Abdelmajid Benjelloun
(Morocco)
Le lent cerceau de la respiration
The slow hoop of breath
Aphorisms
-The moon is delivered this evening to the brook. I know not for what untemperamental immobility.
-To look at the moon, and give her fresh human looking, or rather a warm one.
-At the foot of the horizon, eve falls asleeps when the torch of the day dies.
-When gulls flock around the river, believe that the weather is not everywhere the same.
-Wind has many poplar forms in her sweep.
-I care not for the poet that throws words as a discus.
-The sky came to die between your hands like the last wave on the beach.
-Song or music interest me only if I mixed in their shadow all my gestures of grimacing happiness.
-I like paintings where beauty is arbitrary.
-Often I think the coming of the day is also the coming of the sense.
-That the light of the lamp resist to the storm is of little interest. But rather that it is a haven to the storm of light.
-The storm does not find its peace in calm, but in agitation.
-Poets also hold the magic of the mad verb.
-The stone that leaves us breathless by its immobility has in the mean time, all its time to do a tour of any soul.
-Silence is the permanent radio of any stone.
-The curves in stone are only the vague memories of its former dances.
-I am fascinated by the numbers that come after the comma in its immobility.
-For all the gold of the world, the stone never would be disturbed by its sense, nevertheless vertiginous, of stone.
-The rise and fall of breath is the same as the sea’s. Double use.
-Breathing man flies, if only a little. But, who is going to worry themselves over so little.
-Man watches his life pass by shaking the bells of his beath.
-Breath is like an accordion that plays music or that one touches.
-A trip? Just take up the flute.
-Departure is not necessarily a car attached to the rest of the train
-You purge your incapacity to create book by buying many of them.
-For certain men many of their errors are seen as success.
-Be wary of those so full of themselves. They can absorb fully no other.
-The superstitious should perhaps burn echoes in the sky.
-I could say, at least, that God made joy and pain so that we could love them both.
-Who is this believer that do not make with himself affectations of mystery concerning God.
-Is there not God in this miracle; the earth stands still at full throttle?
-Finally, we hate more than we love with this medium which is heart.
-With a woman, who do not desire a dream which has never functioned?
-With a woman erased by woman, I bit tenderly or I cut!
-Death is so made that with him we sooth all future pleasure. And, at a snap of the finger without a doubt.
-Sometimes truth devastates the world.
-When invaded by truth you will not know it.
-Truth often do not triumph unless it is not unannounced.
-Freedom is exercised only in conjunction of time and not in its structure.
-The perfect gaze is the view that things have of us.
-The visible has its mysteries and the invisible its own. Perhaps those of the visible are just more dense.
-My priority is not what is hidden in the night, but rather, what is hidden by the day.
-Loss of memory fores us to swallow awry, oh, how many years?
-In the best of cases, Memory will only become a very animated fair of loss.
-If time never returns on itself, it is only for the childish truths of poetry.
-The minute is a motor of 60r.p.s’s.
-Every dying instant transforms to silence. Nothing is lost, nothing created
-It is the meteors that are most quickly forgotten.
Translation: Robert Derr & AB
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Abdelmajid Benjelloun (born in Fez, in 1944) is a Moroccan author, historian and poet.
He is a specialist in the history of North Morocco. He taught Public Law at the Casablanca University since 1983. He is a member of “la Maison de la poésie du Maroc” and professor in the history of international relations at the department of Law at the Mohammed V University in Rabat since 2002. Since 1999 he produces a French language program on Moroccan radio (RTM), Paroles d’esplanade. Benjelloun is also a painter.
Bibliography
Works on History
- Approches du colonialisme espagnol et du mouvement nationaliste marocain (Khalifien. OKAD, Rabat, 1990)
- le patriotisme marocain face au protectorat espagnol (Imp. El Maârif, Rabat, 1993
- Fragments d’histoire du Rif oriental 1994
- Pour une approche possible de l’histoire des institutions et des faits sociaux (Toubkal, 1997)
- Le Nord du Maroc – l’Indépendance avant l’indépendance, Harmattan, 1997
- Etudes d’histoire contemporaine du Maroc, Zaghouan, 2000
Literature
- Etres et choses, le même silence, Saint-Germain-des-Prés, 1976
- Qui tire sur les bretelles de ma respiration, ed. A die, 1991
- Les sept cieux apparents du mot, Aphorismes poétiques, ed. E.m.a.j, 1993
- La mort d’un proche ne se termine jamais, Casablanca, éd. Toubkal, 1998
- Anthologie poétique, Flammes Vives, 2000
- Mama, (auto-biographical novel) with an introduction by William Cliff, Paris, éd. du Rocher, coll. Anatolia, 2002
- L’éternité ne penche que du côté de l’amour (William Blake and co, 2002)
- Hassane l’andalou, ou l’étoile de la manquante était bien allumée, Rabat, éd. Racines, 2007