Pour rassembler les continents From 'To bring together the continents'

Pour rassembler les continents

Le poème est un cheval fou. Il abat les cloisons, franchit l’horizon dépaysé, contraint le chemin à être dans les yeux ébahis du promeneur. Je marche, je marche dans mon regard d’où naissent et renaissent les matins.
 
Poésie de l’évidence pour simplement dire les mots dans lesquels dorment les rêves, des mots vagabonds, des mots soleil, pain, étoile, oiseau, jardin. Le pari: être de plain-pied dans la tendresse du monde.
 
Aussi l’exil : lieu de passage et d’éternité, comme on ouvre une fenêtre sur l’océan pour voir le ciel, parcourir le monde, inventer les printemps ordinaires, être toujours debout, les pieds dans les songes, pour marcher, car la route lave la mémoire.
 
Revenir au pays natal, au pays rêvé où j’ai rendez- vous avec mes ombres dans les rues ensoleillées, puis repartir avec provision de fantômes, dans la confusion de tout sentiment géographique, ni sens ni certitude, ni ici ni ailleurs. Je me mets à ruminer mille vies comme la mienne, mille destins, mille amours, autant de poèmes et de chansons pour garder à vie le cœur et la lumière de l’enfance.
 
Je marche. Je marche. Le poème est un cheval fou, se rappeler, la barque est la route. L’horizon est dans le regard du promeneur.
 
Découvrir une chose douce et amère : des îles, il faut se résigner à foutre la mer dehors afin de pouvoir marcher librement pour célébrer la terre, dans le récitatif qui offre aux mots et aux choses le contrepoint du chant : éloge et mystère. Surtout l’élégance.
 
L’élégance sauve le poème comme le soleil l’été.
 

From 'To bring together the continents'

The poem is a crazy horse. It tramples through barriers, jumps over the stateless horizon, the path compelled to exist in the traveller’s wide eyes. I walk and I walk in my gaze where mornings are born and reborn.
 
A poetry of witness speaks the words in which dreams sleep, vagabond words, words like sun, bread, star, bird, garden. The Game: to be on the same footing as the world’s tenderness. […]
 

To bring the continents together

The poem is a crazy horse. It breaks down all barriers, leaping over the disoriented horizon, forcing the road to exist within the astonished wayfarer's eyes. I walk and I walk within that gaze where mornings are born and reborn.
 
A poetry of facts merely to mouth the words where dreams slumber, vagabond words, words like sun, bread, star, bird, garden. The gamble: to remain grounded in the world's tenderness.
 
Exile, too: a transitory, eternal place, like opening a window that looks out onto the ocean to glimpse the sky, roam around the world, invent an ordinary spring, remain always standing, feet planted in dreams, to walk, because the road cleanses memory.
 
To return to my native country, to the longed-for land where I have rendezvous with my shadows in the sun-bathed streets, then to leave, having stocked up on ghosts, beset by geographical confusion, no sense or certainty, neither here nor elsewhere. I begin to ponder a thousand lives just like mine, a thousand destinies, a thousand loves, so many songs and poems to keep the light and heart of childhood alive.
 
I walk. I walk. Remember that the poem is a crazy horse and the boat is the road. The horizon lies within the wayfarer's gaze.
 
To discover something sweet and bitter: islands, one has to resign oneself to not giving a damn about the sea in order to walk freely and celebrate the land, all within the recitative that offers the counterpoint of song to words and things: accolades and mystery. Above all, elegance.
 
Elegances saves the poem like the sun rescues the summer.
 

Saint-Éloi is a Haitian-Canadian poet and publisher. His politics are anarchist and cosmopolitan. For him, borders are colonial: this comes through clearly in this dense prose poem, arguably his ars poetica, which engages with Éduoard Glissant’s relational poetics and Aimé Césaire’s seminal work Cahier d’un retour au pays Natal or Notebook of a Return to My Native Land.

The ‘crazy horse’ at the poem’s outset references Lakota leader Crazy Horse, who fought against encroaching European settlers in nineteenth century America. The poem, then, is anti-colonial and anti-establishment; its path is made not with maps but with its eyes, and it can’t be restrained.

As always, we only had time to work on two paragraphs of seven, but this week’s discussions felt particularly fruitful: we reached for ‘horsey’ words like ‘trample’ and ‘jump’, rearranged phrases that over-complicated the English (‘merely to mouth’ became ‘speaks’, ‘the astonished wayfarer’s eyes’ became ‘the traveller’s wide eyes’), capitalised ‘Game’ to give it the necessary weight.

Helen Bowell, Workshop facilitator

Original Poem by

Rodney Saint-Éloi

Translated by

André Naffis-Sahely and The Poetry Translation Workshop Language

French

Country

Haiti