Nous ne sommes pas l’arbre
Nous ne sommes pas l’arbre
mais son feuillage qui raconte.
Nous ne connaissons rien du jour,
pourtant l’aube nous a mis en marche.
Nos voix, c’est à peine si nous savons
les reconnaître. Que veulent-elles,
ornées de mots insaisissables?
Elles appellent sous la voûte.
Notre source,
cette brise légère
que nous n’attendions pas.
Translations of this Poem
We are not the tree
Translator: Magi Gibson
We are not the tree
but the leaves who speak.
We know nothing about the day,
yet the dawn set us in motion.
Our voices, we hardly know
how to recognize them. What do they want,
decorated with ungraspable words?
They are calling beneath the vault.
Our source,
this light breeze
which we were not expecting.
About this poem
The Scottish Poetry Library in partnership with the Institut français d’Ecosse invited Jacques Rancourt, director of the annual Festival franco-anglais de poésie and editor of La Traductière, to choose about twenty poems from the last twenty years to be circulated to four Scottish poets, who would then choose twelve poems to translate.
M. Rancourt and Magi Gibson, David Kinloch, Brian McCabe and Donny O’Rourke gathered in the Scottish Poetry Library on 15 December 2002 for a concentrated day of translation, re-working and working on the poems they’d chosen, with advice from M. Rancourt and in discussion with each other. This collegial approach was different from the usual practice of showing work to one or two friends in its intensity of focus and level of exchange.
