This article is published in Cultural Perspectives on the Irish in Latin America (ed. F. Healy; Estelle Epinoux / https://www.cambridgescholars.com/product/978-1-5275-3013-3).It is about the work of the contemporary Irish poet Harry Clifton and the way he evokes South America as a sort of lost paradise, a pre-lapsarian world he would never enjoy, and as an unwritten yet fantasied alternate history, “A past alive in a haunted future / long before [he] was born” (The Winter Sleep of Captain Lemass, 2012, “The Rain Shadow”, 86). In an article where he questions the notion of home and the concept of “a literature of coming back or coming home”, he writes: “I was the only child in the stifling years of midcentrury Ireland for whom the poem Tháinig Long ó Valparaiso had a literal meaning.” (“Coming Home, Home to nowhere”, 15, 7).) His parents met in Chile before coming back to Ireland. After having similarly emigrated he also came back to Ireland, hence repeating the sin of returning, as if he were condemned to re-enact it. He describes himself as an “apostate” or as “exotic” and the world as a cosmopolis or roundabout where people are “displaced”, always in transit, constantly on the move on a “futureless road”. Even if Chile itself does not often appear in his work, what he calls “the South” does frequently reoccur and can take many different forms such as places, daffodils or lemons. It can also appear through altered artificial fake forms such as streetlights or serotonin bottles. The perception of having returned to a home which was not a home, “home to nowhere” seemed to have triggered a lack, a sort of hauntingly evocative perspective, expressed through his quest for light, for the sun, for yellowness. Throughout his poetry, of which geography is a central element, the South is continually opposed to a grey Ireland, to the North, the cold and the rain. The poet seems to be constantly looking for love, presence and a sense of home which he associates with yellow and light. The yellow he describes is pure and powerful yet fragile and can only be briefly experienced before dislocating itself again within a fractured everyday greyness.This article is a chapter of a collective volume which provides the reader with an exploration of Latin America from an Irish perspective. The contributors have explored the multiple, and sometimes surprising, links that exist between Ireland and Latin America, touching on specific features of these links such as the political and cultural influence of the Irish diaspora and their political relations. These topics are examined through different media, including literature, films, history, poetry and sociology, and offer an opportunity to discover an aspect of Irish culture and history that has not been widely studied.
Cet article est publié dans l'ouvrage collectif Cultural Perspectives on the Irish in Latin America (ed. F. Healy; Estelle Epinoux / https://www.cambridgescholars.com/product/978-1-5275-3013-3). Il traite de l’œuvre du poète irlandais Harry Clifton et de ses liens avec le Sud, l'Amérique du Sud et le Chili en particulier. Il parle de sa quête de jaune et de lumière qu'il associe au Sud et oppose au gris du Nord, où il est revenu après avoir émigré avec cependant le sentiment de ne pas être rentré chez lui. Si le jaune et la lumière sont multiformes, s'ils peuvent être artificiels ou s’obscurcir, n’être plus que des traces – signes et restes – d’un sens perdu et d’une grâce disparue, ils percent la grisaille de l’ordinaire et du quotidien. Ils peuvent aussi être le symbole d’un effet de présence et/ou de l’amour, de moments où l’être est transpercé et redéfini. Dans un monde cosmopolite où les êtres sont tous décrits comme exilés, le jaune et le Sud deviennent le symbole d'une quête d'amour, d'appartenance et de présence.
