Kathleen Raine (1908-2003)
The Collected Poems have just been published by Faber & Faber:
Kathleen Raine is one of the most distinguished writers of our time.
Born in 1908, she lived through the upheavals of the twentieth
century and knew some of its most illustrious men and woman of
letters, including T. S. Eliot, C. S. Lewis, St John Perse and Ted
Hughes.
She spent
some of the most formative years of her childhood in a remote
Northumberland hamlet, and although a poet at heart, chose to read
botany and zoology in the Cambridge of the 1920s “because nature
was my theme”. Recognised as one of the leading scholars of William
Blake and W. B. Yeats, she has left behind a body of critical work
and literary essays of immense significance. Yet it is foremost as a
poet that she lived, publishing several collections of visionary
verse in which she expresses the numinous qualities of daily life
that the modern world has largely forgotten.
Her
faithfulness to this vision kept Kathleen Raine on the margins of the
literary and university establishment, which had placed itself under
what she always considered to be the domination of materialist
ideology, and so cut off from the timeless traditions which have
given us the greatest productions of Western art. Yet this same
faithfulness, and determination, led her to co-found the journal
Temenos in
1980, leading in turn to the
Temenos Academy,
launched in 1990,
whose Patron is the Prince of Wales. The
Academy is now a teaching
organisation based in London, devoted to the learning of the
Imagination, both of East and West and
the understanding of
tradition as continual renewal. The
many publications
include the Temenos Academy Review.
The year's programme of lectures can
be found here (https://drive.google.com/file/d/1OpejU1veAX9dmXkcMgTSfjuzfETZF0bB/view?usp=sharing) and on
the Temenos Academy
site (https://www.temenosacademy.org/). The site also contains
an extensive audio archive of lectures, as well as information about
the newly created two-year
diploma course on
the Perennial Philosophy.
Certains recueils de poésie de Kathleen Raine ont été magnifiquement traduits en français. Chez Verdier, on peut ainsi lire, en édition bilingue, La Présence. Voici un poème en anglais, suivi de sa traduction par Philippe Giraudon:
ReplyDeleteTell me, dark world,
What it is you know
That I dare not.
Destruction is the mode,
Love an old story
That none believes.
I ask the grass:
To every living cell
God's secret told,
Knowledge of the all,
In each seed
The axis mundi
Where blood is shed
Of one who dies
And rises from the dead.
Révèle-moi, monde obscur,
Ce que tu sais
Que je n'ose pas.
La destruction est la norme,
L'amour une vieille histoire
En laquelle nul ne croit.
J'interroge l'herbe:
A chaque cellule vivante
Le secret de Dieu est révélé,
Connaissance du tout,
A chaque graine
L'axis mundi
Où se répand le sang
D'un homme qui meurt
Et ressuscite d'entre les morts.