Louise Glück

MATINES
[...]
Pour toujours et pour moi,
le plus grand des plaisirs est la surprise.

______________
MATINS
[...]
For me, always
the delight is the surprise.

LE COQUELICOT ROUGE
[...]
C'est parce que
je suis détruit que
je parle.

__________________
THE RED POPPY
[...]
I speak
because I am shattered.

HERBES FOLLES
[...]
si l'on ne vénère
qu'un dieu,
un ennemi suffit -

____________
WITCHGRASS
[...]
if you worship
one god, you only need
one enemy -

L’AUBÉPINE
[...]
- les choses
qui ne peuvent se mouvoir
apprennent à voir ; je n'ai pas besoin
de vous chasser à travers
le jardin ; les êtres humains laissent
des traces de sentiments
partout

__________________________
THE HAWTHORN TREE
[...]
- things
that can't move
learn to see ; I do not need
to chase you through
the garden ; human beings leave
signs of feeling
everywhere

LE POUVOIR DE CIRCÉ

Je n’ai jamais transformé qui que ce soit en cochon
Certaines personnes sont des cochons ; je leur donne juste
l’apparence de cochons.

Je suis lasse de ton monde
qui laisse l’extérieur déguiser l’intérieur.

Tes hommes n’étaient pas de mauvais hommes ;
la vie indisciplinée
leur a fait ça. Comme cochons,

avec mes soins et
ceux de mes servantes, ils
se sont tout de suite adoucis.

Puis j’ai renversé le sort,
pour te montrer ma bonté
ainsi que ma puissance. j’ai vu

que nous pouvions être heureux ici,
comme des hommes et des femmes peuvent l’être
lorsque leurs besoins sont simples. Dans le même souffle,

j’ai prévu ton départ,
tes hommes avec mon aide bravant
la mer battante et hurlante. Tu crois

que quelques larmes vont me contrarier ? Mon ami,
chaque sorcière est
pragmatique au fond ; personne
ne voit l’essence s’il ne peut
affronter les limites. Si je voulais seulement te tenir

je te tiendrais prisonnier.

You die when your spirit dies.
Otherwise, you live.
You may not do a good job of it, but you go on—
something you have no choice about.

When I tell this to my children
they pay no attention.
The old people, they think—
this is what they always do:
talk about things no one can see
to cover up all the brain cells they’re losing.
They wink at each other;
listen to the old one, talking about the spirit
because he can’t remember anymore the word for chair.

It is terrible to be alone.
I don’t mean to live alone—
to be alone, where no one hears you.

MOTHER AND CHILD

We’re all dreamers; we don’t know who we are.

Some machine made us; machine of the world, the constricting family.
Then back to the world, polished by soft whips.

We dream; we don’t remember.

Machine of the family: dark fur, forests of the mother’s body.
Machine of the mother: white city inside her.

And before that: earth and water.
Moss between rocks, pieces of leaves and grass.

And before, cells in a great darkness.
And before that, the veiled world.

This is why you were born: to silence me.
Cells of my mother and father, it is your turn
to be pivotal, to be the masterpiece.

I improvised; I never remembered.
Now it’s your turn to be driven;
you’re the one who demands to know:

Why do I suffer? Why am I ignorant?
Cells in a great darkness. Some machine made us;
it is your turn to address it, to go back asking
what am I for? What am I for?

The same night also produced people like ourselves.
You are like me, whether or not you admit it.
Unsatisfied, meticulous. And your hunger is not for experience
but for understanding, as though it could be had in the abstract.

More than anything in the world
I love these evenings when we’re together,
the quiet evenings in summer, the sky still light at this hour.

So Penelope took the hand of Odysseus,
not to hold him back but to impress
this peace on his memory:

from this point on, the silence through which you move
is my voice pursuing you.

Matines

Le soleil brille ; près de la boîte aux lettres, les feuilles
du bouleau pliées, plissées comme des nageoires.
En dessous, les tiges creuses des jonquilles blanches,
Ailes de glace, Cantatrices ; les feuilles
sombres de la violette sauvage. Selon Noah,
les dépressifs détestent le printemps, déséquilibre
entre les mondes intérieur et extérieur. Je plaide
différemment – être dépressive, certes, mais en un sens,
attachée
avec passion au tronc vivant, mon corps
bien enroulé dans le tronc fendu, presque en paix
dans la pluie du soir
presque capable de sentir
écumer et s’élever la sève : selon Noah, c’est
une faute typique des dépressifs, s’identifier
à un arbre alors que les cœurs joyeux
virevoltent dans le jardin telles des feuilles mortes, image
d’une partie, pas d’un tout.

Voici comment il [John] jardine : quinze minutes d'effort intense,
quinze minutes de contemplation extatique.

I am
at work, though I am silent.

The bland

misery of the world
bounds us on either side, an alley

lined with tress; we are

companions here, not speaking,
each with his own thoughts;

behind the trees, iron
gates of the private houses,
the shuttered rooms

somehow deserted, abandoned,

as though it were the artist’s
duty to create
hope, but out of what? what?

the word itslef
false

LE JARDIN

Je ne pourrais le refaire,
Je supporte à peine de le regarder -

dans le jardin, dans la pluie fine
le jeune couple en train de planter
une rangée de petits pois, comme si
personne ne l'avait jamais fait auparavant,
les grandes difficultés jamais encore
confrontées ou résolues -

Ils ne peuvent se voir,
dans la terre fraîche, se lançant
sans savoir ce qui les attend,
derrière eux les collines vert pâle, embuées de fleurs -

Elle veut s'arrêter ;
lui veut aller jusqu'au bout,
pour rester avec la chose -

regarde-la, lui caressant la joue
pour faire une trêve, ses doigts
rafraîchis par la pluie printanière ;
dans l'herbe fine, des éclats de crocus mauves -

même ici, même au début de l'amour,
sa main quittant son visage trace
l'image d'un départ

et ils se croient
libres de négliger
cette tristesse.

The rest I have told you already.
A few years of fluency, and then
the long silence, like the silence in the valley
before the mountains send back
your own voice changed to the voice of nature.

You get on a train, you disappear.
You write your name on the window, you disappear.

There are places like this everywhere,
places you enter as a young girl,
from which you never return.

Like the field, the one that burned.
Afterward, the girl was gone.
Maybe she didn’t exist,
we have no proof either way.

All we know is:
the field burned.
But we saw that.

So we have to believe in the girl,
in what she did. Otherwise
it’s just forces we don’t understand
ruling the earth.

Adult grief

Because you were foolish enough to love one place,
Now you are homeless, an orphan
In a succession of shelters.
You did not prepare yourself sufficiently.
Before your eyes, two people were becoming old;
I could have told you two deaths were coming.
There has never been a parent
Kept alive by a child's love.

The fire burns up into the clear sky,
eager and furious, like an animal
trying to get free,
to run wild as nature intended -

When it burns like this,
leaves aren't enough - it's
acquisitive, rapacious,
refusing to be contained,
to accept limits -

You will leave the village where you were born
and in another country you'll become
very rich, very powerful
but always you will mourn something
you left behind, even though you
can't say what it was,
and eventually you will return to seek it

you want to see my hands?
as empty now as at the first note.
or was the point always
to continue without a sign ?

but why
start anything
so close to the end ?