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  • Nous ne sommes pas l’arbre
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Nous ne sommes pas l’arbre

Dominique Sorrente

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.


Dominique Sorrente

from: Paraboles à l’Orient du Cœur (Valenciennes: Cahiers Froissart 234, 1999)

Reproduced by permission of the author and translator.

Tags:

French leaves Translations trees

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.

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Dominique Sorrenteb.1953

Dominique Sorrente was born in Nevers in 1953, and after having studied political science and economics in Paris and Bruges, he settled in Marseilles. He has published extensively, regularly lectures on contemporary French poetry in France and abroad, and...
More about Dominique Sorrente

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