The door to the past is a strange door. It swings open and things pass through it, but they pass in one direction only. No man can return across the threshold, though he can look down still and see the green light waver in the weeds.
LOREN EISELEYA door opens in the wilderness
People cross through it - bloused women families
Acquaintances friends all the ones I have loved
Sleep-walkers night-walkers each dazed and shorn -
Streets aurous with ice, a snowfall scratched into
Moons - and everything I'd known -
Inside the bleak floating light of my lungs
In the capillaries of my eyes a blood
Glancing through the hatches -
If I said I would always be grateful
If I lied or touched with spite
If night is just a foamline of shadows
Though we were both lost - the door
Opening - the fear of being shown
Whole to the one who must love you still -
And stopped as if on a walk to say
Look at that and what matters what really counts
And I'll tell you everything if you promise I promise
I stood at the door and behind me heard
Snow-plows scrape against roads
At the center of night - unknown to yourself
And the word I said out-loud to no one
That meant it was all to no purpose
The word for the desire inside destruction
For everything that can never be brought back -
Loose snow blown hard to each bank
And the common reel of those who
To avoid one extreme rush towards its opposite -
Snow blasted to piles - and neve opend up to
Anything that could reach me until you reached me -
Which hours belonged to us
When i was unknowingly alone
Why did you always return to walk here a path
Behind my closed eyes shedding salt
Dry snowfall and sticks - still you were here
With me I might say The moon rose in the casement window
The red-haired boy across teh street has learned to ride his bike
There are still picnics there are fountains
And the world I am leaving behind says
One learns to see one learns to be kind -
I closed my eyes I closed my hands
I shut down the fields in my arms
The cattle on the plains veins ditches
Blue ravines a gray bird
Sailing though a poplar brake kids
Throwing snow I closed the last swinging juncos
Sheep wool caught on barbed wire I closed
Fumes and clear patches of sky I seized
The river the town I shut down
The hard muscles of sleep farmlands
Warming under midnight salt-lights scruff-pines
On the ridge animals scattering across the slopes I closed
The smooth bone of evening a storm
On the hills white and noiseless spindled
Prairies where I was born I shut I seized
The clouds I closed in anger - fervor - ardor
in Joanna Klink, Raptus, Penguin Poets, 2010
Cela ne fait donc que sept ans que je tourne sans parvenir à le traduire autour de ce poème ... la difficulté vient moins de l'usage répété de l'enjambement ou de la ponctuation réduite au tiret que du ton de cette comptine à voix basse, de ce murmure d'enfant qui conjure le noir, de cette litanie récitée pour tenir jusqu'au matin.
J'ai au moins une version du titre qui me satisfait, Saisissement, pour essayer de rendre à la fois la polysémie de Raptus et le ressaisissement par la mémoire. Il faut bien se satisfaire de ce modeste commencement !
"This is a poet who knows which losses are irreparable, and also
the suffering that shall not heal, the singing that lifts—washed,
unwinged—and is nevertheless heard on every page." a écrit Carolyn Forché à la sortie de Raptus.
