Exhuming a Lost Breton Poet on Armistice Day

Being humbled by Yan Ber Calloc’h, a voice snuffed out by The Great War

In the Schwarzman Library’s Map Room, in midtown Manhattan, the book was presented snug in a cardboard box. I was told that it was to be read in this room only. I took a seat across from the wood-carved globe around which the rooms’ tables and shelves seemed to orbit. Some series of events found me in the gilded austerity of the New York Public Library’s Map Room that day. Yet, from the presentation of the box it began to dawn on me: I am intruding.

The cumbersome stiffness of the box unfolding disturbed the room’s hush. When the book within my hands let out its first spine-crack, it set my shoulders shuddering. Having pried open the spine, yellowed pages at once fell out of place. Bits of binding collected in a pile of dust inside the cardboard shell underneath.

Photo by Author

Uneasy with my own fumbling indelicacy, I cringed. Who was I to soil this edition, century-old and sufficiently precious as to be interred here, summoned only on request, kept strictly to these stifling confines?

Some scholar or laureate would surely be more worthy. One who actually knew Breton, or could at least read the French translation fluently. By the flagging of the fabric that dangled from the cover, and the faded gilding of the name “Calloc’h,” I estimated ten, perhaps a dozen perusals remained before these leaves crumbled to oblivion. Nevertheless, the trespass had been committed. It was now incumbent on me to glean something. I pressed on.

Yan Ber Calloc’h was a poet of the Breton tongue. “Born amidst the sea,” he was a son of a fisherman, a man of Armor. Absolute in his faith, he aspired to priesthood before The Great War came.

Breton poet Yann Ber Calloc’h.

He named his book “Ar an deulin.” In French, “À genoux.” Genuflection? No. These words were purged under machine-gun fire; their truth laid bare before the terror of the trenches. Yan Ber Calloc’h kept in his Breton to an older, more guttural faith.

“Ar an deulin” can be read simply, “On your knees.”

The editor’s preface describes “their magnificent language, old perhaps but still noble and vigorous as ever,” Calloc’h and his generation of Bretons kindled hope of a revival, inspired by fraternal Celts across the Irish Sea. All of which I’d known already. But then I read:

Blind night arrives — envelopes the houses, the countryside, the sea.

Your churches, when the night falls, grow gentler.

And I recognize a poet. And when I read:

Imram — this feeling we’ve arrived at is an old thing, the ancestors knew it.

When they grew weary of some horizon, they cast their barques out the sea

And they rowed.

I recognize a spirit kindred to my own. In a letter from the front at Ardennes dated September, 1915, Calloc’h confided:

The forest is splendid. The dead leaves portend of reverie; the green speak of hope, and of la Celtie…

And then I read:

If by chance I don’t come back, it will be a burden what falls to you.

In April 1917, Yan Ber Calloc’h died, killed in battle by the enemy.

“He lives and breathes in each of these pages,” according to the editor’s preface. Dead leaves crumbling in living hands. And then I read:

Celt of Scotland, where are you? And you, Celt of Ireland? And where are you, Celt of Cymru?

O Celt of Bretagne, my own blood, where have you gone?

“Mort pour la France,” they would have cried in response. Yet elsewhere Calloc’h, writing of his fallen compatriots, committed too his own eulogy:

Reflect that we are fallen, not for the Liberty or Justice of the Republic of France, laughable as the German Empire, but for the redemption of our land, moreover for the beauty of the world.

I reinterred the leaves. Three thousand miles across Saint Brendan’s Sea — unknowing, unworthy — the burden fell to me. I am duty bound now, I carry forward the songs of this soldier-poet, warrior-priest.

Ar an Deulin. On Your Knees.