Paris, Monday 15 January

The zinc roofs of the buildings and church are damp this morning: it rained overnight, which means the temperatures, below freezing, must have gone up a notch or two. Pigeons are splashing in the gutters.

I’m still working - fussing? - with the Jaccottet translation I began last week, a recently-discovered poem in his 1946-67 Poésies (Gallimard). It is a short, apparently simple poem about sitting in room in the morning: ‘Silence enters like a servant come to tidy up.’ The via negativa… .

And so here I am sitting in my own quiet room, waiting…