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French
Poetry
today |
Night handà propos Benoît Conort : « Main de Nuit », Champ Vallon, 1999 by Jean-Michel MAULPOIX Translated from the original French by Catherine Wieder
First : the title : « Night Hand » giving us sufficient matter to ponder and to see : Man's hand, an ink hand, the hand of the poem, the hand of he who knows from every single inch of his body that he is bound to die, the hand which draws towards death or holds back, Orpheus' hand resting only a few moments on Eurydices' shoulder, the hand that sums itself up in one last glance… Who will ever know whether the gestures of ink on the page might repell disappearance or lure us into it ? Someone here clings : a hand, a voice … to the Medusa's Raft, both distress sheet anchor and last hope. This book tells his gesture, it scrutinizes it, fixes it, supports it : the nail or muscle of thought, the poem is written with the energy of despair, the strength of a night hand : « one's jaws clenched on to night ». For the hand is a jaw too when a man, in order to keep on, uses it to hold his breath and when thus it clutches without in truth one ever knowing whether it is to go down again and again and/or rise back, since in the task of writing both are mingled together and neither light nor prop may be grasped elsewhere than in the acute consciousness of disappearance. Thus naked is such hand which digs and scoops out, and beautiful too in that it threw down the gauntlet to show its flesh and bones ; made more salient through effort nothing more than the deadly and heartrending grip, oh ! so heartrending, indeed !
With this third book, Benoît Conort ends the cycle he had started in 1988 with « Pour une île à venir » (« For an island to come ») and followed, in 1996 with « Au-delà des cercles » (« Beyond the circles »), two books published by Gallimard in the Collection entitled « Le chemin » (« The path »). This time the volume is thinner and skittish, knotty like the very hand which applies it its tension from beginning to end. But from this dark precariousness does it draw its strength as well as from being held by nothing but its own effort of negation and awareness. Thus does it answer to today's task on the part played by the poet to « conquer his own atheism, thus destroying nostalgic phraseology, the posture of promise or the prophetic destination towards the Open, from the inside the powers of language ».
Benoît Conort « went down all the steps ». Like Orpheus, he reached there down below, he touched the bottom of the well of the impossible, he left behind Medusa's face and brought back the face of man. He shows it as it is under the sheet of the skeleton's corpse, not as a ghost but as our fellow creature and : « I loved that man indeed, the passion of that passionately manly man. » The night hand is a friendly hand, one of those we miss and would love to be able to shake once and again for they help us to live.
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