[In the following essay, Epstein asserts that “Choses Passagès” is a compelling poem that encourages further study of O’Hara’s friendship with poet John Ashbery.]

“CHOSES PASSAGèRES à JOHN ASHBERY”

J'écorche l'anguille par la queue, peut-être un nœud d'anguille, ou il y a anguille sous roche,
je ne fais que toucher barres.
Chapeaux bas! mais, il n'y avait pas un seul chapeau,
et moi; j'avais beaucoup travaillé dans le temps.
J'avais souffert un grand échec, mystérieusement.
Qui se sent galeux se gratte!
Hébergement? je suis à la hauteur d'une île, c'est du hasard, et je ne suis pas une haridelle,
plein d'impudicité, non, non, j'imprime un mouvement à une machine,
la semaine des quartre jeudis, du temps que la reine Berthe filit.
J'aime partout les kinkajous.
Hier soir, j'étais un labadens; maintenant? je suis un lavabo.
Je mange les morilles moresques, quelle suffisance!
Je suis un homme qui se noie, montant un cheval à nu, et mon ciel est couvert de nuances.
Est-ce que j'ai un bel organe, hein? je fais ses orges très bien, pourquoi pas?
Ce fruit est du poison tout pur, c'est la pure vérité, et pourquoi pas?
ça ne nous rajeunit pas! La rouille ronge la fer, c'est un souvenir soviétique.
La trébuchage, le tric-trac, vous vous trompez! dites voir turlututu chapeau pointu!
Ce drap est d'un bon user,
pour trouver l'usurpateur utérin. Oui, mais, je suis seul.
Par monts et par vaux, le valet de bourreau vient,
c'est un wattman vulcanien, et j'ai peur.
Il pleut. Je mange un xiphias.
Il n'y gagnera rien, je suis un yole, un you you, moi.
Tu es un homme zélateur, donc? Mon ange, tu as un oeil qui dit zut à l'autre.

May 6, 1955

“PASSING THINGS TO JOHN ASHBERY”

I begin this thing at the wrong end, maybe a running bowline, or there is a snake in the grass,
I am off again without stopping.
Hats off! but, there wasn't a single man there,
and me; I used to study a good deal formerly.
I have suffered a terrible blow, mysteriously.
Let him whom the cap fits wear it!
Lodging? I am off an island, it's a stroke of luck, and I am not a hack,
full of immodesty, no, no, I communicate movement to a machine,
when two Sundays come in one week (never), in the good old times.
I love kinkajous everywhere.
Last night, I was an old school chum; now? I'm a washstand.
I eat Moorish mushrooms, what self-sufficiency!
My affairs are going to the bad, riding a horse barebacked, and my sky covered with nuances.
Do I have a good voice, do I? I feather my nest very well, why not?
That fruit is downright poison, it is the plain unvarnished truth, and why not?
That doesn't make us out any younger! Rust corrodes iron, it's a Soviet souvenir.
The weighing and sorting of money, the backgammon-board, you are mistaken! Dites voir turlututu chapeau pointu!
This cloth wears well,
in order to discover the uterine usurper. Yes, but, I am alone.
Up hill and down dale, the assistant-executioner comes,
he is a vulcanian tram-driver, and I am afraid.
It's raining. I'm eating a swordfish.
He will get nothing by it, I am a yawl, a dinghy, me.
You are a zealot, then? My dear, you squint.

[trans. by Andrew Epstein]

In May 1955, Frank O'Hara wrote a strange poem in French and dedicated it to one of his closest friends, the poet John Ashbery. Although “Choses Passagères” appeared in a 1961 issue of the literary journal Locus Solus, and was included in O'Hara's Collected Poems (1971), it has been rendered in English only once, and it has rarely, if ever, been mentioned by commentators on either poet. The sole translation was published in 1973, in The World, then a mimeographed literary magazine of limited circulation, and that version does not adequately represent the poem's meanings or reflect its complex methods of composition. Translated more accurately and viewed in its proper context, “Choses Passagères” emerges not only as a compelling poem, but also as a fascinating linguistic experiment that illuminates the relationship between two of the most prominent and influential American poets of the postwar period.

Perhaps it is not surprising that the poem has received so little attention, since the complicated friendship between O'Hara and Ashbery has remained largely unexplored. Although it is often mentioned that the two poets met as undergraduates at Harvard in 1949 and enjoyed a close friendship until O'Hara's death in 1966, this personal and literary relationship, its nuances and its impact on the poets' writings, deserves greater scrutiny. Indeed, the lives and careers of these poets were so intertwined that their poetry, in part, grew out of this very interaction. Immediately drawn to one another by similar interests, aesthetic tastes, and senses of humor, O'Hara and Ashbery quickly set themselves against the rather decorous verse being written by “academic” poets in the 1940s and 1950s. As the nucleus of the New York School of poets, a group which also included Kenneth Koch, James Schuyler, and Barbara Guest, these two young poets developed a joint commitment to irreverent experimentalism in art, to the dynamic and transient nature of experience, and to the idea that art must contend with a world, and a self, defined by flux and change.

Despite their similarities, O'Hara and Ashbery deliberately cultivated their own poetic styles, aesthetic concerns, and personalities, creating bodies of poetry that are as different as they are interrelated. From the first, the relationship was based on a deep sense of creative and personal affinity, mingled with an equally strong desire, on the part of each, to maintain his individuality and distinctive character as a poet and as a person. This mixture of intimacy and staunch self-reliance is not uncommon in friendships between poets, especially ones so committed to collaboration on the one hand, and individualism and innovative originality on the other. In the case of O'Hara and Ashbery, these paradoxical drives—toward the development of a personal, idiosyncratic style and toward a shared avant-garde aesthetic—created a close, almost siblinglike friendship that was complicated by ambivalence, competition, and even jealousy.

For example, in the summer of 1955, O'Hara was fascinated by the updated version of the Cain and Abel story in the movie East of Eden, which he went to see again and again. He felt that this tale of a bitter struggle between two brothers, one (played by James Dean) “bad” and rebellious and one “good” and docile, had an eerie pertinence to his own life. In a letter to an older friend, the painter Fairfield Porter, O'Hara explained that he strongly identified with the more daring and nonconformist son. He was also convinced that the tense rivalry in the movie neatly paralleled the relationship between himself and Ashbery, whom he compared to the good brother, and that it even revealed certain differences between them as poets. “I think one of the things about East of Eden,” he wrote, “is that I am very materialistic and John is very spiritual, in our work especially. … John's work is full of dreams and a kind of moral excellence and kind sentiments. Mine is full of objects for their own sake, spleen and ironically intimate observation.” Self-deprecating and quietly confident about his own work at the same time, O'Hara would often uncomfortably acknowledge Ashbery's particular brilliance (“let's face it,” he once said to James Schuyler, “John's the poet”) even as he tried to differentiate himself from it.

For O'Hara, the relationship between friends, especially between poets, is simultaneously divisive and nurturing, competitive and stimulating, and as much about differences as similarities. The complexities of friendship, and of this relationship in particular, frequently figure in his poems. During the early fifties, O'Hara wrote a number of revealing poems that concern his friend Ashbery, including “Ashes on Saturday Afternoon” and “To John Ashbery,” works which have thus far virtually escaped critical notice. Often tender meditations on friendship and writing, these poems are fraught with paradox, with undercurrents of rivalry and envy; they are also marked by O'Hara's reluctance to sacrifice independence in the name of intimacy. O'Hara composed one such poem, “Choses Passagères,” on 6 May 1955, around the time his obsession with East of Eden began. Ashbery, who had recently applied for a Fulbright Scholarship to study in France, had been (or soon would be) notified that he had received the award. Some confluence of Ashbery's hope to live in France (a country whose language he did not know very well) and O'Hara's mixed feelings about such a prospect inspired the latter to write a poem in French and dedicate it to his friend.

“Choses Passagères” is not a poem with paraphrasable content that happens to be written by an American poet in French. There is something quite unusual about its use of this foreign language, and we might bear in mind that O'Hara was always quick to admit that his own French was rather limited. The poem, apparently O'Hara's first in French, is actually a playful jigsaw puzzle, whose jagged pieces are strange, hilarious, and suggestive French idioms that the poet has appropriated and stitched together rather than invented himself. In 1961, when Kenneth Koch edited an issue of Locus Solus dedicated to collaborations, he included “Choses Passagères,” claiming that it was a collaboration between Frank O'Hara and the French language. One might go further and call the piece a collaboration between O'Hara and a 1951 edition of Cassell's French-English English-French Dictionary. When translating this poem I discovered by a fortuitous coincidence that many of its lines largely consist of strange idiomatic phrases that are found verbatim in this particular dictionary. In other words, I inadvertently stumbled upon the “key” to the poem's unusual methods of construction.

As one reads the poem, three principles become clear: 1) each line contains somewhere within it one or more words that are keyed to a letter of the alphabet, 2) many of these key words figure in expressions which Cassell's cites as examples of idiomatic use of those words, and 3) the key words are arranged in alphabetical order, though with several significant omissions. Thus, “anguille” is the key word for the first line, corresponding to the letter a, and so O'Hara appropriates three phrases given in Cassell's as examples for idiomatic expressions using “anguille”; “barre” is the key word for the second line, corresponding to the letter b, leading O'Hara to borrow its phrase from the entry for that word, and so on, until the last line, whose key words are “zelateur” and “zut,” and whose phrases appear in the dictionary under those words.

Though this is the general rule of composition, the poem is far from rigidly systematic: there is no line keyed to q; r and s seem to share a line; there are two lines for u; and the phrase for f appears out of order (in line 9). We can assume, then, that O'Hara was not interested in observing these principles of construction too precisely. Furthermore, not all the phrases employed are idiomatic ones, and in quite a few lines, O'Hara does not appropriate a prefabricated phrase from the dictionary at all. However, even in these lines, he seems to have lifted the unusual key words—such as “kinkajous,” “labadens,” “morilles,” and “moresques”—from the dictionary, often taking two words from the same or adjacent pages. After selecting his key words, he often places them in his own syntactical arrangements, such as parallel structures (“last night I was … ; now I am a …”) or questions. He also adds connecting clauses and invents some full sentences that do not appear to be dictionary-derived at all. However, once the general method becomes apparent, we can retrace O'Hara's romp through the French language, his whirlwind passage through the dictionary.

The only translation of this poem that I have found, John Bátki's 1973 version included in The World, misses its hidden principles of composition. Bátki treats the poem as a standard, if zany, French poem, not seeing that it consists largely of idiomatic phrases lifted from the dictionary in alphabetical order, fused together by the poet's act of selection. For example, the poem seems to begin with some remarks about eels (“l'anguille”):

J'écorche l'anguille par la queue, peut-être un noeud d'anguille, ou il y a anguille sous roche,
je ne fais que toucher barres.

Bátki renders these phrases literally:

I grab an eel by the tail, perhaps it is an eel-knot, or an eel under the rock,
all I do is touch bars.

Bátki does not notice that each of these phrases is idiomatic in French; what he also seems not to have discovered is that each of them appears in Cassell's as an example under the words “anguille” and “barres.” That is, after this dictionary defines “barre” as “bar (of metal, wood, etc.),” it cites various idiomatic phrases that employ “barre”; one of ten such phrases is “je ne fais que toucher barres,” which is offered in English as “I am off again immediately or without stopping.” Because the phrases in “Choses Passagères” are so consistently found intact in this edition of the dictionary, we can conclude that O'Hara was trolling through Cassell's as he wrote it.

If the English translations of these dictionary examples are sewn together, the lines take on a strikingly different (and eel-less) meaning:

I begin this thing at the wrong end, maybe a running bowline, or there is a snake in the grass,
I am off again without stopping.

It is clear that attention to French idiom is necessary in reading this poem, but Bátki continues to translate each phrase literally, so that “there wasn't a single man there” is rendered “but there was only one hat,” and “my affairs are going to the bad” as “I am a drowning man.” Furthermore, his version is marred by inaccurate translations of even the nonidiomatic phrases, such as “I eat a xylophone” for “je mange un xiphias” (“I eat a swordfish”) and “I was a lavatory” for “j'étais un labadens” (“I was an old school chum”). Although Bátki's translation frequently manages to convey successfully the strangeness of the words' literal meanings, much of their significance and playful complexity is lost, since the poem calls for an awareness of the difference between the literal and figurative meanings, as well as between the French and English phrases.

When the poem is more properly decoded, one begins to see not only the correct English meaning of the French idioms, but also the counterpoint between the three linguistic elements—the French original, the literal meanings of the words, and the idiomatic expressions as rendered in English. The poem's experimentation with language is ingenious and amusing, in part, because O'Hara forces the careful reader to consider both idiomatic meaning and literal meaning at once, while an uninformed, or dictionary-less, non-French reader is doomed to misunderstanding. Though the literal meaning (“I peel the eel by the tail”) is often less “correct,” as far as French goes, than the idiom (“I begin this thing at the wrong end”), it remains shimmering behind the figurative: both meanings coexist and hang suspended in midair. Perusing that treasure trove of language, the dictionary, the poet is drawn to each of these linguistic constructions; the poem demonstrates how habituated we become to language's strangeness, how little we understand of its bizarre workings in our everyday usage.

Language's slippery, elusive qualities are always emphasized when a work foregrounds the unstable relationship between languages, and it is this gap that O'Hara's poem plumbs. For example, to render “du temps que … Berthe filait” (“in the times when … Bertha marched”) accurately (and not literally) we must use the bland phrase “in the good old times,” which lacks the colorful specificity of the French idiom. No translation, of course, can adequately represent the full experience of such a text, which depends on moving from French into English with an awareness of the interplay of literal and idiomatic meanings in both and between both. Thus, the poem remains virtually untranslatable. It is impossible to transfer the French to the English without loss and change, just as it is impossible to say what the single, univocal meaning of any given line is. After all, when you say “il y a anguille sous roche,” is there “an eel under a rock,” “something in the wind,” or “a snake in the grass”? In a way, all these meanings exist simultaneously, in transition from one to the next: each are fleeting, passing, mobile things—“choses passagères.”

As Robert Frost said, “poetry is what gets lost in translation,” and both O'Hara and Ashbery were deeply inspired by the chaotic plurality of meanings, the verbal indeterminacy, that such a cross-language experiment reveals. This poem, then, can be seen as O'Hara's tribute to the poets' mutual attraction to the absurd strangeness and arbitrariness of language. Since it is an experiment in “found language,” one might assume that any ideas or themes located in it are merely incidental. However, its suggestive title, its unexplained dedication to Ashbery, and its predominant images, offer enough oblique allusions to the O'Hara-Ashbery relationship to indicate that O'Hara's choices of phrases and words were hardly random. For starters, by naming his poem for Ashbery “Passing Things,” O'Hara seems to acknowledge that he and his friend share the view that life—like our words, our friendships, and our selves—is kinetic, unstable, and transitory.

By declaring at the outset “I begin this thing at the wrong end,” O'Hara self-consciously reflects on the way his poem is composed: he acknowledges that to write a poem, one usually writes first and checks the dictionary later, rather than beginning with dictionary phrases as your point of departure. From that moment forward, O'Hara is “off again without stopping,” as he jumps from point to point at high speed.

Despite its rapid transitions and nonlinear development, the poem does sustain three interconnecting themes. On the first of these thematic planes, O'Hara stages a dialectical conflict between self and other, “I” and “you,” individual and group. It is a struggle he carries throughout the poem, since this tension lies at the heart of his ideas about the simultaneous gift and burden of friendship; thus, many lines in the poem deliberately play intimacy against isolation, communion against singularity. For example, the opening reference to a “running bowline,” a kind of slipknot that both holds and, at times, slides, is an extremely apt figure for the paradoxes of friendship the poem addresses. But even this dubious evocation of friendship's bond immediately gives way to another alternative, a sinister sense of betrayal, a fear that “there is a snake in the grass.” The phrase “there wasn't a single man there” could imply that the place specified is empty, or point to a lack of available men to date, but it could also suggest that in such knotlike gatherings (of friendship or community) no man can remain single, no person a self-reliant self.

Being part of a duo or a group can be a threat to one's singularity, one's “self-sufficiency,” and it is this possibility inherent in friendship that so unsettles these poets and leads to much of their ambivalence. Near the end of the poem, O'Hara suddenly inserts the line “Yes, but, I am alone,” a phrase which simultaneously implies a defiance of conformity and a lonely sadness. Though he supplies many connecting phrases and grammatical constructions, this sentence is one of the few in the poem that O'Hara has wholly invented, without recourse to a word or phrase from the dictionary. As such, this statement about solitude, coming just after the reference to the “uterine” (that is, a sibling) “usurper” contains a certain gravity, poignancy, and urgency, especially since the rules of the game do not account for its appearance.

The penultimate line casts the self as a boat, mobile and solitary: “I am a yawl, a dinghy, me.” However, in the counterpoint between French and English, there is a deliberately confusing play of pronouns which intentionally highlights the paradoxes of self and other. In French, O'Hara writes “je suis un yole, un you you, moi”; by splitting the single French word “youyou” (dinghy) into two “yous,” O'Hara graphically demonstrates the vertiginous merging of identities in close friendship, so that the line appears to be saying “I am you, you me” at the same time it proclaims “I am a yawl, a dinghy.” Though it is impossible to reproduce in translation, this playful and highly suggestive interlingual gesture increases the poem's blurring of “me” and “you.”

The entire poem is driven by these paradoxes which hold together sameness and difference. O'Hara's treatment of this tension recalls Whitman's self-contradicting lines from “Song of Myself,” where he defines human relationships as dramatic moments in which “opposite equals advance”: “always a knit of identity, always distinction.” This conflict is apparent in the phrase O'Hara used for the letter f in a line that was removed in the final manuscript. (Note that in the published version, the replacement phrase for f occurs out of order, in line 9, where “filait” is the key word: “du temps que la reine Berthe filait.”) Donald Allen's editorial note to this poem in O'Hara's Collected Poems tells us that one manuscript contains the following as the “original 7th line,” though it does not appear in the poem's published incarnations: “Néamoins, il y a fagots et fagots,” which Cassell's defines as “nevertheless, there are men and men; men or things are not all alike.” First of all, O'Hara probably chose this dictionary phrase because its interplay of French and English playfully points to the sexual orientation he and Ashbery shared—which may also explain why he chose not to use it in the poem. Since this phrase follows the line “let him whom the cap fits wear it!” the whole passage seems to assert that if the shoe fits—that is, if you are homosexual—then accept it, and just be homosexual. However, the omitted line 7, which O'Hara chose to begin with “nevertheless,” seems to take issue with the previous assertion: it seems to suggest that while two men might both be homosexual, they might very well go about it differently: “Nevertheless, there are men and men; not all men or things are alike.” Indeed, Ashbery's extreme reticence about his homosexuality in the 1950s and 1960s contrasted sharply with O'Hara's brash openness about his own sexual orientation. O'Hara's use of this resonant phrase simultaneously highlights the striking differences between men's sexual choices in general, and stresses the different approaches to homosexuality in this particular friendship.

The sentence also reiterates O'Hara's ambivalent stance towards the struggle between selfhood and communion. At this moment, he deliberately chooses to emphasize that not all men are alike. Such a recognition is the other side of the coin from his fear that communal identity tends to subjugate individuals, that “there wasn't a single man there.” Pitted against the fact that there is “always a knit of identity” is the recurring idea that there is “always distinction.”

With the second, related theme, O'Hara dramatizes emotions of suspicion, jealousy, and violence, as he introduces elements of a Cain-and-Abel-like sibling rivalry. With its warning about “a snake in the grass,” the poem opens under a sign of betrayal, suggesting that something wicked this way comes. The phrase is an especially resonant one in O'Hara's oeuvre, because it appears two years earlier in one of his plays, coming out of the mouth of a character originally played by John Ashbery. When the play Try! Try! was performed at the Poets' Theater in Cambridge in 1951, Ashbery starred as a character named John, who was essentially a theatricalized version of himself. In 1953, O'Hara almost entirely rewrote the play for a New York production, creating a new version that foregrounded the bitter rivalry, latent in the original, between John and the other male character, Jack, who bears similarities to O'Hara. After John has literally usurped Jack's place by stealing his wife and his home, he states at the play's climax: “I suppose I'm the snake-in-the-grass but / I can't say I'm sorry. … Do you think everything can stay the same / like a photograph?” Thus, O'Hara has already linked the phrase, with its air of rivalry and betrayal, to Ashbery before it finds its way into this poem. (Other definitions of “il y a anguille sous roche” include “I smell a rat” and “there's more here than meets the eye,” both of which resonate with the poem's tense atmosphere, hidden principles, and submerged themes.)

Similarly, O'Hara seems to have been drawn to two words found practically next to each other on the dictionary page, “usurpateur” (usurper, one who illegally seizes another's place or power) and “utérin” (a half-sibling; brother or sister on the mother's side). Why fuse these two words together into “l'usurpateur utérin,” the uterine usurper? O'Hara introduces this Cain-like betrayer near the end in order to reinforce the numerous hints along the way that this poem, like East of Eden and Try! Try!, is driven by feelings of sibling rivalry. The “you” of the poem is a back-stabbing sibling or friend who threatens to usurp the “I”'s rightful place. O'Hara further stresses this air of threat and violent confrontation between self and other by including a poisonous fruit, an approaching “assistant-executioner” (who may or may not be the friend) that frightens the speaker, and by ending with a phrase whose literal meaning is “you have one eye that says ‘go to hell’ to the other.”

The third thematic plane of the poem concerns time and the transience of poetic powers and friendship itself. O'Hara and Ashbery, jointly preoccupied with the paradoxes of motion and stasis, write poems that attempt to encompass the kinetic, “passing things” of experience in art, so it is fitting that from the title onward, this jagged, rapidly shifting poem both embodies and addresses the chaotic flux of experience. The unusual phrase “I communicate motion to a machine” must have caught O'Hara's eye as he scanned the dictionary pages, because it epitomizes the central goal and burden of the poetics of motion and transience he and Ashbery share—the attempt to transfer movement to a typewriter, the machine these poets chose to compose poems on almost exclusively.

Loss and nostalgia crop up repeatedly, hand in hand with dynamic motion: the poem stresses the relentless passage of time (“that doesn't make us out any younger! rust corrodes iron”) and hints at a mysterious transition that has occurred, from an earlier moment of happiness, creativity, and union to the current moment of deprivation, creative insecurity, and separation. “I used to study [work] a good deal formerly,” the speaker laments, as if uncomfortably aware that his poetic productivity has declined. “I am not a hack,” he protests uneasily, but then confesses that he only “communicates movement to a machine” (that is, writes his poems) when “two Sundays come in one week,” which is to say never, unlike “in the good old times.” Hovering over everything is a sense of O'Hara's insecurity about his own literary talent, an emotion both O'Hara and Ashbery frequently felt in the face of the other's rather threatening, disconcerting genius. After confessing that his “affairs are going to the bad,” O'Hara betrays his anxiety about his poetic ability by nervously asking, “do I have a good voice, do I?”

The transformation seems to have been both intense and enigmatic: “I have suffered a terrible blow, mysteriously.” Though the nature of this wound is never revealed, the sudden transition from intimacy to estrangement is most tellingly apparent when he asserts that “Last night, I was an old school chum; now? I'm a washstand.” O'Hara's deliberate “then … now” syntactical construction sets up a sharp contrast that highlights the transient nature of friendship. This recognition about the nature of intimacy may ultimately be the “plain unvarnished truth”—the poisonous fruit—that the poem struggles to articulate. While it seems like just yesterday evening that he and his friend were old pals fresh out of Harvard, now he feels alone, as inert and insignificant as a bathroom fixture.

The poem's mixture of affection and bitterness is pervasive. At the end, O'Hara asks “You're a zealot, then?” in a tone that implies he doubts the “you”'s true zeal, perhaps alluding to Ashbery's then-imperfect knowledge of French. However, he immediately addresses the other with the word for “angel”: “mon ange” which means “my love” or “my dear.” He ends the poem with the phrase “avoir un oeil qui dit zut a l'autre,” which is a wonderful, odd idiom that Cassell's defines as “to squint.” The English version of the conclusion—“my dear, you squint”—again combines tenderness and critique. However, since the idiom literally means “you have one eye that says ‘go to hell’ to the other,” the angry tone of “zut”—a slang interjection used to convey flat refusal (“damn,” “drats,” and “shut up”)—lingers after the poem concludes. O'Hara ends by suggesting that this divisive battle between one “I” and another is simultaneously fought within a single ambivalent person (as with two eyes at war on one face), as well as in the blurry gap between two people.

The whole poem, with its struggle between identity and distinction, its drama of bitter confrontation, and its sense of loss, suggests that even the closest friendship, like poetic creativity and independence, like everything else, is a precarious, fleeting thing. The three intersecting thematic planes, combined with the poem's linguistic play, create a dense and complicated piece full of ambivalent emotion and paradox. Perhaps it is not surprising that the poem is fraught with such tension: “Choses Passagères” was written at a moment when feelings of competition between the two poets were presumably at a high point. In the spring of 1955, both O'Hara and Ashbery had submitted manuscripts for the prestigious Yale Younger Poets Prize; less than one month after this poem was written, W. H. Auden would give the award to Ashbery rather than O'Hara, a prize which led to the publication of Ashbery's first book, Some Trees. In July, O'Hara would tell Fairfield Porter that the fierce sibling conflict in East of Eden paralleled his relationship with Ashbery. The same spring, Ashbery had applied for and received the Fulbright to France, which may have left O'Hara feeling provincial, insecure, left out, and even jealous. For example, on 23 May 1955 (three weeks after writing “Choses Passagères”), O'Hara reported the news to Kenneth Koch thus: “glorious Ashes [i.e., Ashbery] has captured a Fulbright to Montpellier, isn't that heaven? … What with this and his projected trip to Mexico next week with Jane, Joe, Grace and Walt, our little gamin is really in his travellin shoes, isn't he? It makes me feel like Emily Dickinson.” Beneath O'Hara's witty, light-hearted comments is a twinge of jealousy and resentment at Ashbery's good fortune and the exciting opportunities awaiting him. At the same time, O'Hara's alignment of himself with a major American poet who almost never left her home, Emily Dickinson, is, in effect, a subtle and clever reversal of poetic power. Although it seems to arise from uneasiness about his own artistic ability, his quip rhetorically turns the tables, as he posits himself as the poetic genius despite, or almost because of, the fact that he is not going to France. This mixture of pique, insecurity, and self-confidence, and the ambivalent attitude toward “glorious Ashes” and his Fulbright (which O'Hara refers to in another letter to Koch, with more cutting humor, as Ashbery's “recent liaison with the Government”), erupts in “Choses Passagères,” a poem conspicuously written in the language Ashbery would soon have to cope with.

Ashbery's choice of country, then, probably spurred O'Hara's poetic experiment in a language in which he himself was not really fluent. By composing this poem, with its bizarre phrases, esoteric vocabulary, and hidden key, that so defamiliarizes the French language, and by addressing such a work to Ashbery, O'Hara playfully and deliberately challenges his Fulbright-seeking friend, since Ashbery frequently mentioned that his French was imperfect when he first moved to France. The punch line to the joke is that its dedicatee will have to read this difficult poem using his flawed French, presumably misinterpreting the unfamiliar idiomatic phrases, and, realizing his failure, will need to turn to the dictionary; at this point, he may become aware that the author has so arranged things that he must plod alphabetically through the dictionary in order to make sense of the poem at all.

To drive home this dig at his friend's linguistic deficiency, O'Hara even includes a practically untranslatable shibboleth, a phrase used by the French to detect a foreign accent: “Dites voir turlututu chapeau pointu.” (I have left the sentence in French in my version because the phrase remains untranslated in the dictionary, only explained as this kind of shibboleth.) By putting this teasing phrase into his poem, O'Hara tests his friend, mocks his not-yet-perfected French, and draws attention to Ashbery's distance from the French people he intends to live among. On one level, then, O'Hara's poem says to its recipient: “you think you know French well enough? Try to read this!”

Once it was written, O'Hara apparently felt quite excited about and invested in his odd poem. He hurriedly mailed it to Kenneth Koch, who was living in France at the time, saying “I'm sending you my first poem in French. If you find any mistakes please let me know. … Does it sound French, I wonder?” When he learned that Koch might have missed the letter because he had left for Italy, O'Hara quickly mailed it again, this time adding that “since I cannot wait to have you see my first poem in French I hasten to send it along to you in Italie. I wonder if it makes any sense one way or the other?”; he even closes the letter with another reminder to “tell me what you think of choses passagères.” Writing the poem seems to have at least temporarily assuaged O'Hara's anxieties about his creative prowess that are expressed in the poem: “Anyway, it was such a joy to write as I have been having a drought with English the likes of which hasn't been seen since Koch last went to Europe.”

Upon receiving it, Koch seems to have picked up on the complexities, and the teasing qualities, of the poem right away: “I like ‘Choses Passageres’ a lot. It's very lively and witty and nuts, besides being a little course in French for those who think they know it all (French; me).” Sensing its unusual genesis, he asks O'Hara, “How did you ever write it? I guess I can figure that out, without at the same time being able to duplicate the feat (feet?), for when writing French poems I've never been able to face up so squarely as you did to the fact that it's a foreign language.” Koch astutely zeroes in on O'Hara's defamiliarizing play with the French language in this poem, and goes on to note that, in this, it exhibits one of the strengths of his friend's poetry in general: “Come to think of it, you have the same true opinion about English [that it is a foreign language], which is what always keeps one jumping around in one's seat while reading your poems.” One of the numerous reasons why “Choses Passagères” is so interesting is that the poem amply demonstrates O'Hara's inveterate fascination with the mystery, the absurdity, and the sheer mobility of language itself.

In addition to its cross-language game playing and exuberant oddity, “Choses Passagères” epitomizes the tension between friendship and independence at the heart of O'Hara's poetry. Friendship—both its gifts and its costs—is a constant theme and motivating force in O'Hara's life, his writings, and even in his conception of his own poetry. In the famous, half-mocking, half-serious essay “Personism: A Manifesto,” O'Hara directly links his poetry with interpersonal relationships (but noticeably not “intimacy”). He declares that his own poetic “movement,” Personism, “does not have to do with personality or intimacy, far from it!” but instead calls for the poem to “address itself to one person (other than the poet himself),” so that “the poem is at last between two persons instead of two pages.” Dedicated to his “old school chum” John Ashbery, “Choses Passagères” is a good example of such a poem—one that grows out of, comments on, and inserts itself within the poet's relationship with another person, to whom the poem is addressed. For O'Hara, such a poem of friendship or love is not a merging of souls, but rather a relational entity that serves as both a communicating bridge and a wedge between two people at the same time.

Given the biographical context in which it was written, and O'Hara's ideas about friendship and poetry, we can begin to surmise why this bizarre French poem written for a close friend is marked by such ambivalence, why it dramatizes both the bond and the conflict between one “I” and another, between brother and brother. “Choses Passagères” not only illuminates central paradoxes in Frank O'Hara's poetry but also offers a telling glimpse into the workings of this important American literary friendship.

Note

For the most part, my version of “Choses Passagères” follows a rather simple, if unorthodox, translation procedure: when the phrase O'Hara uses is one lifted directly from the dictionary, I have usually chosen to reproduce the English version exactly as given in Cassell's French-English English-French Dictionary (New York: Funk and Wagnalls Co., 1951). (Note that in subsequent editions of this dictionary, many of the phrases O'Hara uses, and/or their translations, have been omitted or substantially revised.) While this has occasionally led to somewhat awkward phrases and stilted diction, I have left the language as is, because the very intent of O'Hara's poem is to foreground and defamiliarize the strange nature of idioms and received phrases. I assume that O'Hara was intrigued and amused by how bizarre and unidiomatic some of the dictionary's English translations were and that he had these English words and phrases that he found in the dictionary in mind as he composed the poem.