Jonathan Larson on Francis Ponge's Nioque of the Early-Spring

I decided to translate Francis Ponge's Nioque of the Early-Spring, in part, for its bridge from the earlier Ponge of Things (playful paeans to objects) and the later Ponge of Making of the Pré and The Table, etc.(serial investigations into the changing thing, prairie, commodity…), but also because the time spanned by the document gains a distinct charge due to their circumstantial nature. Composed first as a series of notes (hear also nioques or gnoques) during a sojourn in the countryside in the early-spring of the 1950s after Ponge had tacitly withdrawn from active participation in the French Communist Party (and having before that been a member of the French Resistance and the Surrealists), selections are then published in the journals Tel Quel and L'Éphémère in the April of 1968, the former of which engaged directly in the events of May '68, and was ultimately published in full as a slim green leaflike edition by the NRF in 1983. The booklet features a note to the reader that situates the text as "curiously preceding" the protests of '68 though, of course, it was recorded a lot earlier during a period when coming to terms with the failures of a revolutionary movement, given an afterlife in 1983, another period of disbandment, and, now again in the English 50 years after May '68. All this to say that this booklet is deeply committed to taking account of its time, both cyclical and historical, cosmic and natural, in order to again regroup alongside and affirm its emancipatory forces, i.e. "to say April yet again." 

COLD WINTER RAIN OR EARLY-SPRING.

LES FLEURYS, APRIL 7 1950.

The adversity, the oblique elementary meanness pierces with little liquid stingers even more supple than whip-strands (the rain, the whips), raining heavily from above, and healthy (unburdening, unbridling, liberating, satisfying dire worries; liberating voluminous worries generally coming westerly).
The cold adversity, the elemental meanness remade from the sand, from the gravel, from the bed of the brook with the walls of houses and with the walls of enclosures, healthy as by the struggle it is bound to lead against it, refreshing; recooling and reinvigorating all the same.
One does not die from it. It is only a benign meteor; yet able to cause diseases, that are sometimes serious.
Hollows out cupules and sometimes pierces and damages, creating miniscule scree.
This cold rain, it is good. It is good that this elementary degradation comes about, these little elementary depredations, this degradation of walls. To render back to the earth that which comes from it, that which had been taken from it, and to require rebuilding, sealing; to give us enjoyment from this bit of gravel, this gravelle.
To refill the cisterns.
To remoisten the fields, the labors.
A good deal for the feet of the trees. Instillations at the feet of the trees and the grass, like an eye-drop at the corner of the eye.
Renders the earth as plastic (made from the mud).
Lays out subterranean spreads; streams (streaming), douix, rivers, vauclusian fountains.
All this comes from a tartness, from a little (bad weather) passing meanness (passage of voluminous worries, coming first from ecstasy, from the evaporation of the sea).

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