Here’s a translation of Roselyne Sibille’s ‘Il Est Temps.’
I didn’t actually mean to translate this — I was working on a little sequence of hers I thought would go well into Scots, but Roselyne asked me to read her work at the performances, and, although I really like Michael Fineberg’s translations of the other pieces she’d selected (‘Avant le Nuit ne s’en Vienne’ and ‘Entre l’Aube et l’Aurore’), I kept tripping over something in this piece that didn’t suit my voice.
It’s a cast-iron sign for me if I can’t read something aloud that I need to work on it, and this instinct kicked in, hence the following:
It is Time
Autumn
the leaves know
it is time
Silence
they loosen themselves
without urgency
it is time
they let go
Light
smiles and waltzes
in the weightless
abandon of leaves
they land
tremble a little once more
and are at peace
Here’s the original:
Il est Temps
Automne
Les feuilles le savent
Il est temps
Silence
Elles se décrochent
sans brusquerie
Il est temps
Elles lâchent
La lumière
valse et sourit
dans l’abandon léger des feuilles
Elles se posent
tremblent encore un peu
apaisées
Sorry about the indents, Roselyne: I had a great deal of ‘fun’ typing in HTML that wouldn’t do what I wanted. I’ll try again once I understand how WordPress thinks these should be done.