samedi 30 octobre 2010

From the Paris Commune to the Kronstadt rebellion -- Kenneth Rexroth (1905-1982)


 
Remember now there were others before this;
Now when the unwanted hours rise up,
And the sun rises red in unknown quarters,
And the constellations change places,
And cloudless thunder erases the furrows,
And moonlight stains and the stars grow hot.
Though the air is fetid, conscripted fathers,
With the black bloat of your dead faces;
Though men wander idling out of factories
Where turbine and hand are both freezing;
And the air clears at last above the chimneys;
Though mattresses curtain the windows;
And every hour hears the snarl of explosion;
Yet one shall rise up alone saying:
“I am one out of many, I have heard
Voices high in the air crying out commands;
Seen men’s bodies burst into torches;
Seen faun and maiden die in the night air raids;
Heard the watchwords exchanged in the alleys;
Felt hate speed the blood stream and fear curl the nerves.
I know too the last heavy maggot;
And know the trapped vertigo of impotence.
I have traveled prone and unwilling
In the dense processions through the shaken streets.
Shall we hang thus by taut navel strings
To this corrupt placenta till we’re flyblown;
Till our skulls are cracked by crow and kite
And our members become the business of ants,
Our teeth the collection of magpies?”
They shall rise up heroes, there will be many,
None will prevail against them at last.
They go saying each: “I am one of many”;
Their hands empty save for history.
They die at bridges, bridge gates, and drawbridges.
Remember now there were others before;
The sepulchres are full at ford and bridgehead.
There will be children with flowers there,
And lambs and golden-eyed lions there,
And people remembering in the future.




 Note :
From the Paris Commune to the Kronstadt Rebellion was originally entitled “March 18, 1871-1921” — the dates of the Commune and of the Bolsheviks’ crushing of the Kronstadt revolt exactly fifty years later. “The next morning, March 18, the Petrograd newspapers carried banner headlines commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the Paris Commune. Bands played military tunes and the Communists paraded in the streets, singing the ‘Internationale.’ ‘Its strains,’ noted Goldman, ‘once jubilant to my ears, now sounded like a funeral dirge for humanity’s flaming hope.’ Berkman made a bitter entry in his diary: ‘The victors are celebrating the anniversary of the Commune of 1871. Trotsky and Zinoviev denounce Thiers and Gallifet for the slaughter of the Paris rebels’.” (Paul Avrich, Kronstadt 1921.) 






De la Commune de Paris à la mutinerie de Kronstadt

Maintenant se souvenir qu'il y en eut d'autres avant eux;
Maintenant que montent les temps mauvais
Que le soleil se lève rouge en des endroits inconnus,
Que les constellations changent de place,
Qu'un orage sans nuage efface les sillons
Que la lune souille et que les étoiles s'échauffent.
Bien que l'air soit fétide, pères conscrits,
De l'enflure noire de vos visages morts;
Bien que les hommes errent désœuvrés hors des usines
Où gèlent la turbine et la main;
Et que l'air s'éclaircisse enfin au-dessus des chemines;
Bien que les matelas tiennent lieu de rideaux aux fenêtres;
Et que chaque heure retentisse du grondement des explosions;
Quelqu'un se lèvera seul et dira:
"Je suis la multitude unie, j'ai entendu
Les voix qui portaient les ordres haut dans l'air;
Vu les corps des hommes s'enflammer en torches;
Vu le faune et la vierge mourir sous les raids de nuit;
Entendu les mots d'ordre échangés dans les allées;
Senti la haine accélérer le débit du sang et la peur vriller les nerfs.
Je connais aussi la pire des vermines,
Et je connais le vertige suspendu de l'impuissance.
J'ai suivi contraint et forcé
La dense procession parmi les rues ébranlées.
Resterons-nous ainsi reliés par un solide cordon
A ce placenta corrompu jusqu'à en pourrir;
Jusqu'à ce que nos crânes soient fendus par le corbeau et le milan,
Que nos membres appartiennent aux fourmis,
Nos dents à la collection des pies ?"
Des héros se lèveront, en nombre,
Rien enfin ne leur résistera.
Ils vont chacun disant: "Je suis la multitude unie",
Leurs mains ne tenant rien que l'histoire.
Ils meurent sur les ponts, les portes, les ponts-levis.
Se souvenir qu'il y en eut d'autres avant eux;
Les cimetières sont pleins à ford et bridgehead
Il viendra là des enfants avec des bouquets,
et des agneaux et des lions aux yeux d'or,
Et des gens qui s'en souviendront dans l'avenir.
 






Plus sur Kenneth Rexroth du côté de Bureau of Public Secrets ; quelques traductions de Pierre Reverdy, en particulier, .


mercredi 27 octobre 2010

Miel (Bal) -- Semih Kaplanoğlu
























Avec ce film, Kaplanoğlu boucle sa "trilogie de Yussuf", après Œuf (Yumurta) et Lait (Süt) ; c'est aussi cela sans doute que l'Ours d'Or de Berlin est venu récompenser. Non que Miel soit sans qualité, loin de là,  -- on y retrouve cette lenteur qui s'enroule en tension que Kaplanoğlu partage avec quelques illustres prédecesseurs (qu'ils soient russe, grec ou japonais !), cette volonté de donner à voir, de laisser le temps à l'image de se former (ainsi, ce reflet de la lune dans un seau d'eau) qu'on avait déjà appréciées dans ses films précédents -- mais l'ensemble des échos discrets qui se répondent entre ces trois films à partir de Miel (on y voit Yussuf enfant ; il était jeune homme dans Lait et vers la quarantaine dans Œuf) finissent par former une trame "en profondeur" sur laquelle l'action de Miel s'inscrit et prend un sens qui la dépasse.

Ainsi, Bal nous donne à voir la première rencontre de Yussuf avec son "poème-fétiche", Sensation, le poème de Rimbaud dont un extrait figure sur l'affiche de Yumurta, poème dont le choix ne doit sans doute rien au hasard ; rappelons que ce poème, envoyé à Théodore de Banville en 1870, signe l' "entrée en poésie" de Rimbaud, .



Sensation

Par les soirs bleus d'été, j'irai dans les sentiers,
Picoté par les blés, fouler l'herbe menue,
Rêveur, j'en sentirai la fraîcheur à mes pieds.
Je laisserai le vent baigner ma tête nue.

Je ne parlerai pas, je ne penserai rien :
Mais l'amour infini me montera dans l'âme,
Et j'irais loin, bien loin, comme un bohémien,
Par la nature, heureux comme avec une femme.



Note pédante : ci-dessus, c'est la version finale du poème ; la version envoyée à Banville était légèrement différente et ne portait pas de titre :


Par les beaux soirs d'été, j'irai dans les sentiers, 
Picoté par les blés, fouler l'herbe menue :
Rêveur, j'en sentirai la fraîcheur à mes pieds.
Je laisserai le vent baigner ma tête nue ...


Je ne parlerai pas, je ne penserai rien :
Mais un amour immense entrera dans mon âme :
Et j'irai loin, bien loin, comme un bohémien,
Par la Nature, - heureux comme avec une femme !



In the studio -- Pan Sonic et Keiji Haino






Et voila, trois de mes musiciens fétiches font un disque ensemble en studio (enregistré à Berlin peu après leur live Shall I Download A Black Hole and Offer It To You) et il me faut trois ans pour m'en apercevoir ...

Keiji Haino est un habitué des collaborations aventureuses (voir par exemple celle avec Zeitkratzer) : quatre faces, quatre aspects de son travail, guitare, voix, batterie et flûte, le tout soutenu, noyé, propulsé par les abrasions de Pan Sonic. Deux approches diamétralement opposées du bruit. Très sombre, très réussi.



Keiji Haino signe les titres des morceaux (traduits par Kobayashi Masumi et Chris Campion), sous le titre Synergy between mercy and self annihilation overturned :




Synergy between mercy and self annihilation overturned


So many thihgs I still have to say

If I could incarnate this feeling would you consider it a creation

Imperious doppelganger of tears, playing catch with objectivity that evades ultimate responsibility

I wonder if I have become wiser than Gods by making worse what already is

This trembling, no longer seems to be the axis at the center

As far as the left goes,            it is starting to look red
What about the right,     I wonder what colour it will be

In the hollow created between the eyebrows, what offering would be most appropriate

"Without doubt" an attestation written from that time, will no longer have effect, because the wound has widened so much

I have embedded it approximately 2 minutes and 7 seconds into the 4th song, in order to return whenever I wish

Perhaps there is no need to return

Preparation is unnecessary from this point on ..., leave me alone some time
 

Supplément à l'incident de Tarnac -- Alain Brossat

 
Toujours impeccable ; à lire puisque l'actualité récente a permis à nos magistrats d'en remettre une louche ... en notre nom. 

On rappellera juste ce poème de Gérald Godin, à propos de la crise d'Octobre; est-on au Québec, en 1970, ou en France, en 2009-2010 ?



Libertés surveillées

Quand les bulldozers d'Octobre entraient dans les maisons
à cinq heures du matin
Quand les défenseurs des Droits de l'Homme
étaient assis sur les genoux de la police
à cinq heures du matin
Quand les colombes portaient fusil en bandoulière
à cinq heures du matin
Quand on demande à la liberté de montrer ses papiers
à cinq heures du matin
il y avaient ceux qui pleuraient en silence
dans un coin de leur cellule
il y avait ceux qui se ruaient sur les barreaux
et que les gardiens traitaient de drogués
il y avait ceux qui hurlaient de peur la nuit
il y avait ceux qui jeûnaient depuis le début
Quand on fait trébucher la Justice
dans les maisons pas chauffées
à cinq heures du matin
Quand la raison d'état se met en marche
à cinq heures du matin
il y en a qui sont devenus cicatrices
à cinq heures du matin
il y en a qui sont devenus frisson
à cinq heures du matin
il y a ceux qui ont oublié
il y a ceux qui serrent encore les dents
il y a ceux qui s'en sacrent
il y a ceux qui veulent tuer

(in "Libertés surveillées", Éditions Parti-pris, 1975)


La crise d'Octobre avait fait une victime bien réelle, le ministre Pierre Laporte ; chez nous, c'est à peine si quelques trains avaient pris du retard.






vendredi 22 octobre 2010

Naming power -- Wendy Rose


They think I am stronger than I am.
I would tell this like a story but
        where a story should begin
        I am left standing in silence.
                       There has to be someone to name you.

There must be hands to raise you sun-high,
        old voices to sing you in, warm hands
        to touch you about, ancient words
        to bind you to your many selves,
        gentle spirits with yucca whips waiting
        as you learn to walk.
                       There has to be someone to name you.

The words have thundered in my body for thirty years.
        Like amnesia, this way of being a fragment.
        Unfired pottery with poster paint splashed on
        to hide the crumbling cracking commonness
        left in the storeroom for a tourist sale.
        I will never be among them.
                       There has to be someone to name you.

I will choose the tongue for my songs ;
        I am a young woman still ; joining hands with the moon.
        I am a creature of blood and it's the singing
        of the blood that matters, the singing of songs
        for keeping thunder, of songs for hollowing out
        mountains, of songs for awareness -- always -- of
        someone else, of songs that starve not for food
        but for being remembered.
                       There has to be someone to name you.

Aging with the rock of this ancient land I give myself
        to the earth ; my red feet merge with the mesas
        and root in this desert, balance like the rainbow
        shaped in its dance, searching the sky for clouds.
        Across asphalt canyons
                       waits a thirty-year old woman to be named.
  
(1979-1980)





Wendy Rose ... "academic squaw" (le terme est d'elle, ironique et précis) de la nation Hopi ; quelques éclaircissements sur la seconde strophe tirés du classique Book of the Hopi de Frank Waters, publié en 1963 (disponible en français : Le livre du hopi, aux éditions du Rocher) :



Pour les "gentle spirits with yucca whips", voir "kachina" (pas les poupées, les danseurs masqués) et ci-dessous :



Pour ce qui est des justes récriminations contre mon usage immodéré de la photocopieuse, voir ici, merci.


D'autres poèmes de Wendy Rose, ici.


lundi 18 octobre 2010

The Basho project -- Lance Henson


Erin Hanson
(rien à voir avec Lance Henson !)



from far down river the echoes of cities

you are returning and there are no sweet winds
to hold you
no fields to see you remembering
not even the pale moon
that once remembered everything

outside the window the light is moving away
the tracks of animals holding themselves for the last time

the gathering night full of stillness … …




we have waited a long time
in our prayers we have lit lamps though the words
that know us have turned away

others without the hope of prayer have
walked past us and lain down

their voices fallen into the rivers …




awakening to bullets shattering lives
on the streets of kosovo and kabul

their names rise up
in a misted rain
they put their hands upon our eyes
that have grown lonely and searching

in this torn place
a leaf falls leaving its shadow on the wind

and the birds in their songs … 




D'autres textes et quelques informations sur Lance Henson, ici et (pour commencer !); ne manquez surtout pas le "classique" Twelve songs written in the ennemy's language.

De la neige qui recouvre les mots désormais muets et les occulte, der Schnee des Verschwiegenen, à ces mots familiers qui se sont détournés, in our prayers we have lit lamps though the words / that know us have turned away, du deuil impossible d'une Mitteleuropa  "où vivaient des hommes et des livres" au souvenir impossible dont la lune même se détourne, c'est la même présence lancinante du manque qui me fait associer la poésie de Lance Henson à celle de Paul Celan.

La fin du poème de Henson marque nettement leur différence : ce n'est évidemment pas la même chose de tenter de sauver la langue allemande d'elle-même, de jeter pour cela, contre toute espérance, une passerelle au-dessus de l'abîme qu'Adormo a pensé infranchissable et de poursuivre un combat, fût-il déclaré perdu d'avance par ses vainqueurs auto-proclamés, dans la langue de l'ennemi s'il le faut.

La conscience si aiguë chez ces deux poètes de leur rapport  conflictuel à la langue n'est pas de même nature  -- pour Celan l'allemand ne fut jamais réduit à la "langue de l'ennemi" -- et détermine des orientations différentes vis-à-vis de l'Histoire, tournée vers l'avenir et le combat chez Henson, tournée vers le passé chez Celan (*), comme l'ange de Benjamin, brutalement balayé vers l'avenir par le vent du progrès, der Wind, der dich fortstösst, sans pouvoir résister, témoin impuissant de cette accumulation de ruines qu'est l'Histoire, ballt um das Wort sich der Schnee.






(*) il faudrait nuancer cela : Celan n'a pas été indifférent à son présent, même dans sa poésie ; en témoigne, entre autres, l'implacable réquisitoire qu'est "In memoriam Paul Eluard".


dimanche 17 octobre 2010

Mit wechselndem Schlüssel -- Paul Celan


Mit wechselndem Schlüssel
schliesst du das Haus auf, darin
der Schnee des Verschwiegenen treibt.
Je nach dem Blut, das dir quillt
aus Aug oder Mund oder Ohr,
wechselt dein Schlüssel.

Wechselt dein Schlüssel, wechselt das Wort,
das treiben darf mit den Flocken.
Je nach dem Wind, der dich fortstösst,
ballt um das Wort sich der Schnee.

(in Von Schwelle zu Schwelle)




With a changing key

With a changing key
you unlock the house where
the snow of what's silenced drifts.
Just like the blood that bursts from
your eye or mouth or ear,
so your key changes.

Changing your key changes the word
that may drift with the flakes.
Just like the wind that rebuffs you,
packed round your word is the snow.

(in John Felstiner,
Selected Poems and Prose of Paul Celan
 (Norton))




D'une clé qui change

D'une clé qui change
tu ouvres la maison où
tournoie la neige des choses tues.
Au gré du sang qui sourd
de ton oreille ou ton œil ou ta bouche,
ta clé change.

Ta clé change, le mot change,
qui peut partager la course des flocons.
Au gré du vent qui te repousse,
la neige se roule autour du mot.

(in De seuil en seuil,
Bourgois (bilingue), 
traduit par Valérie Briet)




Dans son livre, John Felstiner traduit Celan avec une attention extrême qui n'est pas exempte de risques assumés et son travail d'universitaire lui donne souvent l'occasion de commenter ses choix, une occasion qui n'est que trop rarement accordée à d'autres traducteurs. Ci-dessous, il justifie son choix pour le dernier vers (au passage, son "Changing your key changes the word" pour "Wechselt dein Schlüssel, wechselt das Wort" mériterait aussi un commentaire ...) :

With a Changing Key (1953)

Everything Paul Celan ever wrote was an arte poetica, a proving of poetry after "that which happened," as he called what we call Holocaust or Shoah. Yet some poems come closer to the bone than others. In this one he's musing to himself, testing the reflex of words to pain. In 1969 Celan spoke his poem aloud to a Jerusalem audience anxious to know what had become of a survivor who remained in Europe writing in German rather-than emigrate to Israel and Hebrew. On a rare recording, he can be heard to stumble on the next-to-last line-something unheard of for one who enunciated so exactingly.

Je nach dem Wind, der dich fortosst,

ballt um das Wort sich der Schnee.

just like the wind that rebuffs you,

the snow packs around the word.

For some unknowable reason he balks after Je nach dem Wind (Just like the wind), then speaks the line again. Nevertheless his final line comes out firm and cadenced.

Celan worried about metaphor, and here der Schnee presents hard fact, Ukrainian snow where his parents perished. So the syntax shaping his line, stifling "word" between "packed" and "snow," matters vitally: ballt um das Wort sich der Schnee, he stresses it. For years I said "the snow packs around the word," but now that sounds feeble and faltering to me. Rhythmically we need something like this, "packed round your word is the snow," to shape the poet's plight.


Le texte complet de Translating Paul Celan, ici




Finalement, "s'enroule autour du mot la neige.", cela passe plutôt bien :

Ta clé change, le mot change,
qui peut virevolter avec les flocons.
Poussée par le vent qui te balaye,
s'enroule autour du mot la neige.


 

Translating Paul Celan -- John Felstiner


Une fois dégagé des encombrantes publicités pour jeux en ligne qui nuisent un peu à sa lisibilité, voici le texte de John Felstiner (qui est disponible ici dans sa version "enrichie"):


His poems were "the efforts of someone who goes with his very being to language, stricken by and seeking reality." Paul Celan spoke these words in German to a German audience in 1958, on receiving the literature prize of the Free Hanseatic City of Bremen. And what of that language, his mother tongue though he was not born in Germany but in Czernowitz, Bukovina in 1920, the eastern outpost of the late Austrian empire? His mother tongue, turned overnight into his mother's murderers' tongue in 1941, was literally all he had left after the war: no parents, no possessions; no homeland, no cultural or Jewish ambience. "It, the language," Celan said in 1958 --but since die Sprache is feminine, he might have been saying "She, the language"--"remained, not lost, yes in spite of everything. Yet it had to pass through its own answerlessness, pass through frightful muting, pass through the thousand darknesses of deathbringing speech."

And those darknesses? Judenfrage (the Jewish Question), Rassenschande (racial defilement), Die Juden sind unser Ungluck (The Jews are our misfortune), Kauft nicht bei juden! (Don't buyfrom Jews), Umseidlung (resettlement), Sonderbehandlung (special treatment), Juden raus! (Jews out), Endlosung (Final Solution), judenfrei (Jew-free).

After merely alluding to the "thousand darknesses of deathbringing speech" that Luther's and Goethe's, Holderlin's and Rilke's German passed through, Celan in his next breath says: "In this language I have sought... to write poems: so as to speak, to orient myself, to find out where I was and where I was meant to go, to sketch out reality for myself." The point is, he persisted in a barbarously abused language: "Only in the mother tongue can one speak one's own truth."

So when it comes to the phrases closing Celan's Bremen speech, we listen closely, because they hold the key to his poetry: "someone who goes with his very being to language, stricken by and seeking reality," wirklichkeitswund und Wirklichkeit suchend. Rendered more exactly, Celan's severe parallel would say "reality-wounded and reality-seeking," which drives home a hard paradox: the same reality that wounded him yields a new reality in seeking it. This imperative, exposed through syntax, pervades the eight poems chosen here to represent Paul Celan's twenty-five-year arc of work.

Stricken by and seeking reality: you can grasp that tensile arc in poem after poem speaking from Celan's "true-/ stammered mouth," poems where a wound takes the touch of a word: a "vulture's nail" voiced by "stitchery" in "The Lonely One," "heart's blood" met by "Thou" in the Eluard elegy, "snow" packing "your word" in "With a Changing Key," "rhymes in the night house" in "Where the word," "wasteness" but "still songs to sing" in "Threadsuns," "motley gossip" purged by a "Breath-crystal" in "Etched away," "a shardstrewn craze" allayed by drawing "the one and only circle."

And because Celan's poems deal strongly with loss in the very language that effected loss, any act of translation turns questionable, further alienating the poet's voice from the tongue he could hold fast to. Unless, perhaps, we recognize translation as the specific art of loss and work from there.

The Lonely One (1944)

Composed by a raw orphan back home in Soviet-occupied Czernowitz after nineteen months at forced labor, this was not Celan's earliest lyric to bend nature onto grief. What strikes me are those textiles, art figuring reality: an embroidered veil giving way to coarse cloth. I sense here a Yeatsian motive (Celan as a teenager had tried translating Yeats), and by that same token, Celan's verse demands meter plus rhyme in English. His two dosing lines can find a strong enough cadence, and with a little ingenuity, "veil" gainsaid by "vulture's nail" and then "seam" by "scream" will expose lyric decorum to savagery.

In Memoriam Paul Eluard (1952)

By 1952, self-exiled in Paris, Celan had begun teaching at the Ecole Normale Superieure, seen his first collection appear in Germany, and married Gisele de Lestrange, a graphic artist. About the Paul Eluard elegy, it helps to know that in 1950 a Czech Stalinist tribunal had condemned Zavis Kalandra, a surrealist poet and survivor of Hitler's camps. Andre Breton urged Eluard to intercede, Eluard declined, Kalandra was hanged. Thus Celan, though no longer steeped in surrealism, responded vehemently to the death of a fellow poet who'd once defended liberty and "the power of words."

Penciled into an edition of Gerard Manley Hopkins Noun 1. Gerard Manley Hopkins - English poet (1844-1889)
Hopkins  in Celan's library I found an angry draft, using words such as "gallows" and "guilt" that he later removed from the more tempered final version. Tone, idiom, and the rhythms that carry them seem to me vital in translating his caustic yet understated sentences. Luckily the telling play on "tongues" and "tong" is a set-up, English being cognate with Zungen and Zangen. And occasionally, "Thou" can respond to the familiar second-person singular du. But where German word order differs markedly, English line breaks need extra care to deliver Celan's tentative, chastening lines: "a second,/ stranger blue will enter,/ and the one who said Thou to him/ will dream with him: We."

With a Changing Key (1953)

Everything Paul Celan ever wrote was an arte poetica, a proving of poetry after "that which happened," as he called what we call Holocaust or Shoah. Yet some poems come closer to the bone than others. In this one he's musing to himself, testing the reflex of words to pain. In 1969 Celan spoke his poem aloud to a Jerusalem audience anxious to know what had become of a survivor who remained in Europe writing in German rather-than emigrate to Israel and Hebrew. On a rare recording, he can be heard to stumble on the next-to-last line-something unheard of for one who enunciated so exactingly.

Je nach dem Wind, der dich fortosst,

ballt um das Wort sich der Schnee.

just like the wind that rebuffs you,

the snow packs around the word.

For some unknowable reason he balks after Je nach dem Wind (Just like the wind), then speaks the line again. Nevertheless his final line comes out firm and cadenced.

Celan worried about metaphor, and here der Schnee presents hard fact, Ukrainian snow where his parents perished. So the syntax shaping his line, stifling "word" between "packed" and "snow," matters vitally: ballt um das Wort sich der Schnee, he stresses it. For years I said "the snow packs around the word," but now that sounds feeble and faltering to me. Rhythmically we need something like this, "packed round your word is the snow," to shape the poet's plight.

Where the word (1962)

In 1960 Claire Goll, widow of the Alsatian Jewish poet Yvan Goll, groundlessly charged Celan with plagiarizing her husband, whom he'd befriended and translated in 1949. Plagiarism--an intolerable accusation for "someone who goes with his very being to language," someone whose word, unlocking what's silenced, felt like bloodburst. Added to this, German anti-Semitism in the early 1960s agonized Celan. In 1962 he felt "abolished by neo-Nazi 'human beings,'" and wrote to an old friend calling himself "the one who doesn't exist," like Heinrich Heine whose Lorelei the Nazis decreed anonymous. On August 15th he composed "Where the word," then a few weeks later wrote another friend about "very unsettling things--and that's only a euphemism," and about "unbearable psychological pressure": "The thing I should have been able to do was hang it all up; but you know what it means for a German-language author who has lived through the Nazi terror to be cut off a second time from his language."

If das Wort really was unsterblich--immortal, imperishable, undying--then Celan's anguish must press on the words themselves in "Where the word." He even tests this by minting a term, Siebenstern, seven-star flower, suggesting that maybe he intends the Pleiades, or better, their lost seventh star. But knowing how a seven-branched candelabrum candelabrum or menorah appears in his poetry, and having seen two that he bought on the Seine in the 1950s, I venture to say that a "seven-branch star," akin to the Star of David, lives with him.

Lives, that is, amid spittle and dreck  and muck. Meanwhile a surer venture has turned up. Although Celan doesn't use the German term Dreck, Yiddish dreck has migrated into the American grain if not into the OED. It is good, now and then, to harbor such stowaways in translation. As for "muck," Celan's Kot (dirt, mud, mire) can also mean "excrement," so this poem's French version cannily uses merde.

Against degradation, against being "cut off a second time from his language," the poet ends up declaring, ein aufrechtes Schweigen. Calling this un silence loyal, Celan's French translator goes just a bit figurative, missing the chance that En glish has for abracing cognate: "an upright silence."

Threadsuns (1963)

For nine months in 1963, suffering what he called a "rather severe depression," Celan seen-is to have written perhaps one poem, "Tabernacle Window," which fore- fronts Menschen-und-Juden, "humans-and-Jews,/the Cloud Crowd." Then four days after' his birthday in November he wrote "Fadensonnen" and another poem that opens bluntly:

WITH THE PERSECUTED in late, unsilenced, radiant covenant.

Even there, in draft he added "un-" to what had been "silenced" covenant. The gaping question was allegiance, solidarity--with whom? Mostly with people who could grasp or share his predicament: the poet Ingeborg Bachmann in Vienna in 1948; in Paris in 1949 the Dutch music student Diet Kloos, who'd worked in the Resistance and whose husband the Nazis shot. To a German-Jewish acquaintance Celan once spoke of our common "threads to the past: invisible threads leading into the depth... where bits of them appear in words."

"Threadsuns" draws strength as well from his wife Gisele's haunting etchings, alongside which it first appeared in a bibliophile edition, Atemkristall (Breathcrystal, 1965). White and gray and black filaments, fragments, enigmatic forms and vectors mark her work from 1963, much like Celan's image of tenuous light hovering over the face of the deep as at Creation. In fact the poem felt so essential that he entitled his next collection Fadensonnen. This also illumines a presence behind Celan's "tree-high, thought," for mike begins the elegiac Sonnets to Orpheus  "Oh Orpheus sings! Oh high tree in the ear!" Clearly what binds Celan to Rilke and later poets to them both is how radically they sound their own craft. "Your question-- your answer," Celan writes shortly after "Threadsuns": "Your song, what does it know?" -- a cry that resonates with the Psalm of exile, "How shall we sing the Lord's song in a strange land?"

Most translators of "Fadensonnen" more or less agree until the last word. Yes, possibly "there are still songs to sing," but what is the drift of jenseits der Menschen? Even without knowing that, we keep coming back to Menschen. Translators invariably make it "mankind," but not only gender makes me try for more. Celan habitually gave Mensch the sense that Yiddish does: a decent person, someone with grit, a real human being. Are these Menschen?, he asked Nelly Sachs about the German literature industry in 1960. "These men, they even write poems!"

Beyond that, he knew that in Nazi camps Jews were not Menschen but "dogs," "vermm." Whence his phrase Menschen-und-Juden, also' from 1963. So "mankind" sounds too pat, not vulnerable enough. In Europe, the 'more Jewish, the more' vulnerable, the more vulnerable the more human. I would say "humankind," which after all has a livelier cadence-as ever in writing, expedient jibes with essential.

Etched away (1963).

Two days before writing "Etched away," in the aftermath of depression, Celan tendered a quatrain to his wife Gisele with this question: "Where flames word to witness for us both?" He would hit on that talismanic word, Atemkristall, in a late draft of this multilayered poem:

Psychic affliction, conjugal solidarity, engraving, geology, Kristallnacht, Heidegger, puns, compounds, coinages, revisions: in extending just a little this poem's half-life, the process of translation at it's fullest would take in all these elements, while pursuing a face-to-face, moment-by-moment, to-and-fro German-English colloquy. For instance, Celan's very first word Weggebeizt (etched away) already poses problems. The verb beizen, close to our "bite," means to "mordant" or corrode as in etching. But this is done by a Strahlenwind (radiant wind), which calls up geologic or even cosmic erosion. And what is mordanted anyway? Gerede (gossip), Heidegger's term for blab cut off from true Being. Possibly Giseles caustic art is helping cure her husband's language.

As if to prove as much, Celan commits a double double-meaning: Mein-/ gedicht, das Gneicht (My-/ poem, the Lie-noem). Mein means "my" and Geditcht, "poem"--but Mein can also negate, as in Meineid (Eid = "oath"), meaning "perjury." Then in das Genicht, nicht (not) turns "poem" into what my colleague Jerry Glenn calls "Lie-noem." Puns often have a desperate quality about them. Celan once wrote down the word Sch(m)erz, making Scherz (joke) contain Schmerz (pain). Behind the somewhat hectic wordplay in "Etched away" lies his bitterness at Germany's "economic miracle" during the Adenauer years. "Something is rotten in the state of D-Mark," he quipped.

The poem's middle section breaks into cleansing terrain, stressing "human-/ shaped snow," through scientific terminology: spike-ice resembling a penitent's cowl, and glacial tectonics. This kind of clean usage purged. Celan's German of the thousand darknesses, pressing a Nordic tongue "north of the future," as he put it in 1963. Finally, discovering the technical name of something hard yet life-giving. "honeycomb-ice," he goes on to forge his own compound, again hard yet life-giving: Atemkristall, and here I borrow from regular German orthography to irregularly capitalize this astonishing "Breathcrystal." Taking the breath that inspirt is Adam, plus human inspiration, utterance, and sudden breathtaking revelation, Celan binds it all to crystal's purity over against Hitler's Kristallnacht, the 1938 "Night of Broken Glass" when Jewish shops and synagogues were destroyed.

Atemkristall, that "word to witness for us both," so answered a need that with it Celan titled the joint edition of his poems and Giseles art. "Atemkristall opened the paths of poetry for me," he told her, "it was born from your etchings." The rhythmic heft this word receives, toward the close of "Etched away," seems a gift if we let German syntax shape the English:

Tief

in der Zeitenschrunde,

beim

Wabeneis

wartet, ein Atemkristall,

dein unumstossliches

Zeugnis.

Deep

in the time crevasse crevasse,

by

honeycomb-ice

there waits, a Breathcrystal,

your unannullable

Witness.

In draft Celan first tried "your true [wahres] witness," but then changed wahres to unumstossliches, five obstinate syllables balanced by "unannullable."

Several years later, for a thousand listeners at Freiburg in 1967, Celan closed his recital with this poem, with Martin Heidegger sitting in the front row. Germany has long styled itself the nation of Dichter und Denker, poets and philosophers. Somehow it girds the heart to imagine that thinker, who paid Nazi party dues until 1945, hearing this destitute poet reclaim for himself "a Breathcrystal,/ your unannullable/ witness."

Where? (1964)

Although a kind of hope-struck radiance lightens Celan's lines at times - "THE BRIGHT/ STONES ride through the air, bright/ white, the light- / bringers" -- yet a terrible cost grounded his writing. This agelong paradox colors the translator (-biographer)'s task, the setting of pain-ridden intensity to rich music. "Crumbling...trouble...rubble...tumult": whether this goes too far is really a question of tact and ear. The same holds for Celan's last Phrasings in "Where," a tightdrawn bow on the page:

Water needles

stitch up the split

shadow--it fights its way

deeper down,

free.

All that assonance and alliteration, though not perfectly obvious, come to hand fairly readily. And isn't there some point to it, here where Celan has dared a presentiment of his suicidal drowning in April 1970?

There will (1969)

In the summer of 1948, having just reached Paris, Celan wrote to relatives in the new state of Israel then fighting for its existence: Should his family have emigrated to Palestine before the war, or he himself after? It could hang on the question of language. "There's nothing in the world for which a poet will give up writing, not, even when he is a Jew and the language of his poems is German," he wrote them. "Perhaps I am one of the last who must live out to the end the destiny of the Jewish spirit in Europe." But why "must"? Why "to the end"? Portentous words for a young man.

For two decades Celan did not journey to Israel, though the Six-Day War acutely stirred him. At last in September 1969 he visited the Promised Land: its green growth and regained language elated him, he circled the walls of Jerusalem, gave two readings, and had a fraught, passionate encounter with a friend from his Czernowitz youth. He might have stayed for good, but could not--too much promise, perhaps. Back in "this cold city Paris," a spate of brief "Jerusalem" lyrics emerged, among them "THERE WILL be something, later" (ES WIRD etwas sein, spater).

That perennial word "later" signals messianic deferral, redemption ever to be fulfilled. Once for our 25th anniversary, to promise better times, I translated this lyric and made spater "soon now" rather than "later": same syllables and accents, but a lift, a not-quite-permissible spur. What has felt permissible, given this poem's tense shift from future to present, its messianic timing, is an English version uttering just as many syllables per line as Celan did.

Aus dem zerscherbten

Wahn

steh ich auf

und seh meiner Hand zu,

wie sie den einen

einzigen

Kreis zieht

Out of a shardstrewn

craze

I stand up

and look upon my hand,

how it draws the one

and only

circle

Shortly before the Six-Day War broke out, Celan had written a poem coining Notscherben, "Trouble-shard," Scherben being Gershom Scholem's term in Kabbalah for the fragments of Creation's shattered vessel, to be mended in the fullness of time. Now in 1969 Celan speaks of madness, of rising from a zerscherbten Wahn, the tocsin word of his last decade. "Out of a shardstrewn/ craze": maybe this will do, as the poet's hand moves back round where it must, meridian-wise, regaining an origin atrociously lost.

BIBLIOGRAPHY:

Paul Celan "Der Einsame," "Fadensonnen," "Weggebeizt," "Wo?," Es wird," from Das Fruhwerk (1989), Atemwende (1967), Zeitgehoft (1976), (Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main). "In Memoriam Paul Eluard," "Mit Wechseldem Schlussel," from Von Schwelle zu Schwelle (1955), (Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, Stuttgart). "Wohin mir," from Die Niemandsrose (1963), (S. Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt am Main).

JOHN FELSTINER'S Selected Poems and Prose of Paul Celan (W. W. Norton) is coming out this fall. He teaches in the English department at Stanford.



Quelques références supplémentaires autour du travail de John Felstiner :

http://www.anti-rev.org/textes/poemes/Felstiner-PAUL%20CELAN.htm
http://www.celan-projekt.de/materialien-felstiner.html
http://www.kcrw.com/etc/programs/bw/bw010628john_felstiner_trans
http://www.kcrw.com/etc/programs/bw/bw010628john_felstiner_trans/excerpt/
 

jeudi 14 octobre 2010

Raptus -- Joanna Klink


Raptus (Penguin, 2010) est le journal intime d'une renaissance ; introspection d'une extrême finesse, les mots justes pour dire sans ostentation aucune l'irréparable de la rupture, un recueil incroyablement lumineux dans ses derniers poèmes. La référence à Rilke ne paraîtra écrasante qu'à ceux qui ne l'ont pas lu.


Lest we think

the world has hardened we do not       harden
Sleepwalker       suppose    there are other loves

velvet-wet    night on the tarmac
I will always adore you      So long



De peur de réaliser que

le monde est devenu plus dur     nous ne nous endurcissons pas
Somnambule     suppose     qu'il est d'autres amours

moiteur de velours    nuit sur le tarmac
je t'adorerai toujours    Adieu




Un poème plus ancien, de 2005, trouvé ici

Into the kitchen a light
rays down quiet. A private
sense of absence in my everyday
patterns—of disservice, breath,
or words pulled into my ribs
prying apart my errors from
the hopes that made them
and outside the window coated
in soot from winds that come
all winter, some process has
ceased although birds
drop and lift off the roof,
aerial sweeps, or just bursts of
feather, wings, claws, and the leap
of heart I would have,
should I be so brightly altered
with the chances of life,
a reparation I feel gathering
in my lungs, zero in the pitch,
scarlet wing, most unnatural
sound held in the dim
threshold of my throat
or am I less than I was
and fear I can't distinguish
the delicate blue current inside
the light from the pain in my voice
or the early morning fog laid over
the grass from the voice
that underlies everything


mercredi 13 octobre 2010

In Egypt Land -- John Beecher (1904-1980)

 
I.
It was Alabama, 1932
but the spring came
same as it always had.
A man just couldn't help believing
This would be a good year for him
When he saw redbud and dogwood everywhere in bloom
And the peach tree blossoming
All by itself
Up against the gray boards of the cabin.
A man had to believe
So Cliff James hitched up his pair of old mules
And went out and plowed up the old land
The other man's land but he plowed it
And when it was plowed it looked new again
The cotton and corn stalks turned under
The red clay shining with wet
Under the sun.
Years ago
He thought he bought this land
Borrowed the money to pay for it
From the furnish merchant in Nostasulga
Big white man named Mr. Parker
But betwixt the interest and the bad times coming
Mr. Parker had got the land back
And nigh on to $500 more owing to him
For interest seed fertilizer and rations
With a mortgage on all the stock—
The two cows and their calves
The heifer and the pair of old mules—
Mr. Parker could come drive them off the place any day
If he took a notion
And the law would back him.
Mighty few sharecroppers
Black folks or white
Ever got themselves stock like Cliff had
They didn't have any cows
They plowed with the landlord's mule and tools
They didn't have a thing.
Took a heap of doing without
To get your own stock and your own tools
But he'd done it
And still that hadn't made him satisfied.
The land he plowed
He wanted to be his.
Now all come of wanting his own land
He was back to where he started.
Any day
Mr Parker could run him off
Drive away the mules the cows the heifer and the calves
To sell in town
Take the wagon the plow tools the store-bought furniture and the shotgun on the debt.
No
That was one thing Mr Parker never would get a hold of
Not that shotgun....
Remembering that night last year
Remembering the meeting
In the church he and his neighbors always went to
Deep in the woods
And when the folks weren't singing or praying or
Clapping and stomping
You could hear the branch splashing over rocks
Right out behind.
That meeting night
The preacher prayer a prayer
For all the sharecroppers
White and black
Asking the good Lord Jesus
To look down
And see how they were suffering.
"Five cent cotton Lord
and no way Lord for a man to come out.
Fifty cents a day Lord for working in the field
Just four bits Lord for a good strong hand
From dawn to dark Lord from can till can't
Ain't no way Lord a man can come out.
They's got to be a way Lord show us the way..."
And then they sang.
"Go down Moses" was the song they sang
"Go down Moses, way down in Egypt land
Tell old Pharaoh to let me people go"
And when they had sung the song
The preacher go up and he said
"Brothers and sisters
we got with us tonight
a colored lady teaches school in Birmingham
going to tell us about the Union
what's got room for colored folks and white
what's got room for all the folks
that ain't got no land
that ain't got no stock
that ain't got something to eat half the year
that ain't got no shoes
that raises all the cotton
but can't get none to wear
'cept old patchedy overhauls and floursack dresses.
Brothers and sisters
Listen to this colored lady from Birmingham
Who the Lord done sent I do believe
To show us the way..."
Then the colored lady from Birmingahm
Got up and told them.
She told them how she was raised on a farm herself
A sharecrop farm near Demopolis
And walked six miles to a one-room school
And six miles back every day
Till her people moved to Birmingham
Where there was a high school for the colored
And she went to it.
Then she worked in white folks’ houses
And saved what she made
To go to college.
She went to Tuskegee
And when she finished
Got a job teaching school in Birmingham
But she could never forget
The people she was raised with
The sharecrop farmers
And how they had to live.
No
All the time she was teaching school
She thought about them
And what she could do for them
And what they could do for themselves.
Then one day
Somebody told her about the Union…
If everybody joined the Union she said
A good strong hand would get what he was worth
A dollar (Amen sister)
Instead of fifty cents a day.
At settling time the cropper could take his cotton to the gin
And get his own fair half and the cotton seed
Instead of the landlord hauling it off and cheating on the weight.
“All you made was four bales Jim” when it was really six
(Ain’t it God’s truth?)
and the Union would get everybody the right to have a garden spot
not just cotton crowded up to the house
and the Union would see the children got a schoolbus
like the white children rode in every day
and didn’t have to walk twelve miles.
That was the thing
The children getting to school
(Amen)
the children learning something besides chop cotton and pick it
(Yes)
the children learning how to read and write
(Amen)
the children knowing how to figure
so the landlord wouldn’t be the only one
could keep accounts
(Preach the Word sister).
Then the door banging open against the wall
And the  Laws in their lace boots
The High Sheriff himself
With his deputies behind him.
Folks scrambling to get away
Out the windows and door
And the Laws’ fists going clunk clunk clunk
On all the men’s and women’s faces they could reach
And when everybody was out and running
The pistols going off behind them.
Next meeting night
The men that had them brought shotguns to church
And the High Sherriff got a charge of birdshot in his body
When Ralph Gray with just his single barrel
Stopped a car full of Laws
On the road to the church
And shot it out with 44’s.
Ralph Gray died
But the people in the church
All got away alive.

II.
The crop was laid by.
From now till picking time
Only the hot sun worked
Ripening the bolls
And men rested after the plowing and plowing
Women rested
Little boys rested
And little girls rested
After the chopping and chopping with their hoes.
Now the cotton was big.
Now the cotton could take care of itself from the weds
While the August sun worked
Ripening the bolls.
Cliff James couldn’t remember ever making a better crop
On that old red land
He’d seen so much of
Wash down the gullies toward the Tallapoosa
Since he’d first put a plow to it.
Never a better crop
But it had taken the fertilize
And it had taken work
Fighting the weeds
Fighting the weevils…
Ten bales it looked like it would make
Ten good bales when it was picked
A thousand dollars worth of cotton once
Enough to pay out on seed and fertilize and furnish for the season
And the interest and something down
On the land
New shoes
For the family to go to church in
Work shirts and overalls for the man and boys
A bolt of calico for the woman and girls
And a little cash money for Christmas.
Now though
Ten bales of cotton
Didn’t bring what three used to.
Two hundred and fifty dollars was about what his share of this year’s crop would bring
At five cents a pound
Not even enough to pay out on seed and fertilize and furnish for the season
Let alone interest on the land Mr Parker was asking for
And $80 more on the back debt owing to him.
Mr Parker had cut his groceries off at the commissary last month
And there had been empty bellies in Cliff James’ house
With just cornbread buttermilk and greens to eat.
If he killed a calf to feed his family
Mr Parker could send him to the chain-gang
For slaughtering mortgaged stock.
Come settling time this fall
Mr Parker was going to get every last thing
Every dime of the cotton money
The corn
The mules
The cattle
And the law would back him.
Cliff James wondered
Why he had plowed the land in the spring
Why he had worked and worked his crop
His wife and children alongside him in the field
And now pretty soon
They would all be going out again
Dragging their long sacks
Bending double in the hot sun
Picking Mr Parker’s cotton for him.
Sitting on the stoop of his cabin
With his legs hanging over the rotten board edges
Cliff James looked across his fields of thick green cotton
To the woods beyond
And a thunderhead piled high in the south
Piled soft and white like cotton on the stoop
Like a big day’s pick
Waiting for the wagon
To come haul it to the gin.
On the other side of those woods
Was John McMullen’s place
And over yonder just east of the woods
Ned Cobb’s and beyond the rise of ground
Milo Bentley lived that was the only new man
To mover into the Reeltown section that season.
Milo just drifted in from Detroit
Because his work gave out up there
And a man had to feed his family
So he came back to the farm
Thinking things were like they used to be
But he was finding out different.
Yes
Everybody was finding out different
Cliff and John and Ned and Milo and Judson Simpson across the Creek
Even white croppers like Mr. Sam and his brother Mr Bill
They were finding out.
It wasn’t many years ago that Mr Sam’s children
Would chunk at Cliff James’ children
On their way home from school
And split little Cliff’s head open with a rock once
Because his daddy was getting too uppity
Buying himself a farm.
Last time they had a Union meeting though at Milo Bentley’s place
Who should show up but Mr Sam and Mr Bill
And asked was it only for colored
Or could white folks join
Because something just had to be done.
When Cliff told them
It was for all the poor farmers
That wanted to stick together
They paid their nickel to sign up
And their two cents each for the first month’s dues
And they said they would try to get
More white folks in
Because white men and black
Were getting beat with the same stick these days.
Things looked worse than they ever had in all his time of life
Cliff James thought
But they looked better too
They looked better than they ever had in all his time of life
When a sharecropper like Ralph Gray
Not drunk but cold sober
Would stand off the High Sheriff with birdshot
And get himself plugged with 44’s
Just so the others at the meeting could get away
And after that the mod hunting for who started the Union
Beating men and women up with pistol butts and bull whips
Throwing them in jail and beating them up more
But not stopping it
The Union going on
More people signing up
More and more every week
Meeting in houses on the quiet
Nobody giving it away
And now white folks coming in too.

III.
“You”
Cliff James said
“nor the High Sheriff
nor all his deputies
is gonna git them mules.”
The head deputy put the writ of attachment back in his inside pocket
Then his hand went to the butt of his pistol
But he didn’t pull it.
“I’m going to get the High Sheriff and help”
he said
“and come back and kill you all in a pile.”
Cliff James and Ned Cobb watched the deputy whirl the car around
And speed down the rough mud road.
He took the turn skidding
And was gone.
“He’ll be back in an hour” cliff James said
“if’n he don’t wreck hisseff.”
“Where you fixin’ to go?” Ned Cobb asked him.
“I’s fixin’ to stay right where I is.”
“I’ll go git the others then.”
“No need of eve’ybody gittin’ kilt” Clif James said.
“Better gittin’ kilt quick
than perishin’ slow like we been a’doin’” and Ned Cobb was gone
cutting across the wet red field full of dead cotton plants
and then he was in the woods
bare now except for the few green pines
and though Cliff couldn’t see him
he could see him in his mind
calling out John McMullen and telling him about it
then cutting off east to Milo Bentley’s
crossing the creek on the foot-log to Judson Simpson’s…
Cliff couldn’t see him
Going to Mr Sam or Mr Bill about it
No
This was something you couldn’t expect white folks to get in on
Even white folks in your Union.
There came John McMullen out of the woods
Toting that old musket of his.
He said it went back to Civil War days
And it looked it
But John could really knock a squirrel off a limb
Or get a running rabbit with it.
“Here I is” John said
and “what you doin’ ‘bout you folks?”
“What folks?”
“The ones belon’ to you.
You childrens and wife.”
“I disremembered ‘em” Cliff James said.
“I done disremembered all about my children and my wife.”
“They can’t stay with mine” John said.
“we ain’t gonna want no womenfolks nor childrens
not here we ain’t.”
Cliff James watched his family going across the field
The five backs going away from him
In the wet red clay among the dead cotton plants
And soon they would be in the woods
His wife
Young Cliff
The two girls
And the small boy…
They would just have to get along
Best way they could
Because a man had to do
What he had to do
And if he kept thinking about the folks belonging to him
He couldn’t do it
And then he wouldn’t be any good to them
Or himself either.
There they went into the woods
The folks belonging to him gone
Gone for good
And they not knowing it
But he knowing it
Yes God
He knowing it well.
When the head deputy got back
With three more deputies for help
But not the High Sheriff
There were forty men in Cliff James’ cabin
All armed.
The head deputy and the others got out of the car
And started up the slope toward the cabin.
Behind the dark windows
The men didn’t know were there
Sighted their guns.
Then the deputies stopped.
“You Cliff James!” the head deputy shouted
“come on out
we want to talk with you.”
No answer from inside.
“Come out Cliff
we got something we want to talk over.”
Maybe they really did have something to talk over
Cliff James thought
Maybe all those men inside
Wouldn’t have to die for him or he for them…
“I’s goin’s out” he said.
“No you ain’t” Ned Cobb said.
“Yes I is” Cliff James said
and leaning his shotgun against the wall
he opened the door just a wide enough crack
for himself to get through
but Ned Cobb crowded in behind him
and came out too
without his gun
and shut the door.
Together they walked toward the Laws.
When they were halfway Cliff James stopped
And Ned stopped with him
And Cliff called out to the laws
“I’s ready to listen white folks.”
“This is what we got to say nigger!”
and the head deputy whipped out his pistol.
The first shot got Ned
And the next two got Cliff in the back
As he was dragging Ned to the cabin.
When they were in the shooting started from inside
Everybody crowding up to the windows
With their old shotguns and muskets
Not minding the pistol bullets from the Laws.
Of a sudden John McMullen
Broke out of the door
Meaning to make a run for his house
And tell his and Cliff James’ folks
To get a long way away
But a bullet got him in the head
And he fell on his face
Among the dead cotton plants
And his life’s blood soaked into the old red land.
The room was full of powder smoke and men groaning
That had not caught pistol bullets
But not Cliff James.
He lay in the corner quiet
Feeling the blood run down his backs and legs
But when somebody shouted
“The Laws is runnin’ away!”
he got to his feet and went to the door and opened it.
Sure enough three of the Laws
Were helping the fourth one into the car
But it wasn’t the head deputy.
There by the door-post was John McMullen’s old musket
Where he’d left it when he ran out and got killed.
Cliff picked it up and saw it was still loaded.
He raised it and steadied it against the door-post
Aiming at where the head deputy would be sitting
To drive the car.
Cliff only wished
He could shoot that thing like John McMullen…

IV.
He didn’t know there was such a place in all Alabama
Just for colored.
They put him in a room to himself
With a white bed and white sheets
And the black nurse put a white gown on his black body
After she washed off the dried black blood.
Then the black doctor came
And looked at the pistol bullet holes in his back
And put white bandages on
And stuck a long needle in his arm
And went away.
How long was it
He stayed and shot it out with the Laws?
Seemed like a long time
But come to think of it
He hid out in Mr Sam’s corn crib
Till the sun went down that evening
Then walked and walked all the night-time
And when it started to get light he saw a cabin
With smoke coming out the chimney
But the woman wouldn’t let him in to get warm
So he went on in the woods and lay down
Under an old gum tree and covered himself with leaves
And when he woke up it was nearly night-time again
And there were six buzzards perched in the old gum tree
Watching him…
Then he got up and shooed the buzzards away
And walked all the second night-time
And just as it was getting light
He was here
And this was Tuskegee
Where the Laws couldn’t find him
But John McMullen was dead in the cotton field
And the buzzards would be at him by now
If nodoby hadn’t buried him
And who would there be to bury him
With everybody shot or run away hiding?
In a couple of days it was going to be Christmas
Yes Christmas
And nobody belonging to Cliff James
Was going to get a thing
Not so much as an orange or a candy stick
For the littlest boy.
What kind of Christmas was that
When a man didn’t even have a few nickels
To get his children some oranges and candy sticks
What kind of Christmas and what kind of country anyway
When you made ten bales of cotton
Five thousand pounds of cotton
With your own hands
And you wife’s hands
And all your children’s hands
And then the Laws came to take your mules away
And drive your cows to sell in town
And your calves
And your heifer
And you couldn’t even get commissary credit
For coffee molasses and sow-belly
And nobody in your house had shoes to wear
Or any kind of fitting Sunday clothes
And no Christmas for nobody…
“Go down Moses” was the song they sang
and when they finished singing
it was so quiet in the church
you could hear the branch splashing over the rocks
right out behind.
Then the preacher go up and he preached…
“And there was a man what fought to save us all
he wrapped an old quilt around him
because it was wintertime and he had two pistol bullets in his back
and he went out of his house
and he started walking across the country to Tuskegee.
He got mighty cold
And his bare feet pained him
And his back like to killed him
And he thought
Here is a cabin with smoke coming out the chimney
And they will let me in to the fire
Because they are just poor folks like me
And when I got warm
I will be on my way to Tuskegee
But the woman was afeared
And barred the door against him
And he went and piled leaves over him in the woods
Waiting for the night-time
And six buzzards settled in an old gum tree
Watching did he still breathe…”

The Sheriff removed Cliff James from the hospital to the county
Jail on December 22. A mob gathered to lynch the prisoner on
Christmas day. For protection he was taken to jail in Montgomery.
Here Cliff James died on the stone floor of his cell, December 27, 1932.






Sociologue, John Beecher étudia en 1934 le mouvement des "sharecroppers union", sur le terrain,  en Alabama ; de ce qu'il observa, il tira la matière d'articles savants mais aussi une série de poèmes qui sont parmi les plus fameux de la littérature américaine.

Quelque part entre Faulkner et Dennis Brutus, si cela peut avoir un sens ... Pous se faire une idée plus précise, quatre autres poèmes de John Beecher, dont To live and die in Dixie, ici.
Je ne connais pas de traduction française de John Beecher, tout comme je n'en connais pas de All God's dangers (et ici), la monumentale biographie de Ned Cobb (alias Nate Shaw dans le livre) dont l'auteur, Theodore Rosengarten suivit la trace de John Beecher, trente-cinq ans plus tard. Pas vendeur, coco ...