Translation from a poem by Christophe Bregaint

 One of the pleasures of returning to Facebook is discovering new writings by fellow writers, if you friend writers you will become privy to a storehouse of both published and unpublished material, unpublished in the traditional sense that is. The trick is, of course, to only friend good writers, or at least writers whose writing you actually like.

One such writer for me is the Parisian poet Christophe Bregaint. I have been familiar with Christoph's poetry now for some time. I have published some translations and some transversions of his work. I am rather fortunate as Christophe actually seems to like reading my renderings of his poetry into the 'language of Shakespeare', as he once said to me. He is a wonderful poet, following like many young French poets in the path of such classic 19th century French poets, such as Baudelaire, Malarme, Rimbaud and Verlaine.

Of course translating contemporary French writers like Christophe is also a way of keeping engaged with the French language, I lived for some years in Paris when I was, ahem, a young/er man. I am incredibly lucky, I sometimes feel, to have this natural resource. As it allows me a second way, or medium, of looking at the world. Oscillating back and forth between the two, English and French, then offers you a possible third way, coming in the form of the transversion/ translation.

Poème par Christophe Bregaint

Vers des rives épuisées
Il y eut ces routes
Tuméfiées
Dont les visages sont devenus verdâtres 
Au fil du temps
Peu enclin à retenir les souvenirs des sillons des horizons consumés
A l’approche des côtes qui bordent les rivages de ces mers gonflées par les naufrages
Le vent reproche aux siècles le calme des silences des chemins
En déshérence
Dans l’espace sémantique des perspectives meurtries
Pas après pas
Comme la peau du ciel sent la mémoire de ce qui n’est plus
Qui dégouline sur les terres d’ombres
Qui rassemblent les affaires des empreintes d’une existence qui se marie
Avec l’avènement des ruines

Transversion of a poem by Christophe Bregaint

Towards the exhausted banks

There are these roads which tumefy

So that faces turn green

In time

Little inclined to return to the memories

Of furrows of consumed horizons

Approaching the coasts which break the banks

The sea swelling with waves

The wind reproaching the centuries

The calm of the silence of the paths

Dormant in the semantics of dead perspectives

Step by step

Like the skin of the sky which feels the memory

Of what is no longer there

Dripping onto the earth shadows

Which resemble the affair of traces

Of an existence which is wedded

To the advent of ruins

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