On July 25th 2015 my friend the poet, blogger and curator Dave Bonta was kind enough to publish on his eminent blog, Via Negativa a first draft of French-Canadian poet Yves Préfontaine’s extraordinary poem Peuple Inhabité. Life in a time of Corona has given me the time to return to it and as result make some small but important revisions.
Here;’s what Dave wrote above that first translation:
Quite a challenge, this one. It’s always a delicate balance that has to be maintained between ‘translation’ and ‘version’ so I shall be interested in any feedback from other Francophones.
I found a brief biog of Yves Préfontaine at the Electronic Poetry Centre (which, incidentally, opened for business way back in the mid ‘90s when there was virtually no poetry presence on the internet at all). Born in 1937 in Montréal, poet Yves Préfontaine is an anthropologist by training. He published his first poems at the age of fifteen and released his first collection at twenty. At eighteen, he began his career as radio script writer at Radio-Canada, with some incursions into television. He organized, amongst other things, a series of fourteen shows with Oscar Peterson, the great jazz pianist – who was also originally from Montréal. In 1959, he co-founded the journals Situations and Le Québec libre; later he joined the editorial board of Liberté, of which he was the editor-in-chief from 1961 to 1962. […] His poems have been translated into English, Spanish, Hungarian, Italian, Romanian, and Croatian.
POPULATION VOID
by Yves Préfontaine, translated by Dick Jones
I live in a region where the cold has beaten down the grass, where gloom lies heavy over the ghostly trees.
I live in silence amongst a dormant population, shivering under the frost of their words. I live amongst a people who have lost all language both fragile and forceful.
I live inside an all-embracing cry –
Speechless stone –
Sudden clifftops –
The winter a naked blade in my chest.
A snowdrift of exhaustion gently stifles this land in which I live.
And I prevail within the fog.
And I persist in speaking out.
And from my pain no echo returns.
A people’s language is their bread.
A place of light amongst the rotting wheat.
I live amongst a people who have lost themselves.
And the great territories of their joy wither beneath this endless tundra
This great disowned abundance.
I live inside a cry powerless now to pierce, to strike, to break through
these barriers of spittle and masks.
I live amongst a phantom people disowned like the ugly daughter.
And my footsteps mark a circle in this desert. A deluge of furious white faces surrounds me.
The land that I inhabit is a marble tableau under ice.
And this land empty of the men of light whispers in my blood
like a lover.
But I fight against this absence between my teeth, a poverty of words
that gleam and then are lost.
0O0
Peuple inhabité
J’habite un espace où le froid triomphe de l’herbe, où la grisaille règne
en lourdeur sur des fantômes d’arbres.
J’habite en silence un peuple qui sommeille, frileux sous le givre de ses mots. J’habite un peuple dont se tarit la parole frêle et brusque.
J’habite un cri tout alentour de moi –
Pierre sans verbe –
Falaise abrupte –
Lame nue dans ma poitrine l’hiver.Une neige de fatigue étrangle avec douceur le pays que j’habite.
Et je persiste en des fumées.
Et je m’acharne à parler.
Et la blessure n’a point d’écho.
Le pain d’un peuple est sa parole.
Mais point de clarté dans le blé qui pourrit.
J’habite un peuple qui ne s’habite plus.
Et les champs entiers de la joie se flétrissent sous tant de sécheresse
Et tant de gerbes reniées.
J’habite un cri qui n’en peut plus de heurter, de cogner, d’abattre
Ces parois de crachats et de masques.
J’habite le spectre d’un peuple renié comme fille sans faste.
Et mes pas font un cercle en ce désert. Une pluie de visages blancs
Me cerne de fureur.
Le pays que j’habite est un marbre sous la glace.
Et ce pays sans hommes de lumière glisse dans mes veines comme
Femme que j’aime.
Or je sévis contre l’absence avec entre les dents, une pauvreté de mots
Qui brillent et se percent.
Jean Coulthard – The Bird Of Dawning Singeth All Night Long. Poem for violin, harp and strings (1960)
sisyphus 