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First Day of the Year, Translation of Pierre Emmanuel's Premier De L'An By T Wignesan
First Day of the Year, Translation of Pierre Emmanuel's Premier De L'An By T Wignesan
First Day of the Year, Translation of Pierre Emmanuel’s Premier de l’an by T. Wignesan
Each moment of waking up is an act of giving birth
I use the iron tools myself on the mother
To death
Myself : Who is this myself ?
Am I somebody else other than the weight I bear
Who resists who clings refuses
To be born ?
This weight deliberately reinforces itself
Through its heaviness
It wouldn’t want ever to be anything but matter
Half-conscious half in a state of stupor
Root before being stem
Seed which pushes upwards through the ground
Without being pulled out
Meanwhile it fathoms its false state of sleepiness its
burrow
(And) in delving into it it expels proportionately
All its skin goose-pimply to the touch
Hairiness of anguish enormous world
She kneads it more and more into the narrow passage
Her own abdomen compresses in vain his anguish
Towards the interior and the exterior at the same time
An every day happening that’s always impossible
The act of giving birth
This first day of the year nineteen seventy-three
Aged fifty-six years and eight months
Once again after twenty-thousand times more
I knew I have to be born
I do not want to.
I cry out to Someone who is stronger than me
That he might pull me out of my old fears originating from
my mother*
That they put me on this earth
So that I might walk towards my end once and for all in
my stride
With my dead elder-sister for company
On this earth of living beings
Someone who is I right at the end of the route
Up above
Puts aside with might the thin-lined horizon
So that I might be born
One day the more.
• See his poem : « Now to be flesh of a man and a woman »
(Sophia, O.C., t. II, p. 416)
© T. Wignesan – Paris, 2014
Copyright © T Wignesan | Year Posted 2014
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