The French poet Jules Supervielle was much preoccupied with the idea of an imagined afterlife, a kind of limbo where human beings continue to exist in a disembodied, impotent state along with a strangely random selection of artefacts and other creatures from the earth they have lost: in one of his poems on this theme, ‘Prophétie’, we have a magical flying fish that knows nothing of the sea, a vintage car with four wheels but no road to use them on, and a goldfinch. I suspect that these somewhat fey imaginings have their roots in Supervielle’s permanent state of ill health, that sometimes caused him to doubt his own physical existence to the extent of holding his hand over a candle flame to reassure himself that he was still alive. It’s all a bit odd, and a long way from my own idea of an afterlife, which would be more like Valhalla but with a lot of long runs in place of all the fighting, but I do find the poems have a certain haunting quality.
Pilar was the poet’s wife.
The translation that follows is my own.
Sonnet à Pilar
Pour ne pas être seul durant l’éternité,
Je cherche auprès de toi future compagnie
Pour quand, larmes sans yeux, nous jouerons à la vie
Et voudrons y loger notre fidélité.
Pour ne plus aspirer à l’hiver et l’été,
Ni mourir à nouveau de tant de nostalgie,
Il faut dès à présent labourer l’autre vie,
Y pousser nos grands boeufs enclins à s’arrêter,
Voir comment l’on pourrait remplacer les amis,
La France, le soleil, les enfants et les fruits,
Et se faire un beau jour d’une nuit coriace,
Regarder sans regard et toucher sans les doigts,
Se parler sans avoir de paroles ni voix,
Immobiles, changer un petit peu de place.
Jules Supervielle
Sonnet for Pilar
Lest we should be alone throughout eternity
I look to you for future company
For when we play at life, like eyeless tears,
Still wishing to keep faith with those lost years.
Lest we should long too much for change of season
Or from too much nostalgia die again,
We must from now on plough another way
With our great oxen, so inclined to stay,
Must think how to replace, when all this ends,
Our country, children, sunlight, fruit, our friends,
Conjure a fair day from night’s carapace,
Look though we have no gaze, touch without fingers,
Talk to each other without words or voice,
Immobile, move a little from one place.
David Sutton 
A haunting quality, yes, I agree. Not a theology I would care for however!
“une nuit coriace” – a rugged night, a night of strong winds and heavy rain?
‘Coriace’ is a bit difficult. The root meaning is leathery, having a tough skin or outer covering, from Latin corium. In English ‘coriaceous’ is usually reserved for the natural sciences: you can speak of certain leaves being coriaceous, or turtles. In French ‘coriace’ has a more general meaning of ‘tough’, but what does this mean as applied to a night? I took it as conveying a sense of being impenetrably dark, rather than referring to weather, but it would be good to know what a proper French litterateur makes of the epithet.
He thinks it’s essential to start preparing for the other life now (“Il faut dès à présent labourer l’autre vie, …”) but he presents that preparation as impossible (“Regarder sans regard et toucher sans les doigts, …”)?
Maybe not impossible, but, given the disembodied state that he imagines, requiring an approach very different from anything available to us in this life. Perhaps he is thinking of some kind of telepathy, like that in Tolkien’s ‘The Return of the King’ (‘For they did not move or speak with mouth, looking from mind to mind; and only their shining eyes stirred and kindled as their thoughts went to and from’). But I’d agree that the mood of the poem is one of whistling in the dark.