of ever closing the prying abyss of their eyelids.  And on the bright walls, behind their thin bones, their shadows are also fixed, like pasted cuttings of black paper.

…Truly, if I felt as if I committed a crime, I was wrong.  It has blossomed in its vase like a sprayed bouquet.  And air bubbles, irritated and irised under the lamp’s harsh glare, adhere to the still unfolding wrinkles of its face.  Its eyelids open, its lips part in a vague smile.  It brings air to its ears like a diving water insect.  Its eyes and mouth stare at me with that mystic gaze that troubles one so in a glass mask.  But I shake the vase with clumsy fingers, the bubbles fly away, and I stand gaping at the foolish face of a rubber baby as it expands.

V. TASTE

My lamp has picked out bright points on the teeth of the closest monsters.  Stuffed owls, under masks of white velvet pierced with comb-case eyes, open their scissor beaks.  The endless herd of fleshless quadrupeds lies down like dogs begging bones, and the huge pack awaits its quarry.  The skeletons, hung straight and true from their skulls, part their yellow lips in silent gourmet smiles, and the mummies knock their crooked knees like brown nutcrackers.  I am only the headwaiter who unwittingly serves the appetizer for their next sabbat — for, in its crystal jar, on the shelf of the glassed cabinet, already ballooning with clear alcohol, the Fetus ripens like a fat fruit from the Indies.