Living during the early to mid-20th century, Simone Weil, a French philosopher, activist, and writer, was a religious mystic. Her work is at once intellectual and personal, striking the mind and soul. Almost exclusively a non-fiction writer, her anthology does include one poem. So, of course, I almost immediately wanted to translate La Porte. If there is a pre-existing English translation, it is not openly published. My predominant difficulties in translating this poem have involved balancing a sense of the supernatural with its sexual undertones, and sense of concreteness.
Who Was Simone Weil?
Simone Weil was born in Paris in 1909. Exceedingly smart and gifted at school, she became one of the first women to graduate from the esteemed college École normale supérieure. She was also meaningfully compassionate: those whom she pitied often received help. For instance, she gave up sugar as a child when she learned about soldier’s rations during World War I. She also worked in factories to help the laborers and served during the Spanish Civil War. Truly acting on what she believed, she shaped her ethos and philosophy.
Unable to be defined, Simone Weil was described by absurdist French writer Albert Camus as “the only great mind of our time.” Camus was truly flattering her because she lived at the same time as Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre, and himself. Her work rings with the intricacies of divine relationships, the importance of attention in human relationships, and solidarity with suffering people. Other main themes in her writings include force, labor, and suffering itself. Since her thoughts often seem dense and contradictory, invoking divine mysteries and paradoxes, she has been classed as a type of mystic.
The Red Virgin
But Simone had an additional reputation at school. Known teasingly as “the red virgin,” she never married. She never had children and is not recorded to have ever had a love interest. The director of Weil’s school once said about her, “As for the Red Virgin, we shall leave it to her to make bombs for the coming grand social upheaval” (Bouglé). Not only does this quote show how she was already a revolutionary with communist leanings, but it also shows how comfortable her school superiors were with her nickname.
This background could affect the translation of this poem in two ways. One, people might argue that Simone Weil might have been sexually repressed, and thus used this poem to show sexual desire. The other alternative is that she purposefully eschewed romantic and sexual desire in her life and writing and that this is reflected in the transcendental (not physical) desires in this poem.
Translating the Poem
First things first, and I had to decide what to do with the title. I played around with whether to keep the definite article in the title or not. “The Door,” seemed bland to me, and “The Doorway” was too specific for the rest of the sense and vagueness of the poem, and so I settled on the potential ambiguity of “Doorway” without a definite article.
At the risk of being too obvious, the “Doorway” of the poem is a metaphor. The first two lines read:
“So then open the door to us and we will go to the orchards,
We will drink fresh water where the moon left its trace.”
Then the question becomes, a metaphor for what? Because that answer, or how I wanted to interpret it, would affect my choices for translation. For instance, there are multiple lines that could very easily be read as expressing sexual desire. Taking that into account, I thought maybe the door was a metaphor for some kind of sexual experience.
Separation Meaning Connection
Wanting to find other ideas of hers that might help elucidate this poem, I read some more from Weil and found an analogy she used about the supernatural. In Gravity and Grace, describing the world as separating man and God, she writes that:
“The world is a closed door. A barrier. And, at the same time, it is the opening. Two prisoners, in neighboring cells, [can] communicate through knocks against the wall. The wall is what separates them, but also it is what lets them communicate … All separation is a connection.”
Taking this quote into consideration, along with her biography mentioned above, I decided to focus on creating imagery that connects to the supernatural, rather than innuendo. Granted, the language used to express a longing for the transcendental does often sound very similar to that of sexual desire, but I didn’t want to create connotations that Weil did not intend.
I had a couple of options regarding pronouns and implications. Since French uses grammatical gender, and “door” (or LA porte) is a feminine noun, Weil uses the feminine pronouns “Elle” and “la” to refer to the door. This gave me a little room to play around with using the English personal, and feminine pronouns as well, to experiment with the effect of personifying the door even more with its descriptions of being “unwavering” and almost recalcitrant. One option I had was:
“So we must languish, waiting and watching vainly.
We watch the door; she is closed, unwavering.”
Although I like the potential reading that the door seems coy, and rebuffs attention, I also found that these choices of pronouns created an overtone of sexuality. This is especially true when considering other lines in the poem. For instance, Weil describes wanting to get inside the door as:
“Here [outside the door] thirst comes upon us.
Waiting and suffering, we are just before the door.
If we must, we will break this door with our blows.
We press and push, but the barrier is too strong.”
The concept of “thirst,” even though Weil does mention drinking water earlier in the poem pretty straightforwardly, coupled with the violent language of “break with our blows,” and the associations of “press and push,” and the feminine pronouns later, created a tone that was a smidge too forceful and sexual that I wasn’t comfortable with for the poem. After those considerations, I changed the feminine personal pronouns back to “it.” While potentially less poetic or romantic, I also liked the reading of:
“We watch the door; it is closed, unwavering.
On it, we fix our eyes;”
I found that keeping the standard English neutral pronoun in fact lends a nice contrast of impassiveness to the door that is at direct odds with the intensity of the speakers.
As mentioned above, I understand the doorway to be a metaphor for the relationship with the supernatural. Thus, part of the issue was how concrete I wanted the images. The end of the first stanza reads: “We wander without knowing and do not find anywhere / a place / our (?) place / space.”
“Not finding anywhere” felt too abstract, and “space,” especially in that line, made me think too much of “outer space,” so I kept “place.” This hopefully connects to the action in the poem that the speakers are outside of the orchards, wherever those are. At one point I also had “do not find ANY place,” which brings out the emphasis in the French. But I stuck with not finding “our place,” because of how many first-person plural pronouns there are throughout the poem, which also contributes to the futility of finding our place specifically.
A distinctive formatting change I made was to adjust the stanza break between the last two stanzas. The French has five stanzas that have four lines each. In mine, I shortened the fourth stanza to be only three lines and ended with the original ellipses points. So now the last stanza has five lines and begins with the door opening. This construction makes more sense to me because the ellipses mark the end of a line AND the end of a stanza, which contributes to a broadening sense of space and time. Also in this way, the description of the door stays together in the final stanza, keeping the ideas complete.
Healed by Dust?
The final line was the most difficult to translate. In the original, it reads: “Et lava les yeux presque aveugles sous la poussière.” While reading this, I thought almost immediately of the Biblical parable in the Gospel of John 9. Jesus encounters a man blind from birth, and says, “‘As long as I am in the world, I am the light of the world.’ After he said these things he spit on the ground, made some mud from the saliva, and spread the mud on his eyes.” This is how Jesus healed the blind man, who then washed his eyes in a fountain (John 9:5-6, from the Christian Standard Bible). Since Weil was a Christian and greatly preferred the gospels to most of the rest of the Bible, I wanted to keep a sense that the poem could allude to the Bible story.
On one level the translation problem is Weil not being clear. “Washed by dust,” seems paradoxical, but that is why I thought about the Biblical parable. Or are the speakers’ eyes being blinded by the dust? I ended up with: And with dust washes our eyes almost blind. My goal was to leave it as ambiguous as the original and to avoid restricting any implications Weil may have been communicating. Also, thinking about it as a close reading, that line could be read as our eyes are washed under dust, that our eyes are almost blind, and/or that somehow the dust itself is what helps us be less blind.
All this I think fits together with what Weil is describing throughout the poem which is that the speakers want something that they can not get to. They thought they were getting into an orchard but it was actually the void and light when the door finally opened. There is also the problem of silence coming out of the doorway. If the characters want the door to open to heightened understanding, especially if we take this as the yearning for the transcendental, then what could they do with silence? Is that discouraging, or is that the whole point that the transcendent IS silent, and that is what she described as the separation between man and God?
Silence
Yet here, Weil’s work helps interpret itself. She had already written about silence and spirituality. In Attente de Dieu (Waiting for God), she wrote:
“This tearing apart, over which supreme love places the relationship of the supreme union perpetually resounding across the universe, to the depths of silence, like two notes separated and melted, like a pure and heart-wrenching harmony. That is the Word of God … When we have learned to hear silence, that is what we take hold of, most distinctly, through Him.”
If silence, for Weil, is part of hearing, then the transcendental longings expressed in the poem do actually find fruition.
The Poem Itself
All these translation and philosophical questions probably aren’t satisfactorily answerable, but reading the whole thing can give its own impression:
Doorway
By Simone Weil
Translated by Avery Rist
“So then open the door to us and we will go to the orchards,
We will drink fresh water where the moon left its trace.
The long route burns hostile to outsiders.
We roam without awareness and do not find our place.
We want to see the flowers. Here thirst comes upon us.
Waiting and suffering, we are just before the door.
If we must, we will break this door with our blows.
We press and push, but the barrier is too strong.
So we must languish, waiting and watching vainly.
We watch the door; it is closed, unwavering.
On it we fix our eyes; we cry under the torment;
We see it always; the weight of time overwhelms us.
The door is before us; what is the use of desire?
It would be better to abandon hope.
We will never enter. We are tired of watching it …
In opening the door let so much silence slip past
That neither orchards nor any flowers appeared
But only immense space, where void and light
Suddenly are present everywhere, filling the heart,
And with dust washes our eyes almost blind.”
I’m still not sure if it all makes sense, but that is part of literature. I’m content with the ambiguity, which is part of the point. Weil writes, also in Gravity and Grace, that “The impossible is the door towards the supernatural. We can only knock. It is another who opens.” And this is what happens in her poem. The speakers are completely physically unable to open the door for themselves but then the door does open, without much explanation of how or by whose hand.
After working on this and bumbling around some, I can adapt her quote to: “The impossible, is the translation. We can only try.”
Bibliography
Weil, Simone, Œuvres, edited by Florence de Lussy, Quarto Gallimard, 1999.
–., L’Attente de Dieu,
http://classiques.uqac.ca/classiques/weil_simone/attente_de_dieu/attente_de_dieu_1966.pdf
