Jacqueline Starer

K.B. KEITH BARNES

Extracts

English Translation
by Helen McPhail

I

K. felt tired. He spent hours resting, stretched out in the sun on a chaise longue, his head leaning a little to one side. For several months now he no longer worked late into the night, the night that did not judge, that did not wound, that made him feel master of himself – at least four hours of solitude and silence, every evening, to write : he had been forced to give up the pattern, to go to bed around midnight. He drank much less coffee now. The holidays came as a welcome change – a 17th century house in Norfolk, set amidst fields and tall grass, fifty kilometres from a windy sea. He enjoyed using a scythe and looking at the pond and, above all, he rested.

And she took photographs, recording the man grown pale, with his happy smile, the man with his scythe, the man with his tea cup on the pebble beach. I twas the summer of the first American moon landing, and he took delight in the new era that was beginning. Later he would be known as the poet of this time of space. [...]

© éditions d’écarts, 2007