Melançon - Selections

[yuuago]

A handful of sonnets from Robert Melançon's As Far as the Eye Can See, translated by Judith Cowan. I might need to pick up my own copy of this. I do recommend reading it if you can get your hands on it - it's a wonderful collection. He has such a way with imagery...! (Though I am a sucker for anything to do with winter, it's true.)

The French title is Le Paradis des apparences, if you want to look for the original.



30

Space is enlivened at least with leaves
running along the branches' framework.
For too long this year the cold

has kept the trees in a dormant state.
This is truly the North; it's raining.
The low sky makes of the world one room

under a ceiling of vapours painted with
scrolling of chalky brightness.
Warblers, of the black-and-white sort,

fly down, perch, fly off and are gone.
The horizon lightens with a long pale scarf which
would have pleased the austere Glenn Gould.


32

Up there on a cordillera of clouds
the sun has set a glacier too white
for it not to be a fake.

Soon this sky will be leaden; there'll
be nothing moving unless the icy wind
(for this is the north, the North

of grey springtimes and the recordings
of Glenn Gould) starts a quivering in the leaves,
barely formed as yet, of trees stiffer

than fence posts. Outlined on the coppery
evening, the maple blossoms look as if
turned on a lathe, cut out with a blowtorch.

92

All of autumn, finally, is only a sepia snapshot
with crackled edges, in which we see
some elms thrusting their branches' inky

strokes up against a troubled sky.
All of autumn, finally, is only a pack
of commonplaces, regrets for that which was

and was not, a wasteland swept by wind
until, one morning, crossing the park, we feel
the grass crunch underfoot; it froze overnight,

and in the life-giving cold, in the air
that we breathe in with delight, suddenly
we know that winter's light is on its way.

104

So much softness is a presage of snow;
the day has closed in, the air taken on
a scent of wood and of damp stone.

All seems to be waiting, motionless –
the houses, people in the street, traffic –
all displays itself, even the shadows.

We hear the cawing of a crow
and search for him in vain through
the fine network of small branches.

Then the clouds release, from zenith
to horizon, a downy light which
resolves itself, slowly, into flakes.

105

The waning moon above the fir tree
seems to overhang a landscape that bears
the name only because we have given it.

Landscape? The snow rounds off rooflines,
the snow does away with gardens, the snow
makes a halo round the moon. Landscape?

None of this resembles anything the word evokes.
This is nothing but a construct of faint marks:
some brick walls without windows,

the bluish humps and hollows in the snow,
a street light shining on nothing but branches
outlined with frost, and white everywhere.

107

The movement from night to day
and from day to night cannot,
in winter, be called twilight;

that should be a grander spectacle
than this imperceptible passage
from dark grey to light grey,

or from blinding blue-white
to the greyish white still giving off,
in full dark, a shadow of brightness.

All melts away with the hyperbolic restraint
heard in the playing of Glenn Gould
in his last recordings.