From Adam Zagajewski's Essays: Slight Exaggeration

In the monumental four-volume anthology of French poetry edited by Jerzy Lisowski and completed after his death, I find a poem whose history is somehow near to me; its author is Gilbert Lely, and the title is “Word and Cold.” Gilbert Lely. Gilbert Lely was a writer linked to surrealism, known—as I read in the encyclopedia—for his erotic poems as well as for a highly regarded biography of Sade. But I know just the one poem, and that’s all I’ll mention here. A Polish version of this poem turned up in the anthology of French poetry, as translated by Konstanty Jelenski. I remember that Jelenski found this poem in yet another anthology, Une anthologie de la poésie française, published by Jean-François Revel in December 1985. The poem struck him, and he gave his translation to the Polish journal Literary Notebooks. I’ll give an excerpt from this—truly beautiful—poem, in which the author (speaker) visits his own grave as he strolls through autumnal Paris. 

It’s still empty, waiting in the cemetery at Montmartre:  

Looking at my gravestone, with no year or name etched in gold, 

A strange thought came to me; living, I have no covers, 

Persephone’s recruit, momentarily on leave. 

Tomorrow I’ll be bound in that Albigensian granite. 

Then I thought of my book: every sentence written differently so many times, 

Since the unexpressed requires long resistance. 

And this poem’s thought: less relentless than life, 

it permits me to start yet again. 

Now, reading this poem, I recall the exact location of the Montmartre cemetery, lying in wait beneath that famed Parisian hill. Up above, buses deliver Japanese tourists, and other nationalities, too, who make the obligatory stop at the Moulin Rouge cabaret. Still higher, at the very top, a crowd always gathers at the place du Tertre, seeking some hint of a vanished atmosphere, of an era when hungry young artists—some later became millionaires—made their homes in this district. And now, in the cold and quiet of white stones, smooth marble, the cemetery waits patiently, like a spider hiding in the corner of an elegant room. And Gilbert Lely, already old (his dates are 1904–85), both a surrealist and a bourgeois (since only a bourgeois would have his grave site waiting in this prime location), visits his future and final address. Surrealist and bourgeois, not such an unlikely combination, perhaps in fact ideal.