Lou ramas de pin negre (Le rameau de pin noir) - André Chamson

Lou ramas de pin negre (Le rameau de pin noir - The Black Pine Branch) - André Chamson

Collection of Provençal poems. French version of the author.

"Un épervier sans plus porta" - L'aucèu libre.

The author:

Born in Nîmes in 1900, André Chamson, a writer and chartist, was elected to the French Academy in 1956, and in 1959 he was appointed Director General of the Archives de France. Beyond the statement of this prestigious career, one finds a writer and a committed intellectual, as he defined himself in L'Homme contre l'Histoire (1927). This scholar is the author of a rich and diverse work that includes novels, essays, short stories and memories whose setting is often on the premises of his childhood: the Cévennes, Nimes, Ales, Gard ... He dies in 1983.

In 1988, he published his poems in Provencal: "Lou ramas de pin nègre". Chamson is an enthusiast for whom the "work is always an architecture, and architecture is only the monumental and sublime establishment of a certain way of life". He was seen alongside Jean Guéhenno and Andrée Viollis founded in 1935 the weekly of the Front Populaire: Friday. Pacifist but patriot, he entered the Resistance and joined André Malraux at the head of the Alsace-Lorraine Brigade. Through his heart and culture, André Chamson is close to history, through his humanistic commitment, he symbolizes this "republican Protestantism", of which he has succeeded in making the heritage bear fruit and whose expression can be found in this preface to La Cévennes Suite: "I will have spent my life in search of the Alliance, I mean in search of what can put us in harmony with the world, while at every moment everything seems to league to break this agreement".

Extract:

Compagnons de la nuée,
Donneurs des trous de rochers,
En ce temps, par la montagne,
Dans le pays des Cévennes,
Jambe leste, tête dure,
Talon de fer et main sûre,
De la vallée à la crête,
S'insurgeaient les paysans.

Alors, sur les promontoires,
Du versant Nord au Midi,
Sans bastion ni forteresse,
Les pâtres faisaient leur droit.
Qu'un Roi leur impose un maître,
Reste libre qui veut l'être,
Qui fait à son héritage
Un rempart de son corps.