Simone Routier - Simple désir de femme

[highlyeccentric]

Oui,
Ami,
C'est un rêve
Que je tients d'Eve.
Il vient me tenter,
Saurai-je résister?
Ton sourire fin exprime
Ce soir, oh! tout un monde intime,
Et tes yeux, citernes de reflets,
Ont cet art précieux d'être indiscrets.
Mais voici: je voudrais ouvirir ta cervelle
Pour voir mieux, de plus près, tout ce qui gite en elle.

---

I'll admit one reason this poem stood out from the rest of Routier's poems in the Oxford Book of Canadian Verse is that it's language is simple enough for me to understand - but not translate, alas. It's the second-to-last line that gets me: "but see: I want to open your brain" (and then I can't translate the last line properly - "to see better, closer up, all that is listed in there", is the closest I get, but google translate wants "all that is in that cottage", and either way it would make more sense if there were a circonflex on the i).

Comments

[majoline]

What are you trying to do with the translation? Because "to see better, closer up, all that is listed in there" makes sense to me?

I see it as sort of, the author wants to understand and so wants to open up and peer inside the brain past the filters that are two people trying to communicate.

I'm not sure how to communicate that prettily though.

[highlyeccentric]

In this case I'm genuinely not certain that 'listed' is the correct translation.

[monksandbones]

I think I can help, because I think this is an archaic usage that's probably only still current in Québecois/Canadian French, which still uses a number of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century terms that are no longer in use elsewhere. It's related to the "ci-git" (here lies) that you see on French tombstones. I'd suggest a translation of something more like "everything that lies/rests in it." Dictionnaires d'autrefois also suggests that in archaic nautical terms, giter (circonflexe optional!) can mean something like "come to rest on the bottom of a body of water in a shipwreck situation."

Also, it requires an institutional subscription, as far as I can tell, but the university of Chicago's Dictionnaires d'autrefois site is a glorious online searchable compilation of a bunch of early-modern French dictionaries! Edited to add: ...By which I mean that you should see if the université de Genève has a subscription.

[highlyeccentric]

OOH SHINY. Also, that makes sense of the 'why no circonflex??' question...

[monksandbones]

Ooh, do you have access to it? It is indeed most shiny, and very helpful when I end up chasing bits of legal Latin from Whitaker's Words to Du Cange to seventeenth-century French!

As far as I can tell, the circonflexe is optional in all early modern French meanings of giter - in the dictionary compilation, it appears to depend on the dictionary whether it's there or not.