Greffe
Dans le café, on éteint les lumières
pour nous signifier l’heure de la fermeture.
Sans hâte, elle finit de boire son thé
et comme une lampe sous son teint d’opale
tu vois s’éclairer en elle un au-delà
l’attention intérieure à la communauté
rassemblée près du Styx, inquiète du passage
dans l’alignement des lits d’hôpital.
On l’a renvoyée ici pour attendre
une seconde vie avec le foie d’un autre.
Là bas, ce ne sont pas des mœurs surprenantes
car on ne paie pas le sombre nocher
avec sa propre obole: il faut l’échanger
contre bien des regards, des mots de réconfort
et il n’accepte que la monnaie étrangère.
Elle t’apprend tout cela sans rien dire
avec ses yeux gris où l’inconnue douceur
a dissous l’amertume, et tu la trouves belle.
Translations of this Poem
Transplant
Translator: Magi Gibson
In the café, they put the lights out
to let us know it’s closing time.
Without hurrying, she finishes drinking her tea
and lamp-like beneath her opal skin
you see light up within her one who has gone beyond
an inner awareness of the people
gathered near the Styx, worried about the journey
in the rows of hospital beds.
They have sent her back here to wait for
a second life with the liver of another.
Over there, these ways do not surprise
for the dark ferryman is not paid
with his own coin: there must be an exchange
of sympathetic looks, of words of reassurance
and he only accepts foreign coins.
She teaches you all this wordlessly
with grey eyes where an unknown gentleness
has dissolved all bitterness, and you find her beautiful.
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.
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Jean-Pierre Lemaire
Jean-Pierre Lemaire, born in the Haute- Savoie, is one of the poets loosely described as ‘new lyricists’, less modernist and more conventional than some of their peers. He teaches advanced classes in the humanities at the lycée Henri-IV in Paris,...
