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

Diedra Wandel
Acadia University


Secret Notebooks of Agathe Brisebois
by Patrick Coppens

Translated by Diedra Wandel

*****

I work for eternity,
But in evanescence.

Shapes full of space,
Inner thinking of colors.

About the colors,
Those which pass
Were not made to last.

Cold bells, sleigh of words.

Poetry put in disorder
In my forgotten memories.

*****

He had approached me to ask for the time,
I refused him.
Before his dumbstruck appearance, I made it clear.
Don't worry, she will come.

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

“I believe that you are a poet
But you will not find something new,
To say essential,
Unless you stare at your bellybutton.”
(Max Jacob, a letter to François Gachot, May 7, 1926)

*****
Don't forget the photos;
Those where we danced in Sospel
On the edge of the Merlanson.

Summer lovers
A gooseberry in the head.

The mysteries duplicate themselves
Like rabbits. Hat!

“The assembling of illusion and reality
In the same object makes it
The unsettling mirror of our inwardness.”
(Bernard Noël, Les peintres du désir, 1992)

I like abstraction
In the cracks of reality.

*****

Anonymity,
Certain days, it weighs on me,
Others, it saddens me;
I rejoice in it all the same,
For no one can deprive me of it.
But when I write, when I draw,
I feel kingly, worshipped by my subjects.


Pleasing exhausts those
Who do not love enough.

*****

Style.
What there can I?



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