JEAN GROSJEANdes Critiques. Principal works: Hypostases, 1950; Le Livre du juste, 1952; Fils de
l’homme, 1958; Hiver, 1964; Élégies, 1967; La Gloire, 1969; La Lueur des jours, 1991;
Cantilènes, 1998; Si peu, 2001; Les Vasitas: Poèmes, 2001.
The Ancestor
Joachim must be in the garden. They’re not concerned with him any more.
He who was always so imperious, finally accepted so many unexpected events
that his opinion no longer counted. In his youth he took his good fortune for
granted. The first problems found him untroubled. Then he couldn’t admit his
disappointments: he gave in looking absent-minded.
He no longer counts the days or the hours. Seated under the pear tree, close to
the ra≈a hangers, he reads the hymnal. He is astonished, excited. The sun of an
early evening casts a mocking gaiety over the first dead leaves and the last of the
roses.
It’s as if he were already dispossessed of his life. It seemed to have just left,
splattering him. But the text is an insolent weed in the middle of the road,
intoning its sentences, like the wind when the brambles rake through it.
The strangeness of the world sets my heart afire.
Surely no one lasts for long.
Oh! these few days you allow us.
You wander a few seasons among the illusions
before you disappear,Joachim raises his head as if he’s heard clouds getting caught in the branches.
He notices a young man standing near him. Then he repeats aloud what he had
just read:
You wander a few seasons among the illusions
before you disappear,but at the same time he remembers the days when they’d stopped their cart in the
forest. The whole family had rested in the shade between the patches of sunlight.
Was this tall young man the only one left to come back to see him?
The young man doesn’t know what to say when he meets the atavistic sorrow
of his race. There’s a faint smile on his face, illuminated by the setting sun.
—mary ann caws and patricia terry