Born in Paris in 1970, Christophe Bregaint is the author of four
collections of poetry; Route de Nuit ( 2015), Encore une nuit sans
rêves ( 2016), A l’avant-garde des ruines ( 2017), and finally Dernier
atome d’un horizon ( 2018).
I have been transversing the micropoems of Christophe Bregaint and Yan Kouton for some years now. I told them both when I was in Paris a couple of years ago that I would work on a book collecting some of the transversions that I made from their work over the years, and sure enough as the years go by the collection grows and grows. This micropoem project works alongside my other translation project involving Baudelaire. As both Christophe and Yan could be described as children of Baudelaire, his influence on contemporary French poetry being all encompassing.
The first poem published here, to my mind, is one of the greatest lyrical accounts of the Covid 19 pandemic that I have read. This is a shared quality, this inherent lyricism, that both poets have. The French language is so receptive to lyric poems such as these, such is the very plasticity of the language creating these wonderful aural scapes making transversion an exercise in lyric abandon. Mark Ulyseas enjoyed them too, as he published them in Live Encounters bringing Christophe's micropoems to a wider English speaking audience.
1.
C’est venu
Comme une pluie soudaine et vive
A l’abordage d’une lumière
Ornée de morsures
A l’heure qu’il est
Dans le halo de l’ordinaire impérieux
On attend là
Le poème d’une autre gamme chromatique
It came
Like a rain sudden and alive
Boarding with the light
Adorned with moisture
Timely
In the halo of both the imperious
And the ordinary
We await
The poem of a completely different register
2.
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
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
Transversions into English, Peter O’Neill, 2020.
https://liveencounters.net/le-poetry-writing-2020/05-may-pw-2020/christophe-bregaint-two-poems/
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