Comme j'ai la flemme d'écrire quelque chose, je vous offre aujourd'hui une citation de Stephen Fry (tirée de The Hippopotamus, que je lis en ce moment, ayant beaucoup aimé le précédent livre que j'avais lu de lui), que je tâcherai de ressortir la prochaine fois que quelqu'un m'accusera d'utiliser des mots compliqués dans ma prose :
The poet has no reserved materials, no unique modes. He has
nothing but words, the same tools that the whole cursed world uses to
ask the way to the nearest lavatory, or with which they patter out
excuses for the clumsy betrayals and shiftless evasions of their
ordinary lives; the poet has nothing but the same, self-same, words
that daily in a million shapes and phrases curse, pray, abuse, flatter
and mislead. The poor bloody poet can no longer say ope
for open
, or swain
for youth
, he is expected to
construct new poems out of the plastic and Styrofoam garbage that
litters the twentieth-century linguistic floor, to make fresh art from
the used verbal condoms of social intercourse. Is it any wonder that,
from time to time, we take refuge in gellies
and ataractic
and watchet
? Innocent words, virgin
words, words uncontaminated and unviolated, the very mastery of which
announces us to possess a relationship with language akin to that of
the sculptor with his marble or the composer with his staves.