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When exploring modern french poetry, please don’t overlook Armen Lubin (1903-74). He is not to be confused, of course, with Arsène Lupin, the famous gentleman burglar, though there is something of the burglar as well as the gentleman in this Armenian poet who chose to write in French. His odd, touching—and much too obscure—poetic oeuvre has finally edged into the literary spotlight with Le Passager clandestin / Sainte Patience / Les Hautes Terrasses, a new Gallimard edition of his collected poems.
Like a burglar, Lubin lurked not only in the typical poet haunts—seedy hotels, obscure side streets, cheap restaurants with sawdust on the floor—but also hospitals, tuberculosis sanatoriums and convalescent homes. And he would sneak out of these disorderly or depressing places with precious loot: candid, disarming, sometimes gently erotic poems full of strange and rare imagery.
Who but Lubin would come across a Proustian “jeune fille en fleurs” at a small Parisian intersection and then, instead of describing or praising the girl (with whom he would nonetheless like to “play without risks”), suddenly focus on the geometry of the urban design? The streets come together, he writes, “like a pair of cherries around an ear.” So the poem ends, with an image open to interpretation.
Chahnour Kerestedjian (his real name) was hardly destined to become a French poet championed by the likes of Max Jacob, Jules Supervielle, Jean Follain, Jean Paulhan and Philippe Jaccottet (who devotes perceptive pages to his work in L’Entretien des muses). Born in Istanbul in 1903, Kerestedjian fled his hometown in 1922, during the second wave of Turkish persecutions against the Armenian community. Taking refuge in Paris, he first scraped together a living by touching up photos for photographers.
For most of his adult life, Lubin suffered from tuberculosis of the bones, an affliction that gave him oblique and truth-revealing perspectives on all human aspirations. Although Lubin never bemoans his tragic fate, his poems allude to the difficulties encountered during those first years in the French capital. He writes of an expatriate’s naked hotel room in which silence looms “like a Muslim’s upright tombstone.” In “Les Logis provisoires,” he describes himself dragging a suitcase by a rope and searching for a hotel; he adds that he always hesitates at dusk, outside his “temporary lodgings,” wondering whether to enter. In another telltale piece, a “traveler chilled to the bone” returns to his hotel and stands at the bottom of the narrow stairway, “vomited up by the night.” All life seems to have fled from the silent hotel. The traveler himself is like a “pump frozen at the bottom of a well.”
Yet Lubin’s poverty, illness and exile never soured him. It is true that he graphically depicts sanatorium routines and personalities, even expressing a discouraged patient’s bitterness:
Doctor,
We want to kill you. With a nail. A big one.
Driving it into your bald skull with its powdery dandruff.
We will hammer it down, from top to bottom, making it coincide exactly with your acumen.
Such examples notwithstanding, Lubin’s poetry is more concerned with providing thought-provoking views of human frailty than on belaboring the suffering and hopelessness that he knew so intimately. He never gives in to them; restraint and drollness color even his grimmest evocations. Jacques Réda, in his witty and insightful preface to this edition, points out that Lubin “would not have even allowed himself to despair.”
Indeed, Lubin’s work often relates decisive moments when a human being must choose between fragile hopes and utter pessimism in the face of life’s struggles. It is more a question of resolve and outlook than of effectiveness, for the individual may well remain incapable of changing the dire course of events affecting him. Such is Lubin’s nobility. Given the circumstances in which he lived, it is to his credit, to say the least, that he favored affirmation and humor over nihilism and despair. Réda movingly observes that Lubin, through his writing, “helped every passing moment go by more quickly or last longer.”
In the aforementioned poem about the traveler arriving at the abandoned hotel, for example, it turns out that a servant girl miraculously awakes. Moreover, she is beautiful and “scantily clad.” No less than Hope incarnate, the young woman leads the weary man up the steps (“all the way to the sky”), carrying “his heavy phosphorescent suitcases.” This is not the only instance in which Lubin associates phosphor with hope—or illusion.
More subtle and ambivalent is “Amour de Paris.” Lubin recalls his initial impressions of the city: the “bright clocks,” the “radiant light.” But soon this pleasant, even uplifting, reminiscence turns to his long walks in endless rain along the Seine. What the poet remembers most about those days, he confesses, are hours engraved inside him / With black on legendary white, / With a blackness not to be told. Note that he is not going to recount his gloomiest thoughts. The poet implicitly avows that he has moved on from even those somber, lonely days. And in the same series of poems, revealingly entitled “We Are Free Only in Certain Chapters of Our Life,” he in fact offers more positive, even amusing, appraisals of the minor miracles of daily life. He notably depicts himself strolling along the Quai de la Mégisserie, with its pet and garden shops, and stopping to observe hens, guinea fowl, parrots, doves and a favorite gray turtle who chews lettuce.
Understandably, Lubin did not start writing in French immediately after settling in Paris. Using another pen name, Chahan Chahnour, he initially wrote in Armenian. In 1929, he published his first book in his native tongue, Retreat Without Music. A second Armenian book, The Return of the Vampires, followed in 1933. Other Armenian books would come later. But by those same years, which coincided with the onslaught of his bone tuberculosis and the first of his many prolonged stays in hospital wards and provincial sanatoriums (he eventually left Paris in 1939), he also began writing poems in French.
His first collection of French poems, tellingly called Fouiller avec rien, appeared in 1942. It revealed how profoundly he had been “digging” and “rummaging” in the depths of existence. In 1946, when Gallimard published his first major collection, Le Passager clandestin, Lubin earned the admiration of his fellow poets. Three other French collections would follow: Sainte Patience (1951), Les Hautes Terrasses (1957) and Feux contre feux (1968), a Grasset anthology of “selected and new poems.” Works from the latter volume are also included in the new edition.
Lubin’s poetry has mesmerizing metaphysical twists. The passager clandestin, or stowaway, of his verse is, of course, the immigrant poet who writes in French but is also any of us with respect to the vast cosmos. Several poems underscore the ephemerality and transience of humankind. In Sainte Patience, Lubin posits that this world is more imaginary / than it is necessary . . . / Its burn forms an open wound / Open like hope.
Les Hautes Terrasses includes his most intriguing philosophical poem, “Sans rien autour.” The poet acknowledges that, because he is “homeless” (in both the literal and existential meanings of the term), he has built a window for himself / With nothing around it. It is a paneless window that “frames all matter.” This “astonishing frame,” as he puts it, is made of neither flesh nor wood; it is shaped like an eye, can soar into the heavens and, without blinking, range over all “subjugated Space,” all “erased Time.” For this haunting poem alone, Lubin deserves a place in any anthology of modern French poetry. This edition shows that he deserves much more than that: many new readers. 
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