French | Poetry (excerpts) | Québec
September, 2017The latter two sections of Samuel Mercier’s poetry collection The War Years ("Keep Singing Vera Lynn" and "Suite for Bomber Harris") invoke a strategic military dialogue and rhetoric, referencing, for example, the 2012 Quebec student protests against tuition increases led by student unions such as the Association pour une solidarité syndicale étudiante, particularly the events of May 6, 2012, during a demonstration in Victoriaville that eventually turned into a riot. At least ten people were injured, including some police officers, and two protesters were very seriously injured (the first one lost an eye, and the second sustained head trauma and a skull fracture). The last section also reads as a complicated address to Bomber Harris (Sir Arthur Travers Harris, who assisted British Chief of the Air Staff Charles Portal in carrying out the United Kingdom's most devastating attacks against the German infrastructure and population, including the Bombing of Dresden).
These sections of The War Years are concerned with war as historical event as well as metaphor for human consciousness, as if to be conscious means to be conscious of not only history’s underlying tensions and conflicts (“the memory of happy wars”; “the prolongation of buried wars”), but the constant threat of societal implosion. Not without deeply ironic humor (“you must know how to taste/the sudden peace//in the quiet coolness/of the meat department”), The War Years uses poetic recursion—beginning lines repeating near the ending—to establish a haunting poem-cycle that disrupts rather than describes what it means to be alive in late capitalism’s eco-apocalypse, wherein the “enemy” or absolute other is no longer identifiable, let alone, at times, corporeal, belonging to terrorist networks and cyber-worlds. Seemingly straightforward yet deceptively complex, Mercier’s language play destabilizes the senses (“no rhyme nor reason/for neither words nor bombs”), as well as time-honored modes of restitution such as poetry and spring. What else can we expect from a text that turns on itself, until “we no longer really know very well/what comes next/or who is not/the enemy”?
Forgetting in order to remember, The War Years, as a whole, puts its faith not in “former dictators,” the “carrion” of time, institutions, or institutionalized violence, but in a poetics that exculpates no one, not even the poet, who seeks instead “to find/in his deepest hiding places/the contours of the enemy within.”
- Virginia Konchan
French | Poetry (excerpts) | Québec
July, 2017War 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
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
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
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