Translated poems 2

A second batch of poems translated into French by Leila Forissier.

Quelconque

Où les vieux messieurs achètent-ils leurs vestes beiges?
J'ai cherché dans les boutiques, mais personne en vogue
n'en vend. Il doit y avoir une chaîne,
un négociant sur catalogue, spécialisé dans le beige.

Il y a une variante - taupe - la couleur
de la soupe aux champignons, mais c'est quand même beigeâtre,
une non-couleur, la nuance de l'ennui,
du 'j'ai trop la flemme pour être coloré'.

Le beige ferait camouflage
dans un désert morne, disons le Gobi
en octobre, lorsque le vent des steppes
balaie de sable beige les plaines infinies.

Caracolant parmi les rares herbes grège
de petits rongeurs beiges creusent, élevant leurs petits
tapis sous terre attendant d'être beiges
pour se fondre dans le paysage désolé.

Le beige doit bien avoir une vertu salvatrice,
un trait qui m'a échappé; un fait beige
qui en justifie la fade existence.
Je cherche encore des arcs-en-ciel beiges.

 Published as Nondescript in Sushi & Chips (2006)

Tr Leila Forrisier

 Sept Lunes

La première lune est tout juste décroissante,
et pâle, haut dans le ciel bleu-jour.

La deuxième est le tranchant d’une épée,
à minuit, Auvergne, découpant
le velours jonché d’étoiles.

La troisième porte un halo,
présage de neige.

La quatrième lune est un rond de beurre
dans une chaude nuit de moisson, étouffée de désir.

La cinquième lune, éclipsée par la terre,  
est d’un rouge boueux, augurée de prophéties.

La sixième est occultée à maintes reprises
par des nuages vacillants.

La septième lune est celle
que l’on ne doit pas nommer.

 Published as Seven Moons in Sushi & Chips (2006)

Tr Leila Forrisier

Le Crochet

C'était la pièce sous les toits
et l'été nous baignions dans la touffeur.
Étendus sur le lit, certains de ne pas dormir
jusqu’à ne plus nous soucier de trouver le sommeil.
La sueur perlait entre nos corps
et le drap au-dessous. De sexe, bien-sûr,
il n'était pas question, tout contact proscrit.

La lune montait dans le coin
du velux, blanche
tranche de tarte, s'arrondissant
en pizza d'argent. Le souvenir me vint,
comme s'il venait de m'échapper,
de la présence d'un loquet
sur le châssis de la fenêtre, que quelque part
se trouvait une perche munie d'un crochet,
crochet qui n'allait que dans ce loquet,
et rien d'autre.

Je me dressai de mon côté du lit,
l'humidité montant à nouveau
de mon dos, l'arrière de mes cuisses.
Le fourre-tout, le placard de la souillarde,
était notre cache pour les choses
dont nous ne pensions jamais avoir besoin
et elle était là. Debout
sur le lit, je levai le loquet
et laissai entrer l'air conditionné lunaire.

 Published as The Hook in The Propriety of Weeding (2012)

Tr Leila Forrisier

Translated poems 1

I'm going to post translations of some of my poems here in the next few weeks. These are poems I had translated into French for my trip to the 31st Festival de la Poésie, Trois-Riviéres, Quebec, October 2015.

Here are the first three:

Notes de terrain, de janvier à avril

Un cormoran longe les courbes de la rivière.
Avant même que le Lednock Burn la rejoigne,
L’Earn est à ras bord, et file à toute allure. Je regarde
depuis le pont, ne tentant même pas d’estimer
le volume d’eau charrié. La pluie a été battante,
mais c’est aussi la fonte des neiges.

La neige hivernale vint et partit,
vint et resta, partit, et revint.
Le froid flottait sur les vents sous des semaines
de ciels gris. Des songes de mort,
la conscience de mourir, sur la pointe des pieds, passaient
de pièce en pièce, jusqu’au matin,
annoncé par l’horloge, plutôt que par le jour.

********************************

Des chevreuils paissent sur le coteau couvert de foin
en pleine vue d’un trafic irrépressible.
Ils sont parfois parmi les nettes rangées vertes
de blé d’hiver ou d’orge de printemps.
Je les compte toujours, désappointé
s’il s’en trouve moins d’une douzaine.

Sur une berge ensoleillée une écume citronnée de coucous,
dans les bois des anémones étoilées, des chélidoines
et de timides violettes. Je me rappelle un ruisseau
dans le bois de Twenty Shilling, une marche printanière,
un cerf victime de la saison, morceaux
de chair blanche, touffes de fourrure trempée,
et bois dépouillés en souvenir.

********************************

Les changements commencèrent un jour de ciel d’agneline.
Je marchais sur la rive dans la senteur de l’ail des ours,
chatons sur les bouleaux. L’eau glissait
presque en silence, la gravité l’attirant
vers la Tay, et le réservoir infini de la mer.

Les collines brillaient au soleil de midi.
Les mélèzes parmi les sempervirents, bruns depuis l’automne,
prenaient une teinte vert doré.
L’éclosion était imminente dans tous les arbres
le long de la rive, et la terre fraîchement tournée attendait.
Dans la maison, elle se leva, s’habilla, mangea un peu.
Son corps avait décidé qu’il pouvait, pour le moment,
continuer. 

Published as Field Notes, January to April, in The propriety of Weeding (2012) and made into a filmpoem (Field Notes) by Alastair Cook (available on Vimeo)
.

TR Leila Forrissier

Vol d’identité

Les bécasseaux sont de minuscules fées, dansant, esquivant les vagues;
la semaine passée c’étaient les colombes éléphants qui bousculaient les moineaux
hors de la mangeoire. Demain encore elle s’en ira
fouiller l’épave du langage, former des liens
de connexions au hasard. La structure tient,
la même certitude de syntaxe règne,
mais un caprice empreint le choix de ses noms
et ses comment-ca-s’appelle - mots descriptifs.
Elle s’abîme, pour la troisième longue reprise,
dans ce lent bain d’acide, la soupe effervescente
qui scinde le mot du monde, la connaissance du souvenir.
C’est un doux fondu, comme une sculpture à contresens
Avant que l’armature n’affleure, puis elle aussi
se corrode, s’effondre, et part à la dérive.

Published as Identity Theft in The Propriety of Weeding, 2012)

TR: Leila Forrissier

Une brève histoire de Xi’An

Les Grandes Murailles de Chang’An séparaient autrefois
l’étranger de l’habitant, le barbare du citoyen.

Plus maintenant. Nous flânons le long du vaste rempart
entre les parapets, contemplons la ville en bas sous le smog,

prenons des photos grises sur des téléphones. Un imposant guerrier T’ang
traînaille jusqu’au corps de garde, brillant plastron

de résine moulée, casque couronné de plumes de nylon rouge.
Dans un temple secondaire à la Grande pagode de l’Oie

je fais trois révérences intrépides au Bouddha. Un petit homme
se faufile à l’intérieur, regarde des deux côtés avant de s’agenouiller.

Il n’aurait pas eu de problème, je crois, même vu,
et il est sans doute mieux pour lui d’accomplir les bons gestes.

L'observation ne suffit pas à certaines expériences,
qui demandent de se lancer. Dans la soirée arrive l'annonce

d’un nouveau dinosaure à plumes dans la province du Liaoning,
mais ce n’est pas une nouveauté. Ainsi advinrent les oiseaux.

Published as A short history of Xi'An in The floorshow at the Mad Yak Café (2010)

Tr : Leila Forrisier

The poem in Scots

Back in 1996 I was on an Arvon course at Moniack Mhor, near Beauly, with tutors Bill Herbert and Kathleen Jamie, and Kathleen set a wee exercise to write poems based in characters in old postcards she handed round the table. That's an exercise I sometimes do in my workshops these days, as it can often generate good poems.

So I started off writing the poem in English and, frankly, it was boring. But my granny's Aberdeenshire voice came into my head, and I wrote the poem again in Scots, hearing her Doric accent. Prior to this I had never written in Scots, but it just seemed so natural this time. It was accepted by Lallans magazine, so it became my first poem in Scots to be published.

It was collected in Seven Senses (Diehard Publishers, 2000).

A postcaird frae posteritie

Aits are dreebled in the wheel’s ee

as the kingle stane is ca’ed bi the haun.

The meal-tub’s big roon lid

has thon ziggie-zaggie threids

aa roon the rim.

It’s efternin, we’re here bi the hoose wa,

lukin lang an staunin stiff

sae naethin smeers the siller pents

inside the mannie’s big-leggit box o tricks.

We’re in wir Sabbath-best black-an-white claes,

me wi a mutch oan ma heid.

That tint oan the caird’s a fake,

life here’s no like that - colourfae.

Spinnle clicks, stane grinds,

pipe is sooked

tae keep it bleezin,

cardin kames clatter thegither.

We’re here tae shaw

wir wee bit wey o life,

afore it gangs ootbye,

bit ye faddle us, wi yer

“Haud still noo!”

an “Staun this wey!”

It’s aye the same,

ye canny dae yer wark

fur fowk speirin at ye.

An fit’s tae dae?

Ma laddie’s boat is beached,

an sae is he, sae are we aa,

aye turnin, ziggie-zaggie.

Copyright © Colin Will 1997, 2000

The archaeology poem

In 1992 Jane, our younger son Duncan and I went on a cycling holiday in the Loire Valley. It was billed as 'Cycling for Softies' but that wasn't entirely accurate. Our base and starting point was the village of Montreuil-Bellay. Here we left our cases and were introduced to the mysteries of the puncture repair kit, and cycling in France. Our clothes and necessities for the remainder of our stay were packed into two rear panniers each, and we set off the following day on our circuit. The actual cycling wasn't a problem, and it was a great way to see the French countryside. We stopped off at our pre-booked hotels, each one chosen for its gastronomic excellence and the ability of the proprietaires to cope with sweaty cyclists. We stayed two nights in each hotel, giving us a clear day between to explore each new area.

We explored Fontevraud, Saumur, Chinon and the Loire chateaux, eating well and enjoying the local Loire red wine, made from the Cabernet franc grape. The chateau described in The Sleeping Beauty is at Ussy, which was closed when we visited, but cycling inland we came to the original medieval village of Ussy, which had been abandoned in the 14th century due to plague. And here we came across an ongoing archaeological dig in the ancient churchyard. What we saw moved me very much, and the following poem resulted. It was first published in Seven Senses (Diehard, 2000).

Les Indigènes

Near the chateau of the Sleeping Beauty
we saw the skulls of babies unearthed
in a medieval graveyard;
another skeleton enfolded in her pelvic grip
the bundle of tiny bones which killed her.
The graves were gridded and graphed, ending
six centuries curing in the good Loire soil;
wheelbarrows trundled round mounds of bone-flecked earth,
each fragment a domestic, personal tragedy.
The charmer prince Lionheart lies nearby,
casketed at Fontevraud,
as if his bones are different; his death cause
for a separate class of grief.

Broken at birthing or from war's decay -
all ends are too soon for those who leave
and the loving left.

The diggers were quiet, respectful,
but these sleepers were beyond awakening,
their beds now and forever unmade,
and bony mouths unkissed, unkissable.



Copyright © Colin Will, 2000

The geological poem

Some years ago I realised that rocks, minerals and geology had often inspired me to write poems. Hardly surprising, since I had studied geology in the 1970s and worked for fifteen years in the British Geological Survey library. I had the idea of collecting some of these poems into a pamphlet, with notes on the geology preceding each poem. The poems weren't necessarily about geology, but earth sciences formed some kind of trigger for the poems. I self-published the pamphlet in 2005, but it's long since out of print. A revised version is available on Kindle, as Mementoliths 2.

This poem is about the Five Sisters shale bing at Westwood, near West Calder. The distinctive shape of the bing is a feature that's being preserved, as most of the other West Lothian bings have been removed for industrial uses. But it's also about the shale mines within Calder Wood, which were open and explorable when I lived there, although they've since been bricked up.

20. Oil shale, Mid Calder

In the woods behind our home in Mid Calder the Linhouse Water cut through an outcrop of oil shale, a black and fissile deposit of curly carbonaceous claystone, laid down in lagoons. In the 1850’s James ‘Paraffin’ Young discovered you could cook this stuff, yielding a good quality mineral oil for lamps and heating. So naturally, a mining industry started up. In the beginning, the rock was mined where it outcropped, as in the Linhouse Water. Open adits were driven in from the streamside, and the shale was removed by stoop and room working, leaving pillars of rock supporting the roof. It’s quite scary, but I’ve gone in about 500 metres into the workings without coming to the end. A sobering thought, that the big beech trees of Calder Wood Park were somewhere above my head.


Five Sisters

Dry shale’s a slippery medium;
platy flakes of calcined clay
slide over each other
as I launch and leap
down the bing’s steep slope.

Heels dig deep to stabilise
on each long jump,
lunging further
than an Olympian can.

A sense of balance
becomes more important
than a sense of proportion;
fun outweighs gravity
and son-flanked father laughs
as all three skelter to the base.

The long trudge up
to the tip’s top
is an Everest epic
of back-sliding and step-kicking,
and it’s a relief to reach
the five-way summit
for the next downhill slalom.

This stuff was hewn
in oil-shale’s heyday –
retorted and refined
it lit the lamps
and oiled the guns
to blaze at Kaiser Bill
in Scotland’s first oil boom.

The waste, the waste of it all,
a red ton per barrel, tipped and piled;
flat-topped clinker mesas sat and waited
for the road-making boom to come.

Mostly shifted now,
Contentibus bottoms the by-pass,
and Addiewell’s ‘Reserved for Nature’.
But Westwood’s left, the red skirts
of the Five Sisters preserved
as industrial heritage,
now the industry’s gone.

Bing-jumping’s finished too –
my knees wouldn’t take it –
and my boys are men
and moved away.
I wonder if they recall
these pink hills of childhood,
these mountains once mined,
this discarded debris
in a paraffin playground?

Copyright © Colin Will 2005

The Hiroshima poem

It's now 70 years since the first atomic bomb - Little Boy - was dropped on Hiroshima. This poem was published in Daemon 7/8 in 2005. I read it at an event in Glasgow on Hiroshima Day that year. By coincidence, that was the day my friend Robin Cook died, and it was Tommy Sheridan who told me the news, at that very reading.


Peace and quiet

In the newsreels it’s always silent;
in-sucked dust heats to incandescence,
molten beads fountain, pillar up,
a dirty eruption. Shock waves
squeeze steam out of clear air
in annular clouds. Close-ups focus
on the boiling glow, the head,
a roiling rotisserie. Roasted birds
fall from the sky. On the ground
trees, petals, pets, people, puff
to vapour in a roar, a scream
we can’t hear. On screen
Enola Gay drones home.

In a warm autumn, shinkansen zips smoothly
through the countryside. Hinoki forests yield
trunks for torii. In little fields, clipped lines
of tea bushes suggest Versailles for taste buds,
stooks of rice straw smoulder in smudge fires,
and crows foregather in persimmon trees.
Train windows, triple-glazed, cut out outside sounds.
We’re in a steel speed capsule, streamlined,
hurtling serenely to Hiroshima.


 Copyright © Colin Will 2005

The biker poem

A long time ago, in a galaxy ... No, that's wrong. But a long time ago, when I lived in Midcalder and was working at the British Geological Survey, I got myself a moped, then a small motorbike, and then a medium-sized commuter bike - a Honda 175. So I was a biker, but not the leather-clad, tattoo-covered Hell's Angel type. I used it to get to work in the morning, and to get myself home in the evening. Most of the time I enjoyed it. I didn't like winter biking, especially in some of the cold, snowy winters we had in the 1980s. I recall driving it very slowly, with both boots sliding along the ice to keep myself upright. And I didn't like my crash, when I hit a stretch of unlit roadworks near East Calder, came off and broke my collar bone. But I loved biking on summer weekends, on country roads, the bendier the better. The road along Loch Lubnaig was my favourite, and I've written about that elsewhere.

I used to take our eldest son to school on the pillion, until I had a puncture one morning. I controlled it, having had earlier punctures, but when I told Jane about it she said, 'That's it! You're going to learn to drive a car; you're not putting my son's life in danger.' So I did, and somehow the bike didn't get used much after that. I gave it away in exchange for two bottles of wine - it wasn't worth anything more by then - and I haven't driven a motor bike since. I'm still licensed though, and some nice summer days I look back with nostalgia, and I dream about the very real pleasures of biking.

This poem was written in 1995, and published in my second collection, Seven Senses (Diehard, 2000).


The thing itself

After rain the road flashes
like a metal river.

Bends are rounded
by a shift of weight,
an eye for line, a lean;
routes unroll under pegged feet
straddling wheels.

Wind is helmet shake
and visor flutter;
head wobbles as speed twists up.
Poles flicker past
in a chuff of air;
engine notes blatter from walls
or are sucked silent in gaps.

No space for thought,
no time for calculation.
Wish into action
as action fast-forwards life.
Spray fizzles,
bees bullet the head,
smells assail, ripen, and are gone.
Between machine and rider
no decisions, destinations.



Copyright © Colin Will, 2000