George Bradley (1953- )George Bradley est né à Roslyn, dans l'État de New York. Il a reçu un BA de l'Université Yale (1975) et étudia à l'Université de Virginie en 1977-78. Depuis 1982, Bradley est rédacteur à New York City. Il vit maintenant à Chester, dans le Connecticut.
Bradley a fait paraître ses textes dans plusieurs revues de renom : The Paris Review, The New Yorker, The New Republic, et Poetry. Parmi les ditinctions honorifiques qui lui ont attribuées, notons : le Witter Bynner Prize de l'American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, le Yale's Cook Prize (1975), le Peter I. B. Lavan Award de l'Academy of American Poets (1978), ainsi qu'une subvention du National Endowment for the Arts.
James Merrill, dans son introduction au volume de Bradley, Terms to be Met, affirme que le poète « appartient à une tradition de poètes philosophiques qui incluent Lucrèce et Wallace Stevens. Ses vers sont longs, légers, qui nous amènent facilement dans des endroits distants, et nous enseignent à écouter le son du soleil ».
Once upon a time, way back in the infinitesimal
First fraction of a second attending our creation.
A tiny drop containing all of it, all energy
And all its guises, burst upon the scene.
Exploding out of nothing into everything
Virtually instantaneously, the way our thoughts
Leap eagerly to occupy the abhorrent void.
Once, say ten or twenty billion years ago
In Planck time, in no time at all, the veil
Available to our perceptions was flung out
Over space at such a rate the mere imagination
Cannot keep up, so rapidly the speed of light
Lags miraculously behind, producing a series
Of incongruities that has led our curiosity,
Like Ariadne's thread. through the dim labyrinth
Of our conclusions to the Place of our beginning.
In Planck time, everything that is was spread so thin
That all distance is enormous, between each star,
Between subatomic particles, so that we are composed
Almost entirely of emptiness, so that what separates
This world, bright ball floating in its midnight blue,
From the irrefutable logic of no world at all
Has no more substance than the traveller's dream,
So that nothing can be said for certain except
That sometime, call it Planck time, it will all just
Disappear, a parlor trick, a rabbit back in its hat,
Will all go up in a flash of light, abracadabra,
An idea that isn't being had anymore.George Bradley, tiré de Terms to be Met (1985)
At the Other End of the Telescope
the people are very small and shrink,
dwarves on the way to netsuke hell
bound for a flea circus in full
retreat toward sub-atomic particles --
difficult to keep in focus, the figures
at that end are nearly indistinguishable,
generals at the heads of minute armies
differing little from fishwives,
emperors the same as eskimos
huddled under improvisations of snow --
eskimos, though, now have the advantage,
for it seems to be freezing there, a climate
which might explain the population's
outré dress, their period costumes
of felt and silk and eiderdown,
their fur concoctions stuffed with straw
held in place with flexible strips of bark,
and all to no avail, the midgets forever
stamping their match-stick feet,
blowing on the numb flagella of their fingers --
but wait, bring a light, clean the lens...
can it be those shivering arms are waving,
are trying to attract attention, hailing you ?
seen from the other end of the telescope,
your eye must appear enormous,
must fill the sky like a sun,
and as you occupy their tiny heads
naturally they wish to communicate,
to tell you of their diminishing perspective --
yes, look again, their hands are cupped
around the pinholes of their mouths,
their faces are swollen, red with effort;
why, they're screaming fit to burst,
though what they say is anybody's guess,
it is next to impossible to hear them,
and most of them speak languages
for which no Rosetta stone can be found --
but listen harder, use your imagination...
the people at the other end of the telescope,
are they trying to tell you their names ?
yes, surely that must be it, their names
and those of those they love, and possibly
something else, some of them... listen...
the largest are struggling to explain
what befell them, how it happened
that they woke one morning as if adrift,
their moorings cut in the night,
and were swept out over the horizon,
borne on an ebbing tide and soon
to be discernible only as distance,
collapsed into mirage, made to become
legendary creatures now off every map.George Bradley, tiré de The Partisan Review, Fall 2000, 67(4)
Of course it had been madness even to bring it up,
Sheer madness, like the sighting of sea serpents
Or the discovery of strange lights in the sky ;
And plainly it had been worse than madness to insist,
To devote entire treatises and a lifetime to the subject,
To a thing of great implication but no immediate use,
A thing that could not be conceived without study,
Without years of training and the aid of instruments,
And especially the instrument of an open mind ;
It had been stubbornness, foolishness, you see that now,
And so when the time comes you are ready to acquiesce,
When you have had your say, told the truth one last time,
You are ready to give the matter over and say no more.
When the time comes, you will take back your words,
But not because you fear the consequences of refusal
(Who looks into the night sky and imagines a new order
Has already seen the instruments of torture many times),
Though this is the conclusion your inquisitors will draw
And it is true you are not a brave man ;
And not because you are made indifferent in your contempt
(You take their point, agree with it even, that there is
Nothing so dangerous as a new way of seeing the world) ;
Rather, you accept the conditions lightly, the recantation,
Lightly you accept their offer of a villa with a view,
Because you have grown old and contention makes you weary,
Because you like the idea of raising vines and tomatoes,
And because, whatever you might have said or suffered,
It is in motion still, cutting a great arc through nothingness,
Sweeping through space according to a design so grand
It remains, just as they would have it, a matter of faith,
Because, whether you say yea, whether you say nay,
Nevertheless it moves.George Bradley, tiré de Terms to be Met (1985)
It makes one all right, though you hadn't thought of it,
A sound like the sound of the sky on fire, like Armageddon,
Whistling and crackling, the explosions of sunlight booming
As the huge mass of gas rages into the emptiness around it.
It isn't the sound you are often aware of, though the light speeds
To us in seconds, each dawn leaping easily across a chasm
Of space that swallows the sound of that sphere, but
If you listen closely some morning, when the sun swells
Over the horizon and the world is still and still asleep,
You might hear it, a faint noise so far inside your mind
That it must come from somewhere, from light rushing to darkness,
Energy burning toward entropy, toward a peaceful solution,
Burning brilliantly, spontaneously, in the middle of nowhere,
And you, too, must make a sound that is somewhat like it,
Though that, of course, you have no way of hearing at all.>George Bradley, tiré de Terms to be Met (1985)
Appearing like a "blowtorch in the sky,"
It lit the night, and thus the naked eye
At that time had no trouble in discerning
What seemed for all the world to be a burning
Bit of heaven, a rending of the veil
Of the firmament, though in fact the tail,
Composed of meteoric dust and gas,
Held little to combust, so that it was
Merely one more reflection of sunlight
Arriving out of darkness to ignite
Quick imaginations of idle men,
Seventy-six years past, in 1910.
For some, the comet heralded an age
Of science, in which mankind would engage
Ultimate questions and prevail, in which
Technical advances would enrich
Our lives and a benighted populace,
As seeing means belief, rise to embrace
The light of reason lately come in view ;
For others, as belief is seeing, too,
The visitation meant apocalypse,
Wherein the comet's orbital ellipse
Had brought it back on an appointed round
To signal that the earth would soon be drowned
In blood, the seals be broken, the sky catch
Fire, that helpless sinners would soon watch
A hapless world destroyed and kingdom come,
For if the biblical millenium
Was winding down, then judgment day was due.
Well, we were ripe for change, that much was true,
And both persuations, in a sense, have been
Vindicated, as modern medicine
Works new miracles to extend our years,
While modern warfare brings this vale of seers
To the point of prophecies that have gone
Before the wildest visions of St. John ;
Yet aren't they both evasions of the present,
Utopia and doom, predictions pleasant
Or otherwise, but easy answers to
The daily mix-ups we must muddle through ?
So men still mire in misery every day,
While earth still spins along its merry way,
Through days of bliss and seasons of distress
And eons of redundant emptiness.
The brightest memories occasioned by
Such hours pass in the twinkling of an I,
And once again the average life transpires
Amidst the sort of era that acquires
Historians but leaves the bard non-plussed,
Three quarters of a century that must
Like every other in its time, appear
to its inhabitants as the nadir
Of human kindness and the height of sense ;
Meanwhile, a dirty "snowball" circumvents
An end in space, accelerating through
Our solar system toward its rendevous
With sunshine, with the spectacles of men,
And Halley's comet has come back again.
I went out to look for it late last night ;
You would have laughted to see me, for in light
Of nearby towns and in my ignorance
Of stars, I didn't stand a snowball's chance
In Dante's hottest hell, where lost souls sigh
Because they cannot see the nighttime sky.
Oh, I may have seen something, I suppose,
An unimpressive squib of light that rose
In the southwest with Pegasus and might,
If it wasn't a plane, or satellite,
Or weather baloon, or simply a spot
On my binoculars, as like as not
Have been a comet ; that's the tale I plan
To tell the children of an aged man,
At any rate, how once, blazoned above,
Me, I beheld the very sign that wove
Its way into the Bayeaux tapestry
When, waiting on the tide of history,
Norman troops stood by the channel, how I
Witnessed the same sight seen by the Magi.
As Giotto pictured them in 1301,
Making their augured journey to the Son,
How light observed in Aristotle's time,
And subsequently hailed as the sublime
In the Philosopher's philosophy,
Has showered down its countenance on me,
Who have, I think, as much right as these
To light streaming like "long hair in the breeze,"
As the phrase goes whence "comet" is derived.
But truth to tell, what notions had survived
In me to the grave age of thirty-three
Of some grand cosmic continuity
Stretching across generations of men
And offering a type of order when
Life here on earth is at its most confused
Died in thirty seconds, and disabused
Of superstition, I went back inside
To soothe chagrin with thoughts that I had tried
To see it, that the world had grown too old
For auguries, and that my toes were cold.
Indoors, warming myself in the bright glow
And cold comfort cast by a picture show,
I switched the channel to the late-night news,
Where, among speeches, sports and interviews,
The audience was treated to the sight
Of footage filmed aboard a plane in flight,
Featuring what resembled a small comma
In space that punctuated the ring drama
Of its recurrence with a mild display
Of radience enhanced by cathode ray ;
And so I saw the object after all,
If not first hand, then in a crystal ball,
The second sight of this dim century,
That dispiriting medium, TV.
I watched awhile and then shut off the set,
Stood up, let the dog in, and went to get
A drink before I let the cat out, locked
The house up and turned in ; the ice-cubes rocked
In my glass, clucking sympathy, while framed
Within a windowpane, tiny stars flamed
Enormously in the immense inane ;
It seemed whatever musings might explain
The disconcerting music of the spheres
Had ceased to matter much, as no one hears
Anything like harmony in the skies
And comets are snuffed out before our eyes.
Somewhere that misplaced punctuation mark
Awaited faint distinctions in the dark,
But I had vigils of my own to keep
And made my way upstairs and so to sleep.
Leaving the melting remnant of my drink
To come to nothing at the kitchen sink
And wishing other viewers more success
When the next comet comes from emptiness
(If it does come, if our poor atmosphere
Is not pure smog, if we are even here)
To set its blazing match-head to the straw
Of human intellect and then withdraw,
Wheeling around its perihelion
And disappearing with the tail it spun.George Bradley, tiré de Of the Knowledge of Good and Evil (1992)
Références :
- Poetry Foundation - George Bradley : https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/george-bradley
Oeuvres poétiques :
- Terms to Be Met (1985)
- Of the Knowledge of Good and Evil (1991)
- Fire Fetched Down (1996)
- Some Assembly Required (2001)
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