VAGABONDAGE OF LANGUAGE (GLISSANT)

"We create our landscapes, we decorate them with our fourail, with the blood that we dream of losing on the plant, and we brush against the delible scar. Then: when our landscape combines cleanly with the lines of a country we suddenly discover to be ours, then (the vow fulfilled, the impatience dried up, the silence and leisure of the work ideal offered up), the dream of the One, formerly abandoned, gathers us once more into its tyranny. So that we will leave it soon. Because intention and its progression have become rooted: of what I write, what remains to be written escapes despite myself. "How to conclude. When the sidereal paths of space will open to man, what will he recognize of earth, he who will return from distant countries? Not that series of landscapes that we discover there (in us), but a single signifying expanse, where the banyan tree will shade the meadow. This is what each hopes to see: the earth emerging from the abyss and thickening before oneself.... We must exhaust our landscapes, in other words, realize them. But we must not fear discovering them endlessly: new, tempting, possibly prohibited."

—Édouard Glissant, September 21, 1928-February 3, 2011, from L'intention poetique (1969), as translated by Nathalie Stephens (Nathanaël) with Anne Malena as Poetic Intention: Poetics II (New York: Nightboat Books, 2010), 10-11.

Sky from the lookout over the ruins of Nero's villa.

More Glissant in memoriam, on multilingualism, at punto critico.