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Translation of Eric Mottram's the Nerves of Proust and Sitting Bull By T Wignesan
Translation of Eric Mottram's The Nerves of Proust and Sitting Bull by T. Wignesan
Excerpts from an article, “From space to caves in the heart recreating the collective world in Eric Mottram’s poetry” by Clive Bush, Director of American Studies, King’s College, University of London in The Journal of Comparative Poietics, Vol. I, Nos. 2 & 3 (Paris), 1990/1991, pp. 48-49. Editor: T. Wignesan:
“In Mottram’s work there is no illusion that poetry will save us. Nonetheless a commitment to a poetry of intelligence with its necessarily radical and varied forms, to a clear-eyed and non-moralistic politics, to celebration of non-dogmatic forms of life, and to creativity and its happiness, at least rehearses the possibility of choice rather than submission. It is as necessary a task for Mottram as it was for Shelley in the era of the Peterloo massacre, or Swinburne observing Disraeli’s absurd antics in relation to the Ottoman Empire. Certainly the difficulty is all the greater for Mottram in the sense that there is no “good place” for committed creative intelligence. (…) Mottram expands his frame of reference far beyond officially-recognised English poetic practice in order paradoxically to recover the actual and multiple richnesses of English cultural traditions currently betrayed by the know-nothing, pseudo-lyrical confessions of poets who mistakenly think their personal lives interesting enough to record in immediately comprehensible invariably tear-stained and melancholy mediocrity. The “immediately comprehensible” flatters a populace whose intelligence has been undermined by an autocratic State paranoid about criticism…”
Les nerfs de Proust et de Sitting Bull
comme une guérison pour l’original
tissu fin
qu’il a mis des bouchons d’ivoire
dans ses oreilles
avalait presque n’importe quoi
créa sa
scène inoffensive et l’appela la mémoire
pour honorer la divinité une centaines
de pièces de
peau lesquelles furent presque arrachées de ses bras
qu’il gagne
le triple farce de désobéissance
qu’il donne quelque chose
pour le reporter de Tribune de New York afin qu’il perde
la mémoire pèse pour réaliser un massacre
sur les nerfs qui
se sentaient une guerre Franco-Prussienne et commençaient à périr
dès le début
ainsi le passé d’une détaille urbaine voyageait comme le culte d’une cargaison
les Sioux donnèrent nos
jeunes américains qui rêvent d’un dernier bastion
(from Eric Mottram. the he expression. London: Aloes Books, 1973, p. 49)
(c) T. Wignesan, Paris, 2017
Copyright ©
T Wignesan
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