8Os

The 80’s were cool – for me anyway – and now I am pleased to find my birthday book – the wonderful The Second Seedtime by Philippe Jaccottet translated by Tess Lewis having a quotation for March 1982 from ‘Octogenarian Michaux, in Corner Posts

Keep your weakness intact.
If you follow a route, be careful, you’ll have trouble
returning to the openness.
There is still limpidity in you.

And echoing Blake’s’ tiger:
Lord tiger, it’s a trumpet blast through his
whole being when he spots his prey; it’s a
sport, a chase, an adventure, a climb, a des-
tiny, a liberation, a fire, a light.
Whipped by hunger, he leaps
Who dares compare his seconds to those?
Who has had even ten tiger seconds in his entire life?’

I don’t know why but being an Octogenarian Poet sounds so much better than seventy-nine! So I enter my new decade with a burst of positive enthusiasm and a long list of intentions to do better. Mostly the need to accept the limitations that now dog me, following me around, whispering over the shoulder ‘shouldn’t’, ‘can’t’, ooops! Also a list of gratitudes for all the good things that support and sustain – mostly, maybe, that sense of still searching, adventuring, searching for the tiger moment in my head.

And being still has its advantages, as I have celebrated before; having time and space to look properly, learn to listen, start other forms of creative activity. So it seems a good time to order and sort out things and to approach living in a way that celebrates weakness and remains limpid which I am taking to mean flexible, bendable, full of light – or as my OED has it – ‘Free from turbidity, pellucid, clear’ .

The quotation is of course a translation so I take a bit of time out to pursue limpide in my Larouse Dictionary des Synomynes and find clair, compréhensible, pur, leading to accessible et lumineux. This is very satisfying and a good example of the way in which I might spend a large part of a day pursuing and idea or a word. I am fascinated by the process of translation and how it takes you deep into the heart of meaning as you make the effort to find what the writer is really trying to say. My favourite poem at the moment is by Rimbaud – very famously written when he was just sixteen and likely to have been still wandering around the edge of the Franco-Prussian war. Le Dormeur du Val is a translation in progress. I have a new book by Georges Gernot ‘Poetes-Soldats dans la Grande Guerre which is translation of war poets of WW1 into French. He is a painter and a writer and the poems are illustrated with vibrant water colours. It is very interesting to see a reverse procedure of translation of poems that I am very familiar with. I am working on my own water colour for Le Dormeur as well as looking at other translations of the poem. I read an interesting one by an American poet and translator Liath Gleeson who has translated the poem using the strict metre and format of the original and who has substituted ‘foxglove’ for the French glaïeuls usually translated as gladioli and we have had an interesting email communication about these flowers. These are the kind of things that fill my day and give me a great deal of pleasure.

Well – comme ça le eighties I have just burnt my porridge which has been on the stove since I thought I would check my quotation at the start of this blog! So – maybe time to come to a close. I have nearly finished the draft of Knox and one of my intentions is to be more resolute and ordered about sending out. The lack of limpidity concerning my domestic endeavours my impede this a little.

My love to all my friends and correspondents. Thankful to be here and so well loved.

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