Toute la journée, par la fenêtre, je vois tomber la neige mouillée. Je ne suis pas sortie plus loin que sur la galerie. Le temps est doux. D'une douceur vicieuse de fin d'hiver qui donne mal à la gorge.
Hier soir, j'ai commencé à lire le deuxième roman de Bukowski, Factotum. Faudrait que je rende le livre à la bibli. vendredi au plus tard. Il me reste une centaine de pages. Et les trois autres. Dans ce livre, j'ai retrouvé le personnage de Chinaski plus jeune, au moment où il met son père k.o., quitte la maison, fait des jobbines et commence à écrire des nouvelles à un rythme fou. Il se met aussi à boire des quantités folles de bière, de vodka, de n'importe quoi qui gèle. Il rencontre ses premières femmes qu'il traverse comme des rivières.
mon gros livre du jour :
5 romans de bukowski publiés chez Grasset & Fasquelle en 2005
Grâce à un commentaire très pertinent en bas de mon billet d'hier, page 115, l'élève Strohem a fait ses devoirs.
Trouvé une édition de Women pas chère [$9.39, moins le promocode de $3.29, plus gst de $0.30, grand total = $6.40], chez HarperCollins kobobooks. Lecture à l'écran, pour changer.
J'ai dû fouiler un peu parce que je n'avais pas noté les pages des extraits choisis en cours de lecture. Tout ça parce que les livres de la bibliothèque, j'ose pas écrire dedans, je fais un petit X avec un crayon de plomb dans la marge. Et lorsque je copie les extraits, j'efface les X au fur et à mesure.
Je dois dire aussi que ç'a été plus long de recopier l'anglais que le français. Pas habituée. Se rappeler que c'est impossible de faire du copier/coller avec les ebooks. Une chance, sinon n'importe qui pourrait en faire des modifications. Wow, ça donne des idées. Ça serait ben le fun des fois des changer des passages mal écrits. Ou encore de faire finir les histoires autrement. De rendre parfaitement hideux les plus beaux personnages, ou à l'inverse, de changer la description des monstres pour les rendre plus beaux que des Apollon. Mais ça, c'est une autre histoire. On y touchera pas aujourd'hui.
Voici donc la reprise des extraits d'hier, tels qu'écrits par leur auteur, Charles Bukowski, choisis dans Women, un roman publié vers 1978. Cette fois, j'ai pris soin de noter les chapitres.
Katherine knew that there was something about me that was not wholesome in the sense of wholesome is as wholesome does. I was drawn to all the wrong things: I liked to drink, I was lazy, I didn’t have a god, politics, ideas, ideals. I was settled into nothingness; a kind of non-being, and I accepted it. It didn’t make for an interesting person. I didn’t want to be interesting, it was too hard. What I really want was a only soft, hazy space to live in, and to be left alone. On the other hand, when I got drunk I screamed, went crazy, got all out of hand. One kind of behavior didn’t fit the other. I didn’t care. [chap. 38]
I drove home, drunk. The sun was really up, painful and yellow... [dernière phrase du chap. 43]
There is a problem with writers. If what a writer wrote was published and sold many, many copies, the writer thought he was great. If what a writer wrote was published and sold a medium number of copies, the writer thought he was great. If what a writer wrote was published and sold very few copies, the writer thought he was great. If what a writer wrote never was published and he didn’t have the money to publish it himself, then I tought he was truly great. The truth however, was that there was very little greatness. It was almost nonexistent, invisible. But you could be sure that the worst writers had the most confidence, the least self-doubt. Anyway, writers were to be avoided, and I tried to avoid them, but it was almost impossible. They hoped for some sort of brotherhood, some kind of togetherness. None of it had anything to do with writing, none of it helped at the typewriter. [vers la fin du chapitre 63]
I took my bottle and went to my bedroom. I undressed down to my shorts and went to bed. Nothing was ever in tune. People just blindly grabbed at whatever there was: communism, health foods, zen, surfing, ballet, hypnotism, group encounters, orgies, biking, herbs, Catholicism, weight-lifting, travel, withdrawal, vegetarianism, India, painting, writing, sculpting, composing, backpacking, yoga, copulating, gambling, drinking, hanging around, frozen yogurt, Beethoven, Bach, Buddha, Christ, TM, H, carrot juice, suicide, handmade suits, jet travel, New York City, and then it all evaporated and fell apart. People had to find things to do while waiting to die. I guess it was nice to have a choice.
I took my choice. I raised the fifth of vodka and drank it straight. The Russians knew something. [chap. 80]
Cecelia sat and watched us drink. I could see that I repulsed her. I ate meat. I had no god. I liked to fuck. Nature didn’t interest me. I never voted. I liked wars. Outer space bored me. Baseball bored me. History bored me. Zoos bored me. [début du chapitre 82]
When I was young I was depressed all the time. But suicide no longer seemed a possibility in my life. At my age, there was very little left to kill. It was good to be old, no matter what they said. It was reasonable that a man had to be at least 50 years old before he could write with anything like clarity. The more rivers you crossed, the more you knew about rivers - that is, if you survived the white water and the hidden rocks. It could be a rough cob, sometimes. [chap.94]
Je relis tout ça et je me dis : étrange phénomène, la traduction. C'est à la fois le même texte. Et un autre.
Quand je le lis dans sa langue d'origine, il est fort différent, il respire autrement. Il sonne, résonne et vibre « dix mille fois » mieux.
