Category Archive

Two poems from Gorée babobab island
I

perhaps happiness is so far away
invisible among the tamarind leaves
when my hand brushes the fruit
to share them with spirits laughing at man’s
cruelty to man

perhaps the hope in my eyes drags
the future in clouds of dust where I seek
sparks and the dignity of condemned souls

when the horizon in the early hours
creates images and silhouettes between sun and sea

you are not here to see my eyes
where you have never seen the humour of the world

with the blessing of the island’s
invisible inhabitants I become alive again
as your look is not a poem

but the vast sea that pours infinite pages
by my feet

peut-être le bonheur est-il si loin
invisible dans les feuilles de tamarinier
quand ma main effleure les fruits
à partager avec les génies riant des cruautés
faites à l’homme par l’homme

peut-être l’espérance dans mes yeux traîne-t-elle
l’avenir en nuages de poussières où je cherche
étincelles et dignité des âmes en sursis

quand l’horizon au petit matin
dessine images et silhouettes entre soleil et mer
tu n’es pas là pour voir mes yeux
où tu n’a jamais vu l’humeur du monde

avec la bénédiction des habitants
invisibles de l’île ici je revis

car ton regard n’est pas un poème
mais toute la mer qui coule à
mes pieds
des pages infinies

II

here too I drank at the source
words covered with mildew
like walls oozing all the sorrows
carved on the door of time

I drank the life source
that gives us memory and the capped path
of days to come
I lost count of the mouthfuls of elixir I drank
so that the poem
that has for ever haunted my steps survives

tomorrow I will return
to hear you talk to me
again of you and me

here too the sheets where history snoozed
are white and empty

the covers of time alone
are green like the last word in the world
when the wind howls
day and night at the gates of chaos

then I wrap myself in the words of your look faraway
beyond the sea that separates us infinitely

ici aussi j’ai bu à la source
des mots couverts de moisissures
comme murs suintant de tous les malheurs
gravés aux porte du temps

j’ai bu la source vive
qui nous donne mémoire et chemin majuscule
des jours à venir
j’ai bu je ne sais combien de gorgées élixir
pour la survie du poème
qui hante mes pas depuis toujours

demain je reviendrai
entendre ta voix qui me parle
encore de toi et de moi

ici aussi les draps où l’histoire fait la sieste
sont blancs et vides

seule la couverture du temps
est verte comme dernière parole du monde
quand le vent tourbillonne
nuit et jour à la porte du chaos

alors je m’enroule dans les mots de ton regard horizon
par-delà la mer nous séparant infiniment

(Gorée île baobab, Le Bruit des autres/ Ecrits des Forges, 2004)

Tanella Boni was born and brought up in Abidjan, Ivory Coast, before going to
university in Toulouse and then Paris. She is now a Professor of Philosophy
at the University  of Abidjan (Cocody). She was the President of the Ivory Coast Writers Association from 1991 to 1997 and is often invited to address international conferences on poetry, the arts and literature. Her poetry collections include Labyrinthe, Grains de sable, Ma peau est fenêtre d’avenir, and Gorée île baobab.
She has also published novels (Une vie de crabe and Les baigneurs
du Lac rose), short stories and children’s literature. Tanella Boni has lived in Abidjan for more than twenty years.

A gallant woman’s singular glance
Sliding towards us like the white beam
The undulating moon sends to the trembling lake
Where she wishes to bathe her nonchalant beauty;

The last bag of coins in a gamer’s  hands;
A wanton kiss from some skinny flirt;
Annoying and tender, musical sounds
Like the distant cry of humanity’s hurt

None of that equals, bottle deep,
The penetrating balms you keep
For the sacred poet’s debased heart

You pour him hope and youth and life
And the beggar’s only treasure – pride,
That turns us all conquering, godlike!

Le Vin du solitaire

Le regard singulier d’une femme galante
Qui se glisse vers nous comme le rayon blanc
Que la lune onduleuse envoie au lac tremblant,
Quand elle y veut baigner sa beauté nonchalante;

Le dernier sac d’écus dans les doigts d’un joueur;
Un baiser libertin de la maigre Adeline;
Les sons d’une musique énervante et câline,
Semblable au cri lointain de l’humaine douleur,

Tout cela ne vaut pas, ô bouteille profonde,
Les baumes pénétrants que ta panse féconde
Garde au coeur altéré du poète pieux;

Tu lui verses l’espoir, la jeunesse et la vie,
— Et l’orgueil, ce trésor de toute gueuserie,
Qui nous rend triomphants et semblables aux Dieux!

On some now forgotten day, I dumped into the sea
(though beneath what sky I no longer recall)
what little was left to me of a peerless wine, tossing it
as though it were an offering to the pitiless deep.

But who demanded your loss to the tide, O my elixir?
Did I obey a prophet, or was it my own worried heart
imagining blood poured out as though wine?
Yet in the act the sea reclaimed its purity,
and, after the bloody infusion, its expected shine.

My wine was lost, though, and the waves were drunk–
but in them I saw, thrown high up in the briny air,
a panoply of such astounding faces!

Note: The ‘translator’,Roger Hunt Carroll,  had this to say about his approach :
“A pure translation is never my intent. These are songs I sing out of their original languages and into my particular American English prosody with the aim that their essential poetry be kept intact. (…) My terms arranging and transcribing bear some resemblance to what is done in the instrumental or vocal music sense. I don’t make translations: I place a poem in an alternate language, as if in another musical key…. I recast its images, as though for some other instrument. I hear languages as distinct musical instruments, listening to their harmonies, dissonances, assonances, all things in structured music.”    S.H. 

YOUTH

The instructive voices exiled…Physical ingenuity bitterly repressed…Adagio. Ah! the infinite selfishness of youth, studious optimism: how full of flowers the world was this summer! Airs and forms dying…A choir, to allay the impotence and absence! A choir of glasses of night melodies…Sure enough, the nerves will soon find something to hunt.

(from Les Illuminations)

MORNING OF INTOXICATION

O my Good! O my Beautiful! Dreadful fanfare where I never stumble! Magical rack! .Hurray for the extraordinary work and the miraculous body, for the first time! It started amid the guffaws of children, it will end with them. This poison will stay in all our veins even when, the fanfare changing, .we are returned to the old disharmony. .O now we so worthy of these tortures! Let us receive fervently this superhuman promise made to our created bodies and souls: this promise, this madness! Elegance, science, violence! ..We have been promised .that .the tree of good and evil will be buried .in the shadows, .tyrannical .decencies deported, that we may bring in our most pure love.  It began with some disgust and it will end — we being unable suddenly to seize this eternity —  it will end in a riot of scents.

Laughter of children, discretion of slaves, austerities of virgins! Horror of the .faces and objects here, blessed be you .through the memory of this vigil. It began with complete boorishness and now it ends with angels of fire and ice.

Little vigil of drunkenness! Sacred if only for the mask with which you have gratified us. We extol you, method! We have not forgotten that yesterday you glorified our every age.  We have faith in the poison. We know how to give all our life each day.

This is the time of the ASSASSINS.

(from Les Illuminations)

CITY

I am an ephemeral and not too discontented citizen of a metropolis thought to be modern because every known taste has been avoided .in the furnishings and exteriors of the houses .as well as in the layout. of the city. .Here you will not .be able to make out the remains of any monument to superstition. . Morality and language have been reduced to their simplest expression, at last! These
millions of people .who do not need to know each other conduct . their .education, . profession .and old age so similarly .that .the course .of their lives .must be several times shorter than that which mad statistics show for the peoples of the continent. . Just as, from my window, I see new spectres rolling through the thick and eternal coal smoke – .our woodland shade, our summer night! – new Furies, before my cottage which is my homeland and all my heart .since .everything here .resembles this – Death .without tears, our active daughter and servant, a desperate Love and a pretty Crime whimpering in the mud of the street.

(from Les Illuminations)

Love of my life, my fear is I may die
Not knowing who you are or whence you came,
Within what world you lived, beneath what sky,
What age or times forged your identity,
Love beyond blame,

Love of my life, outstripping memory,
O fire without a hearth lighting my days,
At fate’s command you wrote my history,
By night your glory showed itself to me,
My resting-place…

When all I seem to be falls in decay,
Divided infinitesimally
An infinite number of times, all I survey
Is lost, and the apparel of today
Is stripped from me,

Broken by life into a thousand shreds,
A thousand disconnected moments — swirl
Of ashes that the pitiless wind outspreads,
You will remake from what my spirit sheds
A single pearl.

Yes, from the shattered debris of my days,
You will remake a shape for me, remake a name,
A living unity transcending time and space,
Heart of my spirit, centre of life’s maze,
Love beyond blame.

Catherine Pozzi   (1882 – 1934)      translated Sebastian Hayes

Note: This was the only poem to be published during Catherine Pozzi’s lifetime — though a novella Agnès appeared anonymously. Ave figured in La Nouvelle Revue Française on 1st December, 1929, that is, just five years before Karin’s death (as she preferred to be called). The Latin title Ave is a reference to Catullus’s poem Ave atque Vale on the death of his brother, and this was in fact Karin’s original choice of title. However, she subsequently wrote a second poem on the same theme which she entitled Vale and considered the two poems to comprise a ‘diptych’.
Karin believed in reincarnation so the ‘très haut amour’ commemorates a liaison of cosmic  proportions, spanning several individual lives, thus her strange admission of ‘not knowing who you are or whence you came’.  However, on one level the poem undoubtedly commemorates her relation with Paul Valéry, a poet much more famous than Catherine Pozzi but who strikes me as being considerably below her level poetically and intellectually — and as a human being as well !  She saw him at once as her ‘double’ or ‘kindred spirit’,  while Valéry noted in his private Journal that his meeting with Karin was one of the two most important events in his life. He wrote in his Journal in 1922:

“Il y avait ceci d’étrange dans ces amants, et dans leur amour, que l’un et l’autre le ressentaient, non comme une affaire particulière entr’eux, et comme amour d’une personne et d’une personne, mais comme nécessité d’une intelligence parfait entre des systèmes vivants, car ils prenaient également au sérieux, au tragique, — ce que les hommes réduisent à l’état d’opinion, de speculation — à savoir leur condition meme d’hommes, — événements pensants.”

“What was strange about these lovers, about their love, was that both of them felt that what was happening was not a particular affair between two persons, not the love of one individual for another, but rather something imposed on them, a perfect understanding between two living systems. This was so because they considered with the utmost seriousness, not to say with tragic intensity — what most people dismiss as a matter of opinion, a mere speculation — namely that the very essence of their condition as human beings was to be metaphysical events (literally, thinking events).”

However, Paul Valéry was married and a father at the time of their meeting and their turbulent love affair was at first hushed up at his demand. Karin resented this and eventually told Paul Valery’s wife about what was going on which led to her immediate exclusion from smart Parisian society somewhat in the manner of Anna Karenina (while the reputation of Paul Valéry seems to have been little affected).
The French of Ave is given below :

Ave

Très haut amour, s’il se peut que je meure
Sans avoir su d’où je vous possédais,
En quel soleil était votre demeure,
En quel passé votre temps, en quelle heure
Je vous aimais,

Très haut amour qui passez la mémoire,
Feu sans foyer dont j’ai fait tout mon jour,
En quel destin vous traciez mon histoire,
En quel sommeil se voyait votre gloire,
O mon séjour…

Quand je serai pour moi-même perdue
Et divisée à l’abîme infini,
Infiniment, quand je serai rompue,
Quand le présent dont je suis revêtue
Aura trahi,

Par l’univers en mille corps brisée,
De mille instants non rassemblés encore
De cendre aux cieux jusqu’au néant vannée,
Vous referez pour une étrange année
Un seul trésor

Vous referez mon nom et mon image
De mille corps emportés par le jour,
Vive unité sans nom et sans visage,
Cœur de l’esprit, O centre du mirage
Très haut amour.

Catherine Pozzi   (1882 – 1934)