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Translation of Eric Mottram’s TIME SIGHT UNSEEN, Part Three by T. Wignesan

"Instead of an item in a school of rhetoric, the poem could have variety of articulations, continuity and discontinuity, sentence and parataxis, and an awareness of the imaginative possibilities of relationship between particles”. 
                                        Eric Mottram. 
December 29, 1924 - January 17, 1995, prolific poet, editor of the Poetry Review (organ of The Poetry Society in England during the seventies), eminent critic (Times Literary Supplement) and Emeritus Professor of English and American Literature at King’s College, University of London in 1990. He won a scholarship from Blackpool Grammar School to Cambridge, but chose to join the Royal Navy in 1943. He obtained a Double First in English Tripos (1947-1950) at Pembroke College, University of Cambridge, after serving out the War as second-in-command of a mine-sweeper in the Baltic and the Bay of Bengal. 

Just for the anecdote, his family traces its descent from the times of the Norman Conquest as " Lords of the Manor " on his father's side. His father was a civil servant who worked to put in place Britain's social security system. Once in 1964, Eric showed me - somewhat diffidently - the family's Coat of Arms, saying : " Do you know what this is ? ", and I never (for a while) stopped kidding him about it all. The real reason why he didn't take up the posts offered to him in the States - such as a professorship at Rutgers - was that he was very proud of being " British " ; yet he owed his post at London University to an American : Professor Robert Earnest SPILLER who authored The Literary History of the United States (1948).

The following translation is the third part of “Time Sight Unseen”, published in The Poetry/Rare Books Collection, State University of New York at Buffalo, 1993, n.p.


                                                                3

un monstre à plat ventre là-bas
                sous le feu du projecteur-ici                                il comme c’est
                aveugle envers                                  mis k.-o.
tombe en panne  une plaine bosselée
                pas de rêves visionnaires
                pour ce mécanisme se roulant
                plus ou moins


est simplement en train de poursuivre ses affaires
                vous ne vous souviendrai pas de rien
                pendant trois heures et du quart


une conscience alternative
                ce n’est pas l’équilibre cet état
maintenant regardez l’équilibre et déclarez
                perte du contrôle
                mais dans quelle mesure
                étranger à cet endroit
                appelé théâtre

où un autre à peine moi
                même pas récupérable par la folie
                puisque j’ai été dérobé
                vécu ailleurs en marchant maintenant non-sens
                ce présent non-voulu
                se pénétrant et devient parmi
                l’étranger silencieux parmi nos
                mutuel nos
                mangeant la grande recette


(c) T. Wignesan - Paris, 2017
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