… est né celui qui sera le premier poète « caribéen » prix Nobel de littérature Derek Walcott.

Totalement ignoré en France, il a fallu attendre cette récompense pour que soit édité son oeuvre majeure « Une autre vie » (seconde publication traduite en français)

Ce désintérêt du public français est peut-être responsable, si ce n’est de l’erreur elle-même, de l’absence de correction de celle qui se trouve dans l’article de wikipedia consacré à Derek Walcott.
(concernant sa mère notamment : version française , version anglaise)

On doit au poète une définition originale de la poésie :

 » La poésie est comme la sueur de la perfection, mais elle doit paraître aussi fraîche que les gouttes de pluie sur le front d’une statue; elle conjugue simultanément ces deux temps, le passé et le présent, le passé est la statue, le présent la rosée ou la pluie sur son front.
Il y a le langage enseveli et il y a le vocabulaire personnel: le travail de la poésie est un travail de fouilles et de découverte de soi.« 

Un poème de Derek Walcott intitulé ; La mer est l’Histoire suivi de la traduction de la poétesse Claire Malroux dans : Le royaume du fruit-étoile (éditions Circé, 1992).

Where are your monuments, your battles, martyrs?
Where is your tribal memory? Sirs,
in that gray vault. The sea. The sea
has locked them up. The sea is History.

First, there was the heaving oil,
heavy as chaos;
then, like a light at the end of a tunnel,

the lantern of a caravel,
and that was Genesis.
Then there were the packed cries,
the shit, the moaning:

Exodus.
Bone soldered by coral to bone,
mosaics
mantled by the benediction of the shark’s shadow,

that was the Ark of the Covenant.
Then came the plucked wires
of sunlight on the sea floor

the plangent harps of the Babylonian bondage,
as the white cowries clustered like manacles
on the drowned women,

and those were the ivory bracelets
of the Song of Solomon,
but the ocean kept turning blank pages,

looking for History.
Then came the men with eyes heavy as anchors,
who sank without tombs,

brigands who barbecued cattle,
leaving their charred ribs like palm leaves on the shore,
then the foaming, rabid maw

of the tidal wave swallowing Port Royal,
and that was Jonah,
but where is your Renaissance?

Sir, it is locked in them sea sands
out there past the reef’s moiling shelf,
where the man-o’-war floated down;

strop on these googles, I’ll guide you there myself.
It’s all subtle and submarine,
through colonnades of coral,

past the gothic windows of sea fans
to where the crusty grouper, onyx-eyed,
blinks, weighted by its jewels, like a bald queen;

and these groined caves with barnacles
pitted like stone
are our cathedrals,

and the furnace before the hurricanes:
Gomorrah. Bones ground by windmills
into marl and cornmeal,

and that was Lamentations —
that was just Lamentations,
it was not History;

then came, like scum on the river’s drying lip,
the brown reeds of villages
mantling and congealing into towns,

and at evening, the midges’ choirs,
and above them, the spires
lancing the side of God

as His Son set, and that was the New Testament.

Then came the white sisters clapping
to the waves’ progress,
and that was Emancipation —

jubilation, O jubilation —
vanishing swiftly
as the sea’s lace dries in the sun,

but that was not History,
that was only faith,
and then each rock broke into its own nation;

then came the synod of flies,
then came the secretarial heron,
then came the bullfrog bellowing for a vote,

fireflies with bright ideas,
and bats like jetting ambassadors
and the mantis, like khaki police,

and the furred caterpillars of judges
examining each case closely,
and then in the dark ears of ferns

and in the salk chuckle of rocks
with their sea pools, there was the sound
like a rumor without any echo

of History, really beginning.

(Pour lire plus VITE la grille, cliquer ici)

Quelques poèmes de Derek Walcott