The title "The Graveyard by the Sea" suggests a poem in the style of Gray's "Elegy Written in a County Churchyard," a contemplation of the finality of death and the way it levels out the differences of fame. Superficially Valéry follows this pattern. Valéry's graveyard, like the one Gray describes at Stoke Poges, is the one at Séte (originally Cette) where the poet was born and where he is buried. It is also a poem about eternals; about death and deathlessness, but it is soon apparent that he is not concerned with pseudo-religious morals.
It is not easy at first (or dare I say it, even at second) reading to grasp clearly what Valéry means. Rather than using words to point up some moral, his language comes across as convoluted, seems to become incorporated back into itself, to be involved in itself like music. It can seem, in fact, meaningless. Rather than use words as signifiers, he uses them to compose sound patterns which draw the reader into a mise en scène, not unlike programme music. Valéry wrote:
"Literature interests me profoundly only to the extent that it urges the mind to certain transformations--those in which the stimulating properties of language play the chief part [...] The force to bend the common word to unexpected needs without violating the 'Time-honoured forms'; the capture and subjection of things that are difficult to say; and, above all, the simultaneous management of syntax, harmony, and ideas [...] are in my eyes the supreme object of our art."
This speaks to the interiority of Valéry's poetic process, He wrote: "Poetry has never been an objective for me, but an instrument, an exercise." The sound of the language is intrinsic to its imaging, its rhythm and this, of course, untranslatable."
Jacques Derrida wrote of Valéry's antagonism to Freud: "We will not ask what the meaning of this resistance is before pointing out that what Valéry intends to resist is meaning itself."
In the highly formal, mannered musicality of Valéry's verse the influence of Mallarmé is clear. In his Cahiers, Valéry notes that the programme of a poem is less important than its subject: By a programme he means a gathering of words and syntactical moments, above all "a table of verbal tonalities, etc." In his La Musique et les lettres, Mallarmé had said something similar:
"I assert, at my own aesthetic risk, this conclusion: [...] that Music and Letters are the alternate face here widened towards the obscure; scintillating there, with certainty of a phenomenon, the only one, I have named it Idea."
Coleridge thought "The French wholly unfit for Poetry" because "Feelings created by obscure ideas associate themselves with one clear idea." So, the translator is presented with a "feel" or "sound" rather than a story or logical structure to hold meaning together, and this makes the whole process almost impossible. It might explain why there are so few translations of either poet.
It is this "feel" that has to be caught and the meaning left to fend for itself.
In Terence Rattigan’s play The Browning Version, the student Taplow, after translating some lines of Aeschylus rather too fluently, is reprimanded: "You are supposed to be construing Greek, not collaborating with Aeschylus." I hope I manage to avoid Taplow's error and that my attempt here, insofar as it succeeds, is a collaboration with Valéry.
- David Pollard
Cuba/France | French | Poetry (excerpts)
February, 2017Heroic Sonnets is a translation from the French of the book Les Trophées by the 19th-century Cuban/French poet José-Maria de Heredia. Robert Lowell called him “The man who told the history of the world in a thousand sonnet scenes...with a Tennysonian density and finish.” Heredia was an influence on Lowell’s History, which has the same structure, and includes an imitation of Heredia’s sonnet “The Trebia.” Heredia writes with strong imagery, music, immediacy, and compression, and the translation tries to be faithful to those values. The sonnets are pictorial; a number of them were directly inspired by the paintings of his friend Gustave Moreau. Its alexandrine lines are rendered as blank verse. Though the translations are unrhymed, that music is in part restored through assonance and alliteration; the quatrains and tercets of the original, which the rhymes defined, and which in Heredia’s hands are essential aesthetic units, stand. Heredia is famous for his haunting last lines, and this translation was made with a view to keeping that resonance.
- Larry Beckett
France | French | Short Fiction
December, 2016We all know the fairy tales of Perrault and Grimm, but few readers would recognise the name of Catulle Mendès, one of the great turn-of-the-century creators of fairies. His fairy tales in Les Oiseaux bleus ("The Bluebirds") were first published in 1888, but were largely forgotten until 1993, when the collection was reissued in French. I discovered Catulle Mendès while researching his contemporary, Jean Lorrain, whose fairy tales I have also translated. I was tickled by the outrageous princess in “La Belle du Monde” (“The Only Beautiful Woman”) and was soon reading it to children and adults in French or in my translation.
In Les Oiseaux bleus, Mendès foresaw the extinction of fairies as interveners in human life. But here at the beginning of the collection, enchantment can still change the course of things for the better: a princess prefers riches and power to a good prince, but with the help of a little magic and a lot of muscle, the prince who has tried to win her love receives a far better reward.
Readers will recognise Perrault’s inspiration and a style reminiscent of Grimm, but Mendès’ storytelling breaks with their tradition of toning down the comedy; he explores the incurable selfishness of humans by invoking laughter at the princess’s trifling and time-wasting. Mendès often takes pleasure in surprising his readers with an unexpected turn near the end of a story, as he does here, giving us, and the prince, the last laugh.
- Patricia Worth
French | Poetry (excerpt) | Québec
December, 2016War is more than a political conflict--in late capitalism, it’s a way of life. From Kandahar, Afghanistan, to Rivière-du-Loup, Québec, this war is constellated by concrete acts of terrorism, such as 9/11, and also by a state of near-constant alert, or traumatic consciousness. “History doesn’t exist, it collapses,” the speaker says, moving between mediated images of war and the violence--some symbolic, much of it physical--we encounter every day. It’s tempting to return, in mind, to a time in modernity free from war, but other than a brief gasp between WWII and Vietnam, that time is a phantasm. The speaker of The War Years counsels the reader to continue to move forward, from an age where “we have buried God,” and no longer have a need for poetry, epic or otherwise: “don’t forget but don’t think/ go straight ahead/ carried by what was.” “What was,” is history; “what is,” includes, in this worldview, a confusion between worlds, languages, and us/them binaries wherein the enemy is identified with the path of waged destruction, and “us,” by adherence to “the way of champions.” The champions “eat prize-winning cows/ and all the biggest swordfish,” and “defend the highways/ where our blood flows.” As for the “enemy,” the semantic coordinates are blurred in translation, as they would be in any process of transposition or examination of the language and pronouns used to demarcate, identify, and possess: “you don’t know what they’re capable of/ they will insert themselves into your silence/ until you can no longer tell/ how many we are.” Within this maelstrom, there remains our inheritance of beauty, as preserved in the gaze of another: “and in your eyes.../ I see it already, smoking and beautiful/ Kandahar under the bombs.”
- Virginia Konchan
Chronic Heart (Cœur chronique, Le Castor Astral, 2013) by Eric Sarner, winner of the Prix Max Jacob 2014, is a poetry collection composed of three parts, three melodies. Sarner tells us that Chronic Heart “recounts events, names of places, people, works, and words that, at any given moment” resonated emotionally with him. He adds that, “from beginning to end, what grabs us are our emotions and what often accompanies them, our questions. The work of the poet is to give voice to all that.”
I chose three poems from the collection's third part, Almost a Wandering Song. This is the heart, the chronic heart rhythmically beating, punctuating us, marking time. The titles of the poems in Almost a Wandering Song are eighty Ladino words brought back from trips by the poet. While the poems are written in French, some lines are also in Ladino. The poems are stories, testimonies, time revisited through language.
- Hélène Cardona
France | French | Novel (excerpts)
October, 2016Sébastien Rongier’s enigmatic novel 78 brings us into a provincial French brasserie in 1978, where a disparate collection of characters grow tipsy, argue, break up, smoke cigarettes, read, watch each other, and listen to the rasp of Johnny Cash’s voice wafting from the jukebox. Their stories unfold through chains of Georges Perec-like vignettes, which are gradually braided together as the characters interact.
In 1978, France was still haunted by the bitter and bloody Algerian War, which had ended sixteen years previously. Millions of pieds-noirs (European Christians and Jews living in French Algeria) and harkis (Muslim Algerians who had fought in the French army) had fled Algeria for France after Algeria gained its independence. The nostalgia for a French Algeria played a significant role in the development of the National Front political party in 1972, a far-right, nationalist, anti-immigration party led by Jean-Marie Le Pen. The National Front is still alive and thriving today, and Le Pen’s daughter, Marine Le Pen, has taken the helm; the last two years’ regional elections in France have seen historic successes for the party, and connections have been drawn between its right-wing populism and that of Donald Trump.
We see these tensions reflected in 78. Max, the owner of the brasserie, had fought in Algeria, where he met Mohamed, an Algerian who is now the brasserie’s chef. Although the two had been on opposing sides, they struck up an odd friendship. Max eventually saved Mohamed’s life: after Mohamed was nearly killed in the bloody Paris massacre of FLN (pro-liberation) Algerians in 1961, he came to Max for help. Max has been hiding and employing him illegally ever since. Meanwhile, four of the brasserie’s customers are National Front disciples, who discuss politics loudly. They are hoping to convert Max to their party, unaware of his pro-Algerian sympathies.
Rongier relies heavily on the French pronoun on, which can mean you, he, we, or they, depending on the context. While this works well in French, rendering the text all the more mysterious and giving it a lilting rhythm, it makes translation into a language without such a catch-all pronoun particularly difficult. I sacrificed some strict faithfulness to the text and to its spirit of mystery in the name of clarity, often replacing the pronoun with “the man” or “the boy.”
- Gretchen Schmid
French | Poetry (excerpt) | Québec
October, 2016A special feature on Québécoise poet and novelist Rachel Leclerc in Lettres québécoises (No. 146, 2012) states: “Few bodies of work are as coherent, singular and constant. Rachel Leclerc is one of the great voices of Québec literature. Not one that proclaims loud and clear, but one that whispers, like the voices we hear in church or in libraries. And what she sings is sacred.” (my translation)
This excerpt of six poems is drawn from her 1992 book Les vies frontalières ("Borderlives"). In awarding the Prix Émile-Nelligan to this work, the jury’s president said it was chosen for “its purity of language, variation of rhythm, the strength and evocative character of its images, and the economy of its presentation.” These poems recount Leclerc’s return to her native Gaspésie, which she left as a young woman some fifteen years prior. She returns with her lover, in a quest to reconcile with a past marked by loss and turmoil. It is a passionate, deep exploration of the estrangement she feels--broken ties with family, a land, and a heritage--and the struggle to find a new way of being, what she refers to symbolically as “living at borders,” or borderlives.
There are many reasons why I translate Leclerc’s poetry: the luminous beauty of her language, the striking images, the juxtaposition of the prosaic and cosmic, the search for the essential, the ability to be enchanted. I particularly like its musicality. When I read her poems aloud, I hear the sounds of the Gaspésie: waves rolling onto pebble-covered beaches, wind blowing through pine trees on mountain paths. Sometimes the words are a slow interior recitation, other times they are an incantation, even an imperious cry. I work hard to capture and reproduce such effects in my translation. It requires careful word choice and a judicious handling of enjambments and ellipses, two techniques that Leclerc uses with great mastery. Sometimes it requires breaking with Leclerc’s complete eschewing of all punctuation and using (sparsely) an exclamation or question mark (see poems #3 and #5). This is necessary because in French the stress naturally falls at the end of a word, fragment, or clause, whereas English blank verse is built on groupings of stressed and unstressed syllables.
- CS Lemprière
Isadora Duncan, who haunts our car-mares with her scarf entangled, has cut a wide swath through literary, art, and film history. It was an exciting project to translate from the French her story, so wonderfully told by Anne Reynes-Delobel, in our joint project, Glorieuses Modernistes, published just now by the Presses Universitaires de Liège. A story that, along with Anne's chapter on Kay Boyle, completed the essays I had written on seven artist women in my Glorious Eccentrics; Modernist Women Writing and Painting, each essay so expertly translated by Anne. So it has turned out to be an equilibrating project, the most delightful balancing act I can possibly imagine.
- Mary Ann Caws
Egypt/France | French | Poetry (excerpts)
February, 2016Andrée Chedid's Textes pour la terre aimée (Texts for the beloved earth) was originally published in 1955 by les éditions Guy Lévis Mano (GLM). Lévis Mano was a French typographer, editor, translator, and poet who spent five years imprisoned during World War II. Upon Lévis' return to Paris in 1945, GLM published such luminaries as René Char, Paul Éluard, Henri Michaux, and Jacques Prévert. In 1987, Textes pour la terre aimée was republished by Flammarion as part of a collection titled Textes pour un poème: 1949-1970. Chedid dedicated the volume to Lévis Mano, "mains et voix de la poésie" (hands and voice of poetry).
Writing about the process of bringing "ces textes lointains" (these distant texts) to new life in the latter half of the twentieth century, Chedid posed a series of questions in the introduction to the Flammarion collection: "Pourquoi tous ces textes, forgés à prix d'anxiété et de plaisirs? Ces textes qui charrient peines et joies, ruines et clartés, qui apaisent parfois, interrogent le plus souvent....Pourquoi toute cette chasse aux mots, ce besoin de rapprocher le poème—à travers défrichements, confrontations, emboîtements inattendus, alliances qui surprennent—d'une émotion, d'un bouleversement intime, d'un cri du dedans, d'un chant indicible? Et pourquoi s'acheminer vers un espace qui n'aura jamais lieu?" (Why all these texts, forged at the price of anxiety and pleasure? These texts that carry pain and joy, ruins and clarity, that sometimes soothe, more often ask questions....Why all this hunting after words, the need to bring the poem closer—through clearings, confrontations, unexpected articulations, alliances that surprise—towards an emotion, an intimate dislocation, a cry from within, an unutterable song? And why move toward a place that never had location?)
Never one to leave her reader in the dark without a companion, Chedid also offered a response that, almost thirty years later, continues to reach out a hand: "En réalité, je ne cherche pas d'épilogue, ni de jardin perdu; seule la poursuite me mène....Ainsi, chaque poème achevé continue de m'apparaître comme un caillou dans la forêt insondable, comme un anneau dans la chaîne qui me relie à tous les vivants." (In truth, I don't seek an epilogue, nor a lost garden; only the pursuit leads me....Such does each completed poem continue to appear for me as a pebble in an unfathomable forest, as a link in the chain that connects me to all the living.)
- Marci Vogel
France | French | Novel (excerpt)
September, 2015Pierre Senges’s Geometry in the Dust is a book about city life. On a visit to a foreign city, the book’s narrator is trying to write a description of the city that will furnish instructions for his king to build a city in his home land. Never having seen a city before, his approach is to try to apprehend and set down on paper the principles of the city that he observes in action around him.
In this third chapter, the narrator reflects on one of the city’s many paradoxes: in order to truly know the city, we have to get lost in it. There are cultural resonances here with certain of the psychogeographers’ and Situationists’ experiments (namely la dérive: the urban walker’s surrender to unconscious impulses, useful for discovering hitherto unknown aspects of the city), but if Senges had them in mind when he was writing this chapter, they go nameless--or nearly so.
Whatever may be said of these wanderers, the greater focus is on the orientateur, or wayfinder: the person one stops on the sidewalk to ask for directions. Luckily, their instructions do not interfere with our ability to get lost: instead of useful directions, the wayfinders provide the traveler with “a Menippean satire for their little corner of the city, a macaronic, a description expressed in the local creole.” Along with the street preachers, buskers, graffitists, bustling crowds, romantic couples, and insomniacs of the city that Geometry in the Dust describes, these wayfinders are the book’s comic heroes, and probably not too different, if we only look hard enough, from ourselves.
This is the second excerpt of Geometry in the Dust to be published here at InTranslation. The first chapter was published in the May 2015 edition. The original book, published in 2004 by Éditions Verticales, includes twenty-six illustrations by the artist Killoffer.
- Jacob Siefring
The Brooklyn Rail welcomes you to our web-exclusive section InTranslation, where we feature unpublished translations of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and dramatic writing. Published since April 2007, InTranslation is a venue for outstanding work in translation and a resource for translators, authors, editors, and publishers seeking to collaborate.
We seek exceptional unpublished English translations from all languages.
Fiction, Nonfiction, and Poetry: Manuscripts of no longer than 20 pages (double-spaced).
Plays: Manuscripts of no longer than 30 pages (in left-justified format).