Coréâme
Because you did not lie on the day you were born,
The seers’ sun, the incandescent light,
delighted you under your eyelids, and the wheel of greenery
turning with your blood, became centrifugal,
splattered stones, was truth.
There were smiling eyes and crying flowers
at the end of the hands cutting the day’s rose,
the buzzing mouth to prophesize,
a black brain to bury oblivion.
At the foot of the towers the soil
was like a place ceded without a fight;
the dead looked like trees,
like their flagging flames.
The soul told the body:
if you like, I’ll take you everywhere without touching your clothes,
without letting you fall out of sleep;
you will go through the walls, the sheets of lead;
your raging thoughts, my star presence,
will redden the patients’ brow,
and steal from the poet his turn to speak;
you see the sun’s noise, the perpetual movement
of the bee that stays in one place
like a pulsating factory;
the same night, the same sun; you understand it all.
And the body answered: I hear less than the deaf,
I am thirsty, I feel dizzy at the edge of my anthill,
they fatten me like a queen, I am losing my seeds
and my blood, in spite of my heart’s rose window;
I scream, I have my own light, I feel hot in the snow;
O Sisyphus! O the ordeal! I fall and get up again;
time is feeding my strength and my fatigue;
please just give me a little foliage before I die.
The soul also said— sounding like Antigone:
who knows the weight of the shadow, a thin column,
O my palm tree head holder,
here is the wind of my mind, without all its glories;
and the heavy light one, supporting supported
wobbled along carrying its tower of light.
Dazzled they sleep in the middle of the darkness,
black, it slumbers, as the mangoes roll out of its hands.
(English Translation, © Leonora; all rights reserved.)
- Translator's Note: The paranomastic title is a pun on “Corps et âme“, which sounds exactly the same and means “Body and soul”.The created word means nothing in French. I have left it in French
"Coréâme" was published in Transition, No. 27, 1938: Download Coréâme II
Background: Transition: A Quarterly Review: