The Yale Anthology of Twentieth-Century French Poetry

RENÉ DEPESTRE

The Ballad

In those days, ways of feinting and of tenderness, the plague having the face of
boredom in the cities, it was many shelters, caches of love against love and of
candor against evil: to go speak, very little, with a woman apt to redisappear, to
make one’s faces naked, lowering hands, a phone was enough, or sometimes on a
bed, an exchange of autopsies, the nakedness was slowing down, thanks to the
other, I was asking can I come we won’t love each other any more in the occupied
city, if you’re sad, it was mezzanines, carefree refuges, the more the public and
private speeches lied the more the taste for broken vows rose up in a chance
intimacy, the enemy on our own grounds led us to betray each other, these were
risky uncertain confessions, and now I wait for disgust to let go in order to take
up the pen again.
—clayton eshleman

René Depestre 1926–

jacmel, haiti

A

novelist and poet, Depestre enjoyed early fame and success. Étincelles

was published in 1945, when the young writer was only nineteen. In his

newspaper, La Rûche, and his poetry, Depestre regularly railed against

his government and the American occupation of Haiti. Love, the poet asserted,

cannot exist without political freedom. Depestre was eventually detained for his

opinions and activities. A general student strike ensued, and Depestre became

one of the heroes of the so-called bloodless revolution that forced the Haitian

government to resign. The new president, however, encouraged Depestre to leave

Haiti, o√ering him a scholarship to the Sorbonne in 1947. He was not permitted

to return to Haiti until 1957. Frustrated once again with his country, Depestre left

for Cuba, where he remained for twenty years. In 1979 he moved to France and

took a post at UNESCO. Shortly thereafter he broke with the negritude move-

ment in favor of a more traditional utopian humanism. Principal works: Un arc-