Poetry is the first language of ceremony, so I pay tribute to Valentin-Yves Mudimbe by composing my own poem (Benediction) and translating excerpts from one of his books of poems, Les Fuseaux, parfois (1974). Mudimbe authored several collections in the 1970s, which have received scant scholarly attention. I hope my (inexpert) translations will raise interest for his marvelous poetry. I am grateful to his family for permission to translate his work.
Benediction
In memoriam, Valentin-Yves Mudimbe
Never brighter, you arrive again, lighting up the libraries you razed to renovate.
Who, but the inheritor of hoe and plow – rooted Mudimbe – knew how
to measure the depth of each strike? First to those faulty maps, the fundamentals;
then to towers built of cracked ivory and a misapprehended riot of emotion.
From the other sides of invention you, baobab, blow us the heady scent of knowledge.
No one expected a yew towering from the heart of this Africa, nor a voice chanting
Gregorian modes at will. No one thought of smoldering tapers here.
To regulate is to tune time. L’accorder.
To rise is the task of the translator turning
prayer into labor into the densest of rock.
See how you have stashed the imagined tales of our grandmothers
in that most novel of African universals:
a mouth full of tongues. You are your own term.
Come let us listen for the gourds of a Bambara harp next to a sonata of Shona metallurgy!
Come let us welcome our wooden royalty to this cathedral of bones.
Slow as grief, we must wander through perplexities in this home you have left us,
brimming with your words, ready for our return.
Know this: we are sure we will never be dismissed
from the schools of thought you broke ground on. The last brick will never be laid,
nor will old catalogs hide what we must cite. May your sequel be heard in our questions,
our most authentic reverence for you. O wild architect,
never have you blazed brighter.
Excerpts from Valentine-Yves Mudimbe, Les Fuseaux, parfois (Éditions Saint-Germain-des-Prés, 1974) , translated by Tsitsi Jaji, 2025
I.
Sometimes the tapers
blue blades, or preordained thresholds
momentary muses or well-worn objects
from the churchyard, cries of leaves
they cut, violent caresses from another world.
There, a quiet pool in the hollowed mirror
And vibrant eyes of a multitude of souls
And dreams of ferns surrounding it all
And words slipping away, flying off into the storm
Sometimes the tapered candles
joists or signposts
at the door to an old grotto’s bench
the presence of those who have lived too long
in the heart of riches and futile impatience.
II.
The ring finger retain
the stepped coasts
Bristling scales
It brushes against arms and legs
left to the scent of lemons
the day after a sad banquet
A click
And suddenly around a lost eye
swarm fibrous insects,
tangled in the sound of crushed breasts
Below
hedges, mounds of trash
that open onto
the gatehouses of flesh
while the sea rises
a bewildering flood
in a winter of grains of sand.
…
X.
Now where is the women’s laughter ? When the bell
rings out the hour, the sea responds with the hymn
of Bambara locks. And the hollows of your shoulders,
the jelly fish drift past a nest of incantations.
I search the pacified pits for your call: the traces
of lost happiness are there in the waves, doubles
of my suicides like the ceaseless voices of armholes
The chaos of summits is this opacity of massive things,
that small joy that agitates all orbits. The accents of
lemon trees in bloom are snagged up in the clouds.
What winds are still coming?
XI.
Bound alone to the long departure, I am witness to
the music of bronze bars against the lukewarm droplets
of powerlessness. I am the fly on the faces of a
promise betrayed.
In the overflowing military marches,
the gusting dust of a tropical July is my constant
asylum. Often the precarious scent of illusions
surplants the spectacle of a curse, but what
a straightjacket!
Avalanches and rumors of gold around your body
as if the gliding heavens penetrate you: lightning
sears the full length of your folds, the harvests submerge
the granaries of your dream, the colonizers still live
in the confines of your thought.
…
XIV.
To know that I may contemplate
the sandstone of your visage
the tone of your eyes
your hands made of pale wood
your lips
measures of wonder
your knees
old ancestral pines
Prostrate mother
drawn from the ornamented East
the clouds are dark yet bright-lit
and for centuries the dim eyes
of your children yield your name
But the glory of the gods
is still staggering in you!
