AMADOU LAMINE SALL (Senegal, 1951)

Wild Veins

You came from the North
Where the sun is depleting its
Tears behind the bars of the sky
On the back of the lightning I know
Where you came down to sing

Binding your hair in tufts of millet
And you are waiting on the most divine
Side of your body
Where the gods have
Pushed the strawberry into the mango
You are from that country
Where the swallows have drunk all the suns
And the sky still bent with sleepiness
The wind lifts your name up Bolero
And your mouth and your infallible lips
Have the languorous aroma of
The honey paths that I love
I love you like a recovery
I love your appeasing throat
The season of your mouth when you laugh
I love the house of your eyes
You warm better that the stomach
Of the bear at midday
You are so beautiful that you defuse
The trajectory of meteors
You are my new book Bolero
The first hieroglyphs of a new millennium
Why do you want to break
The momentum of the mountains?
Why do you want to silence the bird of desire?
For a long time now
And for a long time still
Because you are here
Il is no longer dark in my heart
And I ended up reinventing all theirs
And you ended up being more real than the tale
You will not age
Never will you age in my eyes
Never will I age in your eyes
We will have the same path
And it will be the road of the Earth
It will be the path visible to mens questions
It will be the answer to childrens sadness
There will no longer be any secret to love
To sing to dance
Because love dwells in us
Because words gave us their age
Because speech abolished all the silences
And yet Bolero and yet
The Princes of this country have devoured everything
They have stolen and eaten everything
They have eaten the root and
Up to the rocks bordering the root
And in their haste have eaten everything raw
To the last alphabet of this country
And now this country exists only
In the memory and the broken smile of the peasants
I know and you know Bolero
How much these Princes have drained all the seasons of our hopes
They have tortured everything
The totems, the suns, the streams, the peanut fields
The women and the old men
And the adolescents are watches devoid of winding mechanisms
Postcards from a country devoid of Koran and devoid of Bible
But with you Bolero you the loved one the blood of this singing
With you and that love that you carry and
That I carry ever more so
We will defeat the weedy earth
So that LOVE will not be short of one single arm

Translation by Jim Haenlin

Amadou Lamine Sall was born in Kaolack, Senegal, on March 26, 1951. Founder and current president of the African House for International Poetry. President of the Association of Writers of Senegal, President of the Poetry Biennal of Dakar and member of the World Academy of Poetry, with headquarters in Verona, Italy. Founder of Editions Feu de Brousse. He obtained the Great Award of The French Academy. His poetic anthologies have been translated into English, Spanish, Polish, German, Macedonian, Serbi-Croatian and Greek. He has been invited to participate as a lecturer in many universities from Africa, Asia, Europe and America. One of the most recognised poets of Africa; he outstands for his haughty and accusative attitude. His published poetry books are: Mante des auroras (1979); Comme un iceberg en flames (1982) awarded with the Second International Poetry Prize Claude Sernet Rodez; Locataire du néant (1989); Kamandalu (1990); J'ai mangé tout le pays de la nuit (1994); Le Prophète ou le cur aux mains de pain (1997); Odes nues (1998); Les veines sauvages (2001); and Noces célestes pour Léopold Sédar Senghor (2004). He also published the Anthology of poets from Senegal, prefaced by Lopold Sédar Senghor; New Anthology of black and Malgache poetry in French, with Charles Carrere, and Poems of Africa for children, prefaced also by Senghor. His poems have an elegiac tone that keeps up through all the poetical construction. Even his poetry of love (sometimes decidedly erotic) serves as well to heave up the banner of his culture and his race. He is the voice of the one that reveals disgrace, as it is the case in African poets in general. There is no complaint but denunciation in his poems, whose graceful structure is full of music and color, of figures and images that seduce the reader, striking and outstanding amidst the total landscape of the poems.

Última actualización: 28/06/2018