Landscape through literature Le paysage à travers la littérature

Pinning down a town
I lived in too close communion with Nantes – my picture
of which kept being added to over the years as I did
my “growing up” there – not to have trouble defining
the place. If anything it’s the picture and its active hold
that tend to define me: on the whole, looking back
down the years at whatever period of my life, I see
myself plunged body and soul into a much more immediate,
more stimulating, more compelling element than
you would normally apply the word “environment” to.
When I try to distance myself a little from the complex
of streets and squares that shaped me at my most
susceptible, it’s a tricky business. For even when we’ve
moved away, the things that impinged on our earliest
years never quite stop exerting a distant influence,
however small, on our continuing mutations. …
So it was that the image of Nantes came back to me,
rather like a spider spinning its web: first the spokes
which I often followed out from the centre, and where
this dual attraction exerted its naked pull, then the
parallel lines, the lateral rungs, that hold it all together,
lesser lanes for me, which I seldom took, shortcuts and
passageways capricious cracks in the urban mass and
familiar above all to the city dweller I never fully was.
And captured in this web, haphazardly, are names of
places that colour the area round them, drawing a
whole patch of the city out of the shadow like a light,
paths so often trodden that the feet cannot forget, snapshots
which do not overlap, which project on the city,
rather than recomposing it, a patchy canvass, with
opaque zones hovering in the gaps, like a badly developed
photograph revealing itself in patches.
Translation: Council of Europe, 2005.
Frédéric ARAMONT
Mistral d’été
Le vent qui vient du nord,
souffle aux vertus suprêmes,
répand le réconfort
sur les contrées qu’il aime.
Balayant les genêts,
la garrigue et les fleurs,
le mistral embaumé
en unit les senteurs.
Sa force et sa douceur
et sa bonté féconde
insufflent le bonheur
à cent lieues à la ronde.
Summer mistral
The wind from the north,
with its supreme virtues,
spreads solace
to the regions it befriends.
Sweeping through the gorse,
the garrigue and the flowers,
the mistral takes on
and mingles their scents.
The mighty but gentle
and bountiful breath
spreads happiness
a hundred miles around.
Translation: Council of Europe, 2005.
Myriam ECKERT, born / née en 1972
Nous marcherons des heures entières
avant de trouver devant nous
l’évidence,
la beauté de la vie; […]
des heures et des heures encore
à sauter d’une pierre à l’autre
jusqu’à la source,
jusqu’au repos;
des heures entières, nous marcherons.
For hours on end we will walk
Until we see before us
A self-evident fact,
The beauty of life; …
For hours and hours
Hopping from one stone to the next
Looking for the source,
Looking for rest;
For hours on end we will walk.
Translation: Council of Europe, 2005.
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