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Occitan poetry 980-2008 by Joan-Frederic Brun
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Narrations
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Yves Rouquette was born in Sète in 1936, but he always considered that his homeland was southern Rouergue, near Camarès, where he lives nowadays, after having been for long years a literature teacher in Béziers. Very young he became the chief-redactor of the leading literary journal in Occitania, "Oc". At this time he was considered by everybody as the most promising Occitan writer of his generation. In 1965 he was one of the founders of a more pollitically_minded journal: VIURE (to live). That was the time of politically- driven literature and Ives was surely one of the greatest masters of this kind of literature in Occitania. Perhaps he's been the only Occitan writer able to make true poetry with this thematics of revolt. His style is absolutely unique, strong, elegant, dazzling. Unfortunately he did not develop his narrative works to the extent his enthusiastic readers expected and he's mostly known as an author of powerful, inspired poetry, whose texts really fit with the drama of the collapse of Occitan popular civilization during the XXth century, and, beyond, the drama of any oppressed culture. All his poetry his a passionate research on the best expressivity of idiomatic Occitan language, a try to make all words swollen with warm life. And, really, he succeeds in reaching this goal. The choice presented here-below is made of poems of this period. They come from "Los negres, siam pas sols " (We, negroes, we're not alone) (1972), the booklet where Rouquette better succeeds in adapting into Occitan poetry the theme of "negritude" inspired by Aimé Césaire and Léopold-Sédar Senghor. Since Occitania is a colony of France, like African or Carribean countries, the poet symbolically considers Occitan people as dark-skinned mankind, living a similar oppression and revolt. This is the period he wrote "Lo miegjorn se vei la pèl negra" (Southern France is seen with a block skin), in a poem sang by the revolutionary singer Claudi Martí. Later, after the breakdown of the Occitan political movement in 1982, Yves Rouquette came to another kind of poetry, forgetting the immediate struggle and the cry of revolt, with the same wonderful style. After a long period of silence where he made some efforts to become a French writer, rather unsuccessfully, he comes back to Occitan literature since a couple of years, with the same magic skill to manage words and emotions, for the greatest pleasure of Occitan readers.
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TOTA LENGA Tota lenga es la de l’ostal Las paraulas se daissan menar Revèrtan los mòrts atanben quand la tèrra se los pasta Mas lor pòdes pas tot demandar. Son çò que siás.
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ANY LANGUAGE Any language is that of home But you can't trust on them for everything. They're what you are.
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NIGHT OF THE WOMB
I'm from here: from the night In my ragged words I'm black and my mother was black I hear myself going on to the light.
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USELESS PEOPLE Evil is done, evil is always done, where we arrive with our papers blackened with poetry: the factory has been closed, men are gone away, the sheep barn falls into ruin, wild boars show their snout in the courtyard and old ladies stay waiting for the postman with his orangy delivery van, and nothing imports any more. We're become bookkeepers of defeats and ruins, and we snivel by the wall because we've forgotten that a poem is abulldozer.
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YOUNG FIRE Outside, there is the country. It's not darkness that frightens me, but what's inside of the head of lonely people. Inside stone you'll find nothing but stone, and there's nothing to translate from the language of air and leaf, nothing but a bustle of dead stars. But in mankind's country, is living the young fire, and everytime when a lawyer's office resounds with the lame French speech of a hundred of peasants, there's a poem falling over the neck of all sellers of wind.
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