Conception - Hugh MacDiarmid

Connaissez-vous Hugh MacDiarmid ? Figure majeure de la poésie écossaise du XXe siècle, ce « volcan poétique » – communiste léniniste, artisan de la Renaissance écossaise, héritier brûlant de Burns et de Joyce – reste pourtant méconnu en France. Même l’Anthologie de la Pléiade n’en donne qu’un aperçu bien pâle. Pour commencer à découvrir l’ampleur de son génie, inégal mais foudroyant, arrêtons-nous aujourd’hui sur un poème emblématique : Conception (tiré de A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle, 1926). On y retrouve ce mélange unique d’ivresse lyrique et de spéculation métaphysique qui fait la puissance de MacDiarmid.

Conception

I have reached the stage when questioning myself
Concerning the love of Scotland and turning inward
Upon my own spirit, there comes to me
The suggestion of something utterly unlike
All that is commonly meant by loving
One’s country, one’s brother man, not altruism,
Not kindly feeling, not outward-looking sympathy,
But something different from all these,
Something almost awful in its range,
Its rage and fire, its scope and height and depth,
Something growing up, within my own
Separate and isolated lonely being,
Within the deep dark of my own consciousness,
Flowering in my own heart, my own self
(Not the Will to Power, but the Will to Flower!)
So that indeed I could not be myself
Without this strange, mysterious awful finding
Of my people’s very life within my own
– This terrible blinding discovery
Of Scotland in me, and I in Scotland,
Even as a man, loyal to a man’s code and outlook,
Discovers within himself woman alive and eloquent,
Pulsing with her own emotion,
Looking out on the world with her own vision.

Extrait de Collected Poems, éd. Alan Riach et Michael Grieve, Carcanet Press, 1992, rééd. Fyfield Books, 2004, p. 142.