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

John F. Harrod
McGill University
Montreal, QC


The Secret Notebook of Agathe Brisebois
Patrick Coppens

My labor's for eternity,
but it forever fades

shapes suffused with space
colors' intimate reason

As for colors,
those which pass
were not created to endure.

Frigid sleighbells, sleigh of words.

Poetry disarrays
my forgotten memories.

*****

He came up to me to ask the time,
I turned him down.
Seeing his startled mien, I clarified:
Don't worry, she will come.

It was mid-day.
One day, my life has slipped away,
And on the morrow, yours.
After, it was over

“I believe you are a poet,
but you will find novelty,
that is to say the essence,
only in contemplating your own navel”
(Max Jacob,
letter to François Gachot, May 7th 1926)

*****

Do not forget the photos;
those of us dancing in Sospel,
beside the Merlanson.

summer loves
a currant on my mind

The mysteries breed
Like rabbits. Hats off!

“The union of illusion and reality
in the same entity makes it
the unsettling mirror of our inner self”.
(Bernard Noël,
Les peintres du désir, 1992).

I love the abstraction
of the interstices within reality.

*****

Anonymity,
some days weighs on me,
on others it distresses me;
all the same it gladdens me,
since no one can deprive me of it.
But when I write, when I sketch,
I feel as a queen, beloved of her subjects.

To please exhausts those
Who do not like themselves sufficiently.

*****

Style
What can I do there?


LUCK IS A PAINTING
OF WINNING NUMBERS.





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