Chemins couleur du temps

Heather Dohollau’s poetry always ventures to the border of words and silence. A native of Wales but having lived in France since 1950, Heather Dohollau (1925-2013) had found, through the confrontation with the words of another language, the way to the unspeakable. The idea here was to juxtapose some poems in French from the set Le Dit des couleurs, with their English translation by Heather Dohollau herself.

The soul is moved by that ethereal poetry playing with time: time of the motionless moment, time of the ever-present eternity, time of the memory of forgotten places, “places where we have never been.” The delicacy of this poetry comes from a full attention to the emotions of nature; this contemplative smoothness does not exclude times of momentum and strength. The “Chemins couleur du temps” (Ways, colour of time) lead us then into a space without boundaries, with the energy of joy.

Written in 2010 for an equal-voice double choir, harp and string quartet, this piece is in the continuity of two other compositions on poems by Heather Dohollau: Pour l’oiseau (2000), for mezzo-soprano and instrumental ensemble (Symétrie, 2014), and Tout un monde ardent (2007), for an equal-voice choir and harp (Symétrie, 2009).

Anthony Girard
(translation Philippe Do)