Traduction française (par Olivier Brossard et Ron Padgett aux éditions Joca Seria) des Lunch Poems (City Lights, 1964), parue l'an dernier ; il n'aura donc même pas fallu attendre 50 ans !
Merci. Ou peut-être plutôt dziękuję ... tant la Pologne fut un peu la seconde patrie (posthume) de O'Hara.
Pourquoi maintenant ? Juste parce que j'écoutais Mal Waldron (Snake-out, duo avec Steve Lacy sur Hat Art, enregistré à Paris en 1981) et que m'est revenu en mémoire un des poèmes les plus connus de ce recueil :
The day Lady died
It is 12:20 in New York a Friday
three days after Bastille day, yes
it is 1959 and I go get a shoeshine
because I will get off the 4:19 in Easthampton
at 7:15 and then go straight to dinner
and I don’t know the people who will feed me
I walk up the muggy street beginning to sun
and have a hamburger and a malted and buy
an ugly NEW WORLD WRITING to see what the poets
in Ghana are doing these days
I go on to the bank
and Miss Stillwagon (first name Linda I once heard)
doesn’t even look up my balance for once in her life
and in the GOLDEN GRIFFIN I get a little Verlaine
for Patsy with drawings by Bonnard although I do
think of Hesiod, trans. Richmond Lattimore or
Brendan Behan’s new play or Le Balcon or Les Nègres
of Genet, but I don’t, I stick with Verlaine
after practically going to sleep with quandariness
and for Mike I just stroll into the PARK LANE
Liquor Store and ask for a bottle of Strega and
then I go back where I came from to 6th Avenue
and the tobacconist in the Ziegfeld Theatre and
casually ask for a carton of Gauloises and a carton
of Picayunes, and a NEW YORK POST with her face on it
and I am sweating a lot by now and thinking of
leaning on the john door in the 5 SPOT
while she whispered a song along the keyboard
to Mal Waldron and everyone and I stopped breathing
L'occasion, en restant dans la même tonalité, de citer une des figures de proue du O'Haryzm, Marcin Swietlicki, né en 1961 :
portrait de Marcin Swietlicki
par Bartosz Kosowski pour Przekroj
(source)
Sześć razy Coltrane
Do kogo mówię? Bo mówię - i przecież
mówię po polsku - - - - - -. Zaraz słońce padnie
za krawędź. Zaraz zimnym palcem
jazda po gardle. Zaraz zimnym miastem
jazda. Do Nikąd. W Nikąd zamieszkawszy
nigdy nie będę w Indziej. I do kogo mówię?
- po polsku, w marginesach
światła. Anioł
znienacka mówi: - Teraz chcę się dla pana rozebrać.
(Do kogo mówi?)
Six times Coltrane
To whom do I speak? Since I speak – and I do
speak in Polish--------. Soon the sun will fall
beyond the edge. Soon, with a cold finger,
the run across the throat. Soon the run across
a cold city. To Nowhere. Settled in Nowhere
never will I be in Elsewhere. And to whom do I speak?
– in Polish, in the margins
of the light. An angel
unexpectedly speaks: 'Now I want to strip for you, Mr.'
(To whom does he speak?)
speak in Polish--------. Soon the sun will fall
beyond the edge. Soon, with a cold finger,
the run across the throat. Soon the run across
a cold city. To Nowhere. Settled in Nowhere
never will I be in Elsewhere. And to whom do I speak?
– in Polish, in the margins
of the light. An angel
unexpectedly speaks: 'Now I want to strip for you, Mr.'
(To whom does he speak?)
traduit par Elżbieta Wójcik-Leese
(source)
