From the Death Cell
by André Chénier (1762-94) (translated by Tom Paulin, The Road to Inver, Faber)

We live – dishonoured, in the shit. So what? It had to be.
This is the pits and yet we feed and sleep.
Even here – penned in, watered and waiting for the chop
(just place your bets) – affairs take off,
there’s gossip, bitching and a pecking-order.
Songs, jokes, card-school: she lifts her skirts; someone
bops a tight balloon against the windowpanes.
It’s like the speeches of those seven hundred eejits
(Barrère’s the shiftiest of the lot) – a comic fart
we whoop and cheer and then forget.
One jumps, another skips; that greasy pack
of gut and gullet politicians raps and hoots
until, dead quick, the door scrakes open
and our tiger-master’s wee pimp struts in.
Who’s getting it today? We freeze and listen,
then all but one of us knows it isn’t him . . .

André Chénier was arrested on suspicion of “crimes against the state” in France on March 7, 1794, and guillotined on July 25 on the orders of Robespierre. It seems to me that the best poets have to suffer; without suffering it is all hearts and flowers, which are very difficult to write about in a way that gets one’s attention. What make us interesting to each other are our various miseries. The happiness of others appears to engender only spite and envy.

The poet would indeed have been sitting in the shit when he wrote the poem, as hygiene in the prisons of the 1700s must have been rudimentary. And they surely wouldn’t have wasted water. Chénier’s poems – which he now had ample time to work on because there’s nothing like a little incarceration to focus the mind – were smuggled out of the prison and given to his family by a jailer who could be bribed.

Chénier appears inured to his fate. He remarks how affairs carry on even as they all wait for the guillotine. It seems that the prospect of death, once accepted, does not wholly eradicate the desire to mate. And death is the ultimate birth control.

Gossip and bitching are as rife on the inside as on the outside, and possibly more pernicious, as they are inescapable. Not surprising, since human beings seek comfort from their usual behaviour even in unusual surroundings, although that behaviour may be distorted due to limitations imposed by incarceration, and by the fact that they might not normally choose those around them as companions, were they allowed that luxury.

The balloon that “bops” the window might be outside rather than in; a momentary distraction from beyond the prison walls. The window could well be out of reach, since no mention is made of any view. Chénier likens the filling of the balloon to the hot air expelled by “those seven hundred” idiots – his fellow inmates; pontificating prisoners all airing their opinions as “gut and gullet politicians”, which may refer to each pronouncing on his or her gut feelings as opposed to any real knowledge. Their gas serves in Chénier’s mind as a “comic fart”, and their “raps and hoots” imply that they have discarded any illusions of propriety.

There is a noticeable Irish influence on the choice of some words in the translation; “eedjits” (idiots) and “wee” (small).

The door opens and the “tiger-master’s wee pimp” enters. The tiger-master (the prisoners being caged like tigers) is surely Robespierre.

His pimp is so called because he is the procurer of the next individual to be beheaded; it is like a game of musical chairs. The entrance of the “pimp”, marked by the onomatopoeic “scrake” of the door, is the music’s end, when one of the inmates is picked off, after which the others can breathe more easily for a few hours.

The terminology reduces the macabre and sombre reality of impending death to a more jocular level. If one must die at the guillotine, then cause for a sardonic grin might be comforting. If Chénier had known that Robespierre would be executed three days after he was, he might have died laughing.

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