Journeys Translation of Etiemble S Tercets Voyages By T Wignesan

Journeys, Translation of Etiemble’s tercets: Voyages by T. Wignesan For André Gâteau (End rhyme scheme: aab, ccd, aab, eed in the original, the first and third tercets beginning with “Pour vous…” and constituting one complex sentence each. One would do well to bear in mind in this poem that Etiemble was the foremost authority on Arthur Rimbaud’s poetry.) For you all over I laid out my oases, all their date palms in the tiresome desert without wells, where the salts of nitrous valleys, for you* only and your hollow hips squeaked with the leaps of camel calves. For you only I stretched out the fine lace of the poplars over the blue shirt of the nights and scoured out of this bone the winding sheet of dead stars a place to lie as long as mine. * “tu”: second person “you”. © T. Wignesan – Paris, 2014