Mots en mouvement /Words on the Move 2008

Traduction du poème "Carnets secrets d'Agathe Brisebois" de Patrick Coppens.
Translation of Patrick Coppens' poem "Carnets secrets d'Agathe Brisebois

Neil MacKinnon
Acadia University


The Secret Notebooks
Of Agathe Brisebois

By Patrick Coppens
Translation Neil MacKinnon

I work for eternity,
but in evanescence.

forms taking up space
intimate reason of colours

About colours,
Those that pass
weren't made to last.

Cold of sleighbells, sled of words

Poetry adds disorder
To my forgotten memories

* * * * *

He approached to ask me the time
I refused him.
To his taken aback expression, I said:
don't worry, it will come.

It was noon
One day, I lived my life,
and the next day, yours.
After, it was done.

“I believe that you are a poet
but you won't find anything new,
that is to say what is essential
unless you gaze at your navel.”
(Max Jacob, letter to Francois Gachot, May 7, 1926)

* * * * *

Don't forget the photos,
Those where we danced in Sospel,
On the bank of the Merlanson

Summer love
A currant in the head

Mysteries reproduce
Like rabbits. Hat!

“Bringing together illusion and reality
in the same object turns it into
the troubled mirror of our interior.”
(Bernard Noel, Les peintres du désir, 1992)

I love abstraction
In the cracks of reality

* * * * *

Anonymity
some days, weighs on me,
others, grieves me;
I rejoice all the same
because nobody can take it from me.
But when I write, when I draw,
I feel like a queen, adulated by my subjects.

Success exhausts those
Who do not love themselves enough

* * * * *

The style.
That I may?


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