On one of my sloping banks, there were the tracks of beasts. And, in the midst of them, the tracks of man.
THE SARDINIAN (He raises his hand to stop the cripple). Stop, River, stop!
Ah!
Repeat what you said: the tracks of man were in the midst of the tracks of the beast?
THE RIVER. Yes.
Wide tracks that went off into the woods.
THE SARDINIAN. I’m lost, that’s my death.
That’s the death of me, the living earth!
No longer will I be this big beast sprawling in the sky.
But I’ll be put to pasture like the cow.
If man has become the master of the beasts.
Speak!
THE RIVER. I don’t know.
I saw that image of feet that pierced the mud here and there and entered the woods.
But I couldn’t follow.
Ask the Tree.
So here we are in pursuit of man. Here we are in pursuit of that primary position held by the Sardinian.
For right now, I’m not going to translate the rest of the play. I only wanted to give a long series of scenes to show how the serpentine action unfolds. Furthermore, it does not form a whole, a round fruit well sealed off from the sky all around, but it is, on the contrary, like a soft fig, too ripe on one side, its honey dripping gold, and on the other side, bitter and creamy with the milk of the tree, because the shepherds don’t all have the same poetic powers, and in the best flow, there is some water without taste.
As for the Sardinian’s prime place, it will be threatened throughout by the Sea. Glodion will have his say from time to time and each time, it will brutally interrupt the Sardinian’s inspiration. So that finally he will be told:
O Sea, made jealous by all your salt;
Of all this salt that burns your skin,
Jealous of all the greenness.
Leave us in peace.
It would be a beautiful world indeed if it was made up only of you,
We would be soft as an egg without a shell,
And you would lose your fish in the sky
All along your course.
To tell the truth, as for the Sardinian’s primary position, that power that launches the drama like gunpowder, no one wants to see it taken away from the one who holds it. Except for the cripple who did the River, the other shepherds are not up to it, and never will anyone say anything that can compete with the opening monologue, which I call “the birth and youth of the earth.” Even the cripple has faults. He can only improvise in a trance, in a sort of fever that makes his eyes glow in a wind that thrashes him about, limbs strewn. The Sardinian remains motionless as a column. He only moves for the greetings. From this stillness flows a great nobility and when, at the end of the drama, remaining alone, he makes a few essential gestures, they go to the height of tragedy in a single bound.
So here is the pursuit of man.
The Tree arrives. It says what it sees from the top of its head:
From the shores of that river
to the red tree
and beyond more than twenty hills which mount each other like rams and ewes.
It indicates man’s route, that track in the grass: like the slime of a slug. But from the red tree on, it loses sight of it.
But, there’s the Wind and here it comes with a leap. The Wind, at the end of one of its courses, has encountered man and has accompanied him because it has found him:
. . not at all thorny
and supple as silk, and very light on the two springs of his legs.
And his arms are like two wings that tickle without beating me.
It accompanied man in a strange search, full of leaps and slides flat on the stomach, of breathless races. Finally, the man found what he was looking for: his female. She was there:
naked, hidden in the grass like a frog.
And there was the chase, angular and quick as a flash of lightning, and then the man seized the female. And there, the wind saw nothing more because the two bodies pulled each other down under the shelter of the bushes, in the grass.
The Sardinian calls the Grass.
The Grass has seen it all and tells it all. It tells it, without fear of words and things. It’s all men here, and what took place in the shelter of the bushes is the act of life, as simple, as pure as the swelling of a cloud.
The Grass uses a beautiful word to speak of the man’s actions; he uses “pastéjavo” which means, “he kneaded the dough.”
And the Grass saw the slow life of the couple and those hours of dreaming in which, more than the beasts, these new creatures remained there, motionless, and:
went off into the depths of the hour
on a serpent’s back.
One day:
Then, from each side of his female
he hollowed two great streams.
And there she was like a spring,
there she was like a fountain of children;
and the children flowed from her like the stream from the fountain.
And the last ones are still there crawling close to her like fresh nuts, while, already on their two feet the first ones have arrived at the edge of the forest, before the world, and in their thick hands, they carry the fruit of fire.
The Grass’ account was the peak of the drama. If someday the Sardinian must be defeated, I hope — and he himself hopes — that his replacement will be the shepherd who spoke the words of the Grass for us.
When he had finished speaking, the Sardinian approached him, his hand extended. They shook hands two or three times and the Sardinian said, “Bravo!. .”
This shepherd is an assistant for the herd for which the Sardinian is the master.
After the Grass came the Rain. That one told us all it knew of man’s exterior:
Because I’ve encountered him many times!
And because there is not a fold, not a groove in his body which I have not kissed.
He has:
A head like that stone which makes fire
and the power that makes hillocks of his chest and his legs and his arms, it comes from within his head.
And the female:
Some are as lively as little mice
and they are like the fruit of the thyme, that little green star soft with honey, but with a bitterness that swells the tongue.
I run over her as over the naked hills but I never go farther than her belly because a fire is hidden there, hotter than the fire of the sun.
The one that will tell us of man’s interior is the Cold. That one has entered, has gone within to the inside of man, all the way to: