In the poetical "engrenage" of philosophy and the philosophical "coulisses" of poetry....

Translation of Eric Mottram's TIME SIGHT UNSEEN, Part 3 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 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


© T. Wignesan - Paris, 2017