Category: French

A walk on the wild side: The Pure and the Impure by Colette

Colette’s The Pure and the Impure opens in an opium den in Paris sometime during what would come to be known, looking back through the veils of nostalgia, as the Belle Époque. Our narrator, also named Colette, arrives, not as a participant but as a writer intent on conducting a little research. Perhaps, it is implied, for novel.

Fully prepared to be bored, I settled down on my own little mattress, lamenting the fact that the squandered opium smoke rose thickly to the skylights. There it reluctantly came to rest, and its dark, appetizing fragrance of fresh truffles and burnt cocoa gave me patience, a vague hunger, optimism. The muted red color of the veiled lights pleased me, as did the white, almond-shaped flames of the opium lamps, one close by, the other two disappearing like will-o’-the-wisps, far off, in a sort of alcove tucked under the balustraded gallery.

She describes the night as it passes, with a careful attention to the sights, sounds and scents, but all the while she holds herself apart from those indulging directly in the smoke. Her words carry the promise that all manner of decadent secrets may be revealed in the pages to come and, as the narrative progresses, she does go on to discuss sexuality, gender, and the dynamics at play between men and women, speaking through her alter ego with a frankness that is fresh and at times startling. But, as in the opium den, an element of her own experience is always held apart, even contradicted by the attitudes she later expresses. And that complicated dance that both reveals and conceals is one of the reasons that this novel-that-is-not-quite-a-novel is so very engaging, as Rachel Careau’s carefully referenced and sensitively rendered retranslation demonstrates so clearly.

Originally published in French as Ces plaisirs in 1932, and then, after considerable revision, in 1941 under the author’s preferred title, Le pur et I’impur, Colette’s unconventional text was met with mixed responses. Its subject matter was salacious, no doubt upsetting some, but its structure—a series of portraits of people she has known, or known of, sometimes identified directly and sometimes referred to by pseudonyms or initials—lacked the typical narrative flow of a novel. Was it a memoir? Or a collection of gossipy accounts of past friends and lovers? Opinions diverge. However, for Colette herself, and for many of her readers, it may be her finest literary achievement. By turns oblique and unguarded in its revelations, it perhaps comes closer to an autobiography than the memoirs she would write, but it reads as something slightly different. Autofiction disguised as commentary? Whatever you call it, The Pure and the Impure pulls back the curtains on an unspoken world of sexual adventure as it existed more than a century ago. Colette introduces us to several self-styled, yet bitter, Don Juans, speaks of the companionship she found among a group of gay men, examines the nature of lesbian desire, and explores transmasculine cross gender expression in a manner that feels strikingly contemporary today.

Bisexual herself, Colette had many lovers, both male and female, during and between the first two of her three marriages, and was surrounded by a number of extravagant lesbian and gay personalities. She also appears in photographs wearing men’s clothing and confesses to having, at least in her younger years, an internal masculinity, a “mental hermaphroditism” that she wished she could escape. She speaks about how tipping the balance between a woman’s public sex and her concealed sex makes her so masculine that she unnerves a man. Such a woman’s domain, then, is that of other women:

How timorous I was, how womanly beneath my shorn hair, when I was pretending to be boy! . . . “Who will consider us women? Well, women.” They were the only ones who weren’t taken in. Under the cover of such insignia as a pleated shirtfront, a stiff collar, sometimes a vest, always a silk pocket square, I frequented a vanishing world, on the margins of all worlds. If mores, bad and good, haven’t changed in twenty-five or thirty years, class consciousness, by its suppression, has gradually undermined the demoralized sect I am speaking of, which tried, trembling with fear, to exist beyond the reach of hypocrisy, its breathable air.

In this short passage, Colette moves from describing her ability to pass within this community of women who enjoy masculine attire and activities, to what turns into a rather sad portrait of an individual she calls “La Chevalière.” She describes her as a woman with “the strange appearance of a handsome man” who so deftly and stubbornly straddles the gender line that she is unable to form lasting relationships with women and ultimately fits in nowhere. Colette based this character on a well-known real woman, Mathilde de Morny, a former lover of hers, but it is apparent here and later in the novel, that she questions if two women can ever truly be very happy in a loving intimate relationship if “one of the women shifts toward being what I call a pretend man.” Thus, if “La Chevalière” can be seen as an early depiction of what we now refer to as a transgender man (and as a trans man myself, I would accept that perspective), it is not an entirely positive one. Clearly Colette is still nursing some baggage from her five year relationship with the inspiration for her character who, to no surprise, did not receive the depiction well. Such is the contradictory tendency that runs through this book.

For a writer who tackles sexuality in an open and seemingly unapologetic manner, the attitudes Colette expresses towards lesbians, and feminist ideas, is not as progressive as one might expect. In The Pure and the Impure, she looks back to the turn of the nineteenth century to find her ideal image of love between two women. Her portrait of the “Ladies of Llangollen,” Lady Eleanor Butler and Sarah Ponsonby, who escaped the expectations of their aristocratic upbringings and retreated to the Welsh countryside where they lived together as a couple for fifty-one years is detailed. Colette carefully pores through the journals of Miss Butler, the older of the two women (unaware that Sarah also left writings), delighting in the bucolic pleasures of their days, and zeroing in on indications of their physical intimacy, such as the mention of “our bedside”:

English readers, more severe and more depraved than I, may consider this proof, but proof of what? Envious of so unshakable an affection, they assume that these two loyal maiden failed to remain pure—but what do they mean by pure? I have a bone to pick with those who believe that people aren’t being indecent when they stroke a young cheek, as warm and fresh as a velvet-skinned peach; but I their palm cups, squeezes, and weighs the pink breast as it would the peach, like it umbilicate, we must blush, cry out in alarm, sully the assailant . . . How hard virtuous people find it to believe in innocence!

Of course, as one reads this chapter, with its extensive quotes from Miss Butler’s diary, and Colette’s admitted obsession with certain passages filled with tender expressions of love and affection, it is easy to question whether her nostalgia for a time of a simpler, less flamboyant expression of love—lasting love—between two women says more about her own conflicted notion of purity than anything.

That is, perhaps, the real question at the heart of The Pure and the Impure. As a novel, it unfolds as a series of reflections that Colette is directing at her audience—that is, her reader. There is a conversational tone to her prose, the frequent use of ellipses creating a sense that she is almost feeling her way through her narrative, as, in manner, she is. There is a sensuous physicality to her writing. As Careau says in her Translator’s Note:

[. . .] Colette’s work, rarely cerebral, constantly foregrounds the body, whose intelligence she recognizes through her own experience: “It is my body that thinks,” she writes in La retraite sentimentale. “It’s more intelligent than my brain. It feels more subtly, more completely than my brain. When my body thinks . . . everything else falls silent.”

Yet her language is, in fact, controlled and precise, even—perhaps especially—when she is being pointed in her observations and recollections. She tends toward a certain economy of words, but her images can be very intense and she delights in rare and scientific words. And, of course, because most of her work has autobiographical underpinnings, it is always tempting to seek  the true Colette out in her novels and stories.

With this new edition of The Pure and The Impure we have a welcome  opportunity to experience (or re-experience) Colette’s fascinating meditation on the nature of men and women, sex and sexuality, through Careau’s attentive and sensitive translation, supplemented by extensive and detailed, yet unobtrusive, endnotes. Drawing on her own experience as a dancer, Careau describes how the musicality and discipline of ballet helped prepare her for a writer like Colette, even if she might not have realized it when she first encountered her work (her translation of Cheri and The End of Cheri was published in 2022). In her Note, she makes a very powerful statement about the role of discipline in translation:

Translation demands the dual discipline of close reading and careful writing: an attentiveness to the nuances of meaning of individual words (and to the nuances of their meaning for a particular author), to the repetition of words across a text, and to the order of words and phrases and how it causes meaning to unfold in a sentence; an alertness to tone, and its slightest shifts; a sensitivity to the sound, the music of the language. Translating Colette also requires the discipline of a researcher, in order to track down the rare words that she delights in: classical and literary usages, technical and scientific terms, contemporary slang and argot, obscure regionalisms, neologisms.

Her discipline is well rewarded in bringing all the unique qualities of Colette’s prose into focus. This is an endlessly intriguing work containing complex layers of fact, fiction, and even a little fancy. But, to read The Pure and the Impure today, from the perspective of present (and increasingly politically volatile) attitudes toward the LGBTQ community, we can appreciate how groundbreaking the book was—and how the kinds of contradictions Colette ultimately expresses about sexuality, her own and that of others, still complicate our attitudes today. Plus ça change. . .

The Pure and the Impure by Colette is translated from the French by Rachel Careau and published by W.W. Norton.

You are neither silence nor language: The Answer to Lord Chandos by Pascal Quinard

Austrian poet, writer and librettist, Hugo von Hofmannsthal signalled a break with his earlier works when, in 1902, he published the story “A Letter,” also known as “The Lord Chandos Letter.” It is presented as a letter to Francis Bacon, dated August 1604, from his (fictional) friend Philip, Lord Chandos, in which the latter defends his abandonment of the poetic life, and society in general, as a result of his nearly complete loss of the ability to express himself in words.  The sentiment expressed in this communication echoes an abrupt change in Hofmannsthal’s own approach to language and the limits of the word so closely that it has been thought to have had at least some autobiographical grounding. But, it is, in fact reflective of the contemporary emergence of new ideas about thought and expression, especially in Vienna, and the impact that would have on philosophy, science and the arts. Although the exact context has been debated, clearly Hofmannsthal was seeking to express some aspects of his own shifting literary  perspective through the existential crisis of faith in language expressed by his character in his fictional letter.

More than a century later, French author Pascal Quinard is not content to leave this influential “letter” as a one-sided communication. So he has picked up the pen of Lord Bacon to respond to Chandos (and presumably his creator) with The Answer to Lord Chandos. In his introduction, Jean-Luc Nancy suggests Quinard may have a wider perspective in mind:

Literature began to distrust itself at the dawn of the twentieth century, beginning with Nietzsche and Mauthner (much read by Hofmannsthal). At the beginning of the twenty-first century, we doubt instead if literature still takes place. Hofmannsthal’s recoil before words responds to the wear and tear of a certain grandiloquence  and literary profusion of the nineteenth century. The vibrant defense of those same words, in Quinard, responds to a banalization and informanization of language ushered in by the twentieth century.

The result is a moving defense of the vital importance of language and poetry that arises from decades of Quinard’s personal contemplation of the original story.

He opens this essay with an imaginative consideration of two artists who preferred to pull themselves away from the world, more comfortable with limited contact with others, but who continued to have faith in their art. He writes about how Emily Bronte’s time in Brussels in 1842, and the necessary social engagement required of her there, only deepened her need for solitude. Her beloved moorlands, which she wandered with her dog and pet bird of prey, served as her inspirational wellspring. Society was not essential for Bronte or for German-born English composer, George Handel. In 1710, Handel travelled to London where he would remain for the rest of his life, becoming in 1718, the director of music to the current duke of Chandos (hmm…) before becoming involved in opera and theatre. But as Quinard describes him, he preferred to live and compose in relative isolation:

Inside Handel’s small living room—according to the inventory made after his death—there was a large secretary made of walnut, a water bowl, a full-length mirror ringed with brass, and two striking wooden heads on which his wigs were placed. Two big heads without eyes or mouth, so that the wigs, reeking with sweat and smoke, could dry out when the evenings were over. So that the smell of society and its solicitations, its judgments, its resentments, its heartbreaks, were not brought any further into the house.

Ultimately, Quinard’s thoughts turn to “A Letter” and its author. Acknowledging that Hofmanthal had suffered a nervous breakdown right as the century turned, fueled by personal matters, Quinard, himself falling under the darkness of depression in 1978, fashioned a response to his fictional young letter writer.

Lord Chandos’ letter to Lord Bacon begins with an apology for taking two years responding to his friend’s last missive inquiring about his well-being. He then goes on to express his conviction that the inspired poet he once was is no more, and explain how he has lost his faith in language and the ability to express himself in any meaningful way. At the age of twenty-six he has abandoned a promising literary career and intends to retreat further from the society in which he was previously engaged. Quinard’s Lord Bacon  opens his own answer to Lord Chandos with a similar apology for taking yet another two years to reply. But his explanation is initially simple—he strongly disagrees with his friend’s argument and has needed time to formulate an answer.

The response is relatively long and passionate, likely longer than the story that inspired it. But it serves as a moving defense of the power of poetry. Bacon’s argument carries an intensity that is sensual, pointed, and persistent. He is intent on chastising and encouraging his friend to pull him out of the abyss into which he has let himself fall and advise him to hold fast to his pen no matter what:

Remember that words only abandon those who have hollowed them out and somewhat devitalized them. And if words resist those who are in the middle of speaking: never do they resist those who write. Those who write have nothing but time for them, nothing but time to go back over their sentence, nothing but time to crack open their lexicons, their chronologies, their dictionaries, nothing but time to seek the help of their old, quite incomplete grammar manual which dates to the end of childhood, nothing but time to revisit, to revive, to re-etymologize, to revise to correct, to surprise. Do not resort to stupor.

Reading the original story before reading this treatise will enhance the experience of Quinard’s response, but it is not essential. This slight volume is a celebration of the expressive force and intrinsic value of literature that will speak to anyone who loves language.

The Answer to Lord Chandos by Pascal Quinard is translated from the French by Stéphanie Boulard and Timothy Lavenz, with an Introduction by Jean-Luc Nancy and published by Wakefield Press.

2025 Wrap Up: Reading and other stuff

 

I don’t know what I expected when this year began. Ever since 2020 it seems we have greeted each year with some measure of optimism—I mean how could it be worse than the one that just passed? And somehow, each year has managed to be worse in some new, unanticipated way. 2025 saw the continuation of conflict, famine, destruction, climate catastrophes.  We also witnessed the further escalation of intolerance, racism, sexism, anti-trans sentiment, religious fundamentalism, and autocratic politics. Where I am in western Canada we have witnessed all of this, not just from our neighbours to the south, or distant nations, but right here close to home. It is hard not to lose hope, but giving up is not an option and so, 2026, here we come, preparing for the worst but dreaming of the best.

Personally, I struggled a bit this year. Family stuff, some depression, and, in late November, a car accident that has left me with stiffness and pain that is slow to subside. But, on the bright(er) side, my focus and concentration has returned, and replacing my damaged car proved easier than it might have been. My old Honda Fit had more value than I expected, and I happened to see a (newer) used vehicle that fit my needs for a very good price and was fortunately in the position to buy it. If the police manage to find the impaired driver who hit me (assuming she was insured) I will even get my deductible back. But, quite honestly, I’ll be happy to be able to look over my left shoulder again!

As for reading/reviewing, 2025 was a mixed year. I had a few off times when I struggled to finish books (or gave up altogether), and a number of mediocre reads passed without public mention. At the same time, I read some excellent poetry in English, but could not find the words to write coherent reviews. For some reason, I feel I lack the knowledge and vocabulary to say the “right” thing about poetry in my own language—I feel more comfortable responding to translations. And I did read a lot of poetry in translation this year.

Looking back over 2025, the singular defining force for me was the work of Danish experimental poet and writer Inger Christensen (1935–2009). In January I read her essay collection  The Condition of Secrecy, and I was immediately entranced by her love of language and her view of the world as informed by science, nature, music, and mathematics. I knew I wanted to read all of her poetry and fiction and, throughout the year, that is exactly what I did. I read eight of her translated works and only have one left to obtain although I have a dual language edition of one of the sequences in that volume (“Butterfly Valley”). Along the way I also decided I wanted to learn to read Danish as there are elements of her work that simply cannot be reproduced in translation (mathematical constraints in particular).

And so, I am learning Danish, or, should I say, jeg lærer dansk.

Although I enjoyed all of her books, my favourite piece of fiction was the crazy word play mystery Azorno (1967) and my favourite work of poetry was her monumental it/det (1969), both earlier works. Of course, the wonderful book length poem alphabet (1981) is also amazing. Her poetry and essays are translated by Susanna Nied, her fiction by Denise Newman.

Some thoughts about a few of my other favourite reads from the past year:

 Prose:

Ceilings – Zuzana Brabcová (translated from the Czech by Tereza Veverka Novická)

Set on the detox ward of a psychiatric hospital in Prague, Brabcová captures the institutional environment and the strangeness of psychotic interludes with the skill only personal experience can provide. This wild and delirious ride pulled me out of a reading slump.

Dreaming of Dead People – Rosalind Belben

I read two novels by Rosalind Belben this year, The Limit which was re-issued by NYRB Classics several years ago and this one which was re-issued by And Other Stories this year. Both are strange in a brutal yet beautiful way, but Dreaming is, to me, a more accomplished, in depth novel.

Love Letter in Cuneiform – Tomáš Zmeškal (translated from the Czech by Alex Zucker)

One of those books I’ve been meaning to read for years and when I finally picked it up off the shelf, I was delighted to find out how funny and weird this multi-generational family drama truly is. Zmeškal lends magical realism and historical reality with a cast of eccentric characters to create a memorable tale.

Self-Portrait in the Studio – Giorgio  Agamben (translated from the Italian by Kevin Attell)

Far from a conventional memoir, Agamben invites his reader on a tour of the various studios he has occupied over the years, reflecting on the people, books, and places that come to mind along the way. A surprisingly engaging work.

The Dissenters – Youssef Rakha

The final two novels on my list are both highly inventive in style and form. Egyptian writer Youssef Rakha’s first novel written in English manages to seamlessly incorporate Arabic expressions without explanation, adding to the richness of this original, multi-dimensional story of one remarkable woman set against the events of recent Egyptian history. Endlessly rewarding.

Nevermore – Cécile Wajsbrot (translated from the French by Tess Lewis)

This ambitious novel is a moving evocation of loss and change. A translator has come to Dresden to work on a translation of the central “Time Passes” section of Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse from English into French. Reflections on change and transformation drawn from her own state in life and various historical events accompany the process of translation.

Poetry:

Of Desire and Decarceration – Charline Lambert (translated from the French by John Taylor)

It is most unusual for a poet as young as Lambert (b. 1989) to see her first four volumes of poetry published together so early in her career, but translator John Taylor felt that the Belgian poet’s books show a natural growth best appreciated as a whole. He is not wrong (he is also a translator whose judgement I always trust).

Psyche Running: Selected Poems 2005–2022 – Durs Grünbein (translated from the German by Karen Leeder)

This selection of poetry rightfully won the Griffin Prize this past year. Grünbein’s work tends to draw on his hometown of Dresden and Italy where he now spends much time, and this selection presents a good introduction to the variety of his mid-career work. One can only hope that the attention he has received with this book will lead to full translations of more of his work.

arabic, between love and war – Norah Alkharrashi and Yasmine Haj (eds)

The first of a new translation series by Toronto-based trace press, this selection of original poems with their translations—most written in Arabic, with some written in English and translated into Arabic, exists as a kind of conversation between poets from across the Arabic speaking world and its diaspora. Vital work.

The Minotaur’s Daughter – Eva Luka (translated from the Slovak by James Sutherland-Smith)

This book, a complete surprise tucked into a package from Seagull Books, is a delight. Luka’s world is a strange and quirky one, transgressive and fantastic. Leonora Carrington is a huge influence, with a number of  ekphrastic poems inspired by her paintings but given life from Luka’s own unique angle. Loved it!

Ancient Algorithms – Katrine Øgaard Jensen (with Ursula Andkjær Olsen and others)

This is the book that marked my return to reading post-accident. And how could it not. Jensen’s translations of Olsen’s poetic trilogy are very close to my heart. This unique work begins with poems selected from those books (in the original Danish), followed by Jensen’s translations, which set the stage for a series of collaborative mistranslations guided by rules set by the various poet translators involved. A wonderful celebration of poetry and translation and the necessary bond between the two.

My Heresies – Alina Stefanescu

Finally, one of the English language poetry collections I read and did not review (I did have a great title though). Alina Stefanescu breathes poetry as a matter of course, as is clear to anyone who has had an opportunity to engage with her online. There is an infectious defiance to this collection which straddles Romania and America, conjures angels and demons, and explores the everyday reality of romantic and parental love. I connected most directly with wry observations of motherhood that resonated with my own less than conventional parental existence.

There are, as ever, many other books I read this year that could have made this year end review. You’ll have to check my blog to find them!

Happy new year!

“I never forgot. Everything is there. All I have to do is close my eyes.”: The Emperor by Mackenzy Orcel

I asked for none of this. I was waiting for the bus. I was waiting forever. I think I’ve been waiting since I was born. I sat on the floor for hours, fighting the urge to sleep. Looking beyond the clouds of dust that covered the horizon. The days went by, one looking just like the other. The bus wouldn’t come.

In an apartment in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, a man is waiting. He knows that eventually the police will find him. He has made no effort to hide. In fact, the crime he has just committed leaves him with an eerie sense of satisfaction. He has no regrets and is ready to serve whatever sentence he receives. He has known far worse confinement in his life, he is certain. Even freedom, such it was, offered a different form of slavery and only one brief respite of joy. As he awaits the inevitable, he revisits the events that have led him to this point, beginning as far back as he can clearly remember. The Emperor by Haitian writer Mackenzy Orcel is his story—fractured, pain-filled, and proud.

Our unnamed narrator does not know exactly how he came to be abandoned as a child, left alone by the roadside, but he does know that at some point he was swept up and taken into a rural community, or lakou, where a false vodou prophet—the Emperor—holds sway over a flock of worshippers, his sheep, who like slaves, work his fields and tend to his every need and desire. He demands absolute devotion, and punishes anyone who fails to fall into line. The narrator grows up in this unforgiving environment, identified by a number rather than a name, but he is not alone. He is  guided by the wisdom of a blind old man known as the Very Old Sheep, dedicated to the true traditions of voodoo, and aware of the risk of pretenders, and by his own internal compass,  a motivating force he refers to  as the Voice Within. Together they keep him from losing himself amid the brain-washed, weakened souls who surround the supposed holy man or seek his intervention with the divine:

Only the Emperor is granted the power of the word. To mould them to the shape of heart, his anger or his madness. What words capable of cauterizing wounds are not also accused of being lost or eternal? Yours were difficult to grasp. They reminded us of fond memories of the gods. Their goal was to intercede in our favour. To save us. To destroy us. To bring truth, morality and the past to an end. To transform others into obedient machines. A widespread and lucrative venture. You made a fortune off the penniless and their spoilt crumbs, their ill-gotten gains. You recreated an ancient formula.

Despite the very specific cruelties he dispensed upon his young sheep, it is the Emperor who inadvertently paves the way to his release from the lakou by forcing him to play a drum for the ritual dances. In drumming he finds expression, communication, that reaches others without words. He is punished for his disobedience, but is unable to conform. This ultimately leads to his expulsion from the community and, this time, the bus does come and carries him away to the city. He arrives in Port-au-Prince with no name, no education, and only a little cash he’d spirited away. Here he faces a new kind of brutality, but his past has prepared him for “its tyranny, its inhumanity.” He survives. He finds a job delivering newspapers, one of a crew of downcast men, working for a dishonest boss, but at least he is no longer captive. He is free. Until he falls in love.

With clean, clipped prose, finely translated by Nathan H. Dize, The Emperor is a  contemporary fable with gritty, violent undertones. The narrator’s fragmented monologue, largely addressed directly to the Emperor, moves back and forth in time, from the room where is waiting for that knock, knock, knock on his door, into his past, from his early experiences in the countryside to his hardscrabble life in the city, and, finally, to his criminal act. But it is not a strictly chronological account, nor is it always clear or consistent. It is uncertain how old he is; he seems to be both prematurely aged and preternaturally wise. Details from his time under the Emperor’s control continue to emerge throughout, a function in part of him being his primary audience. Yet, some of what he claims seems strange—there is a sense that he himself does not have as firm a grip on things as he thinks when he claims: “I never forgot. Everything is there. All I have to do is close my eyes.” One senses that he has never truly been free, the anger always simmering at or just below the surface of his narrative betrays him. And now he is waiting to surrender his liberty to the police, calm and unrepentant—he even has the evidence to prove his guilt sitting neatly beside him—but, perhaps, in a strange way, he is finally exercising his freedom by giving it up.

The Emperor by Mackenzy Orcel is translated from the French by Nathan H. Dize and published by Seagull Books.

I who dreamed of Africas: The Harmattan Winds by Sylvain Trudel

As for me, I didn’t exist until I was six months old, because up to then no one wanted to be bothered with such a case. Just my luck, I was not an official being, since there was no trace in the records of my coming into the world. Born by the side of the road like a natural disaster incarnate, I had not known the holy oil of baptism, and no one thought to scrawl my name on a government document or anything resembling it, nor even to take an ink print of my tiny foot for a hospital data sheet, even if it was as cute as a tiny goblet. In short, no one dared to believe in me even if I was born bottoms up, like everyone else.

Such is the misfortune of Hugues, abandoned in a shopping cart in a bog of bulrushes by the side of the road, only to be rescued and adopted by Céline Francoeur and her new husband Claude, granting them an instant family, or as he describes it, “they could have all of that indescribable joy, minus nausea or miscarriages, as long as no one went to claim me from the lost property counter.” Despite his unfamiliar appearance, his crossed, slightly almond-shaped eyes, it is not until he overhears his “adaptive” parents arguing over whether he should be told the truth, that the reality of Hugues’ origin story becomes known to him, forever shifting his perspective. Céline and Claude become his semi-parents, his brother and sister his semi-siblings, and his entire existence, in his heart, is rendered incomplete.

The Harmattan Winds, by French-Canadian writer Sylvain Trudel, originally published in French in 1986, is the dramatic, youthful account of a boy who does not know where he really comes from. However, there are two unlikely companions who give meaning and purpose to what might have otherwise been a lonely life in an isolated town in 1970s Quebec. One is a well-worn  collection of poetry by the fictional Gustave Désuet, a flea market find that Hugues carries with him everywhere, reading from it like a guidebook, memorizing the florid and overwrought verses which he admits he doesn’t always understand. He turns to it for comfort and enlightenment—and one also suspects much of his exuberant sense of drama, tragedy and romance are inspired by the poet’s example, even if his misunderstandings and misspelling lend his often enigmatic narrative an internal logic entirely its own. Hugues believes that Désuet, long dead by his own hand (and a rope), helped him to live his life.

He was sort of a paper tiger who one day took up his pen as you would arm to do evil, and poison dripped from his nib. A real viper, that tiger. He said that we, the rich of America and Europe, we’re living in the Accident, curled up in our accidental countries, and the Bible’s Apocalypse is a great idiocy because it has already begun and no one sees it, it’s ongoing right under our eyes that choose to run and hide behind their lids, but it’s there, and, in fact it’s us, yes, the Apocalypse,  it’s ourselves, we are the cataclysm of the poor, seeing that we kill them with one hand hidden behind our backs in the convenient darkness of our heads, so as to stay rich at their expense.

This accidental (that is, occidental) guilt inspired in our hero by his beloved poet, no doubt prepares him to embrace the second companion who suddenly comes into his life. When Habéké, an Ethiopian boy orphaned by famine and adopted by a couple from Montreal, arrives in town, Hugues is naturally drawn to him. They are the same age, and both are potential social outcasts amid the vagaries of early adolescence and the latent racism of the local community, but even though Habéké has already learned the essentials of his new life—to speak French, sing O Canada, and ride a bicycle—he carries within him the dark mysteries of a world beyond the Accident. An irresistible attraction.

I remember that I loved talking with him about Africa, and that is why I know some things today, for example that Africa is a stew of languages and that Habéké’s is full of burgeoning vowels or that in Africa men’s problems, due to their galloping demography, are both acute and grave, high-pitched and low, therefore circumflex, making Africa a kind of quotient, for it is, according to Habéké, the product of divisions between peoples, and over there that’s all there is, peoples. . . . There exist, however, little hooded hats made of soft rubber to rein in the ardor of the peoples, not well attuned to the circumflex dilemmas of Muslims or animists. And then those rubbers look like the moltings of snakes or little caimans, and I’m wondering what a man of this ilk would do with such a device, he who revers the companionship of sacred pythons and crocodiles.

But there is more. Habéké’s exotic wisdom, along with his distinctive appearance, set him apart from the world in which fate had landed him so far from his native land, and in this Hugues finds an echo of his own mysterious dislocatedness.  He sees in him a brother in arms and confesses his own truth: “I told him about my calamity in the bulrushes, my botched birth, my lost invoice, my semi-family, my other man’s eyes, and all and all.” An unbreakable bond is formed—one that sees them through all manner of adventure, outrageous schemes, and some incredibly close calls.

With the spirit of a fairy tale, yet at the same time grounded in small town Quebec (or Canada generally) in an age before video games, computers or many available television channels, this novella surges with energy. Hugues’ willingness to follow Habéké’s increasing desire to connect with his traditional heritage, arising from myth as much as memory, and bound to their mutual desire to escape, not only lands them in more than a few risky situations, but also ends up threatening the safety of two teenage girls they befriend.

Youthful narrators can be hit or miss, but the magic of this coming of age tale rests firmly on the imagination, determination, and entirely idiosyncratic worldview of Hugues and Habéké. The endless forests, rivers, and railway lines that surround them become the African landscape they dream of exploring, and the island of exile they imagine escaping to to live out their naïve utopian dreams. Fast paced and original, it is wonderful to finally have access to The Harmattan Winds in Donald Winkler’s lively English translation.

The Harmattan Winds by Sylvain Trudel is translated from the French by Donald Winkler and published by Archipelago Books.

Staying too literal is a dead end: Nevermore by Cécile Wajsbrot

It is the beginning of time. There was a before, of course, there was day, but everything begins, begins again at night. Genesis. The beginning of time. “Time Passes,” the second part of To the Lighthouse, can be read as a separate work, a text we can approach as we would an island from which, to be sure, the contours of the shoreline, of the mainland can be seen—but the only thing that counts is the exploration of the island. A creation story. Dividing light from darkness.

Only twenty pages long, the “Time Passes” section of Virginia Woolf’s novel is a bridge or passageway between the first and third, marking the passing of ten years during which a summer house on the coast of the Isle of Skye stands bereft of the human life that once filled it. It is empty, and yet it is not. The forces of nature observe, occupy, and lay claim to the house, its contents, and the grounds. Elsewhere war rages and several characters from the first section, including the central figure, Mrs. Ramsay, meet unfortunate fates, noted in brief, bracketed asides along the way. It is not until the end of this interlude that human life begins to reappear on the scene.

This poetic evocation of time and abandonment flows through Cécile Wajsbrot’s contemplative Nevermore, not unlike the Elbe to which her narrator returns regularly during her sojourn in Dresden. This intriguing, intelligent novel, follows an unnamed translator who has come to the German city to work on a translation of “Time Passes” from English into French. She is grieving the recent loss of a close friend and hopes that both the project and the unfamiliar location far from her home in Paris will help her heal:

I’m elsewhere, in another city, another country. The language of my internal thoughts is not the one spoken here. Are we ultimately impenetrable? Will I never know the internal life playing out here? Will I pass like a silhouette, a shade, without knowing anyone?

As someone who has valued her independence, her “untethered life” of freedom, she is seeking a temporary refuge within which she can disappear while she immerses herself in her work. Thus, “Time Passes” not only offers her purpose and direction, but exists as an incantatory exploration of the imperfect art of ferrying a piece of literature from one language to another. As she makes her way through phrases and passages that seem to echo the sense of absence that haunts her, she trials variations and fumbles with sound and meaning, attempting to sketch out a first draft.

However, the ongoing translation is but one thread in this wide ranging narrative. It is interwoven with historical, political, and artistic streams. Regular “Interludes” trace the history of the High Line in Manhattan, from its earliest days as an elevated freight rail line built to transport goods arriving at the Hudson River port and service the warehouses, factories, and slaughterhouses in the surrounding area. In use from 1934 through to 1980, the tracks lay abandoned and open to the ravages  of time and the elements until they were turned into an elevated park and promenade above the noise of the city nearly three decades later. As she repeatedly returns to this evolving space, she is interested in exploring the shifting economic, artistic and human forces that shape the environments we live in. Nothing is static.

Indeed, change is often catastrophic. Another theme that regularly resurfaces is the 1986 disaster at the Chernobyl nuclear reactor near Pripyat, Ukraine. The town was evacuated and a new community was built just outside the so-called Exclusion Zone. But as scientists, and eventually film crews and tourists returned to the abandoned town, they found that nature—flora and fauna—had continued to thrive and even take over some of the empty buildings and structures. The persistence of life in the absence of human care or interference, mirrors the scenes evoked by Woolf decades earlier in her depiction of the elements, insects and animal and plant life working its way into the empty house in “Time Passes.”

Then, of course, there is the very city in which the narrator has taken up temporary residence—Dresden. The history of its destruction and subsequent reconstruction is evidenced and memorialized everywhere. As a backdrop to the translation of a work that spans the Frist World War, a presence even if it is off-scene, so to speak, a city with such an indelible war-time history makes sense. The narrator takes long walks at night, following the river, thinking of death. At times, she seems to encounter some kind of presence and wonders if it is a ghost or a briefly animated memory of her friend. As the messages her family and friends back in Paris leave on her phone go unanswered, she even contemplates the possibility of extending her stay a little longer. She is seeking something even if she doesn’t know what.

There are also other important themes and elements that occupy our narrator’s thoughts in between her translation sessions at her laptop. Michael Powell’s 1937 film, The Edge of the World, for example, based on the evacuation of the Scottish archipelago of Saint Kilda, echoes the common image of abandonment while music, including compositions by Arvo Pärt, Debussy, Felix Mendelsohn and more, forms a sort of narrative soundtrack (all the sources and resources are included at the end). As someone who is, by virtue of her profession, attuned to the rhythms and musicality of language—a particular challenge with the text she is working on—it is not surprising that music should play such a fundamental, even transformative role in her immediate journey. This is, then a rich novel of ideas, one that incorporates its many varied digressions seamlessly into the progressive translation of Virginia Woolf’s “Time Passes” at its core.

But what about this activity so central to this work? How is the potential translation of an English text into French within a French novel realized in an English translation? As the narrator tests out possible variations for each passage she encounters, she often starts with a literal version, then troubles the grammatical and lexical limitations of a language that cannot always do what the source language can to reach some kind of structure that will later be fine-tuned. This often necessitates shifts and small sacrifices to capture not only the meaning, but the lightness, flow, and qualities of repetition in Woolf’s unconventional original. Again and again, we are offered insight into the processes a translator employs to bring a text to life. English translator Tess Lewis’s ingenious approach to this translation-within-a-translation makes these passages accessible to all readers regardless of prior knowledge of French. Each time Wajbrot’s narrator returns another sentence or two from “Time Passes,” Woolf’s text is presented in italics, while a third font (Helvetica Neue Light) is used for the possible French variations under consideration, translated into English (in the primary font) if necessary to highlight nuances between them. Meanwhile, Lewis cuts some of the more literal or less complicated translations to, as she says, sharpen focus on those alternatives that shed light on the process of translation. Of course, the translator-narrator is not only dealing with words, their sounds, lengths and order, but also questions of meaning and intention. Fortunately, with Woolf, there are manuscripts, different edits, letters, and diary sources that she can consult. As the narrator admits, the art of translation is not an exact science,.

This is, then, an ideal book for anyone interested in the process of translation—readers of translated literature, presumably—who enjoy wise, lyrical meditations on a wide range of unexpectedly interlinked subjects. But it is also the story of one woman’s coming to terms with loss and grief through deep engagement with a remarkable piece of literature. Perhaps the only way to truly heal.

Nevermore by Cécile Wajsbrot is translated from the French by Tess Lewis and pulished by Seagull Books.

I accept. I accept it all: Return to My Native Land by Aimé Césaire

At the end of the small hours delicately sprouting handles for the market: the West Indies, hungry, hail-marked with smallpox, blown to bits by alcohol, the West Indies shipwrecked in the mud of this bay, wickedly shipwrecked in the dust of this town.

At the end of the small hours: the last, deceiving sorry scab on the wound of the waters; the martyrs who refuse to bear witness, the fading flowers of blood scattered on the futile wind like the screeches of chattering parrots; an old life’s ingratiating smile, lips apart in deserted anguish, an old wretchedness decomposing in silence beneath the sun; an old silence broken by tepid pustules, the dreadful zero of our reason for living.

The image of his hometown that opens Martinician poet, playwright and politician Aimé Césaire’s Return to My Native Land, is brutal and unforgiving, a bleak portrait of destruction, despair, and disease. With its uncompromising vocabulary, relentless energy, and pointed repetition, a pulsating beat soon settles into the language. It will carry the reader—or listener, for these words beg to be heard—through to the end of this powerful and inspiring epic. Explored through the lens of surrealist poetry, this intensely personal journey to self-affirmation and biting deconstruction of the colonial condition became a rallying cry for the African diaspora. It is also one of the best known French poems of the twentieth century.

Césaire was born in 1913 in the town of Basse-Pointe, Martinique, the second eldest of six children. Although his family were of modest means, they moved to the capital, Fort-de-France, so he might be able to have a good education. It was a wise investment, as Aimé received a scholarship to the Lycée Louis le Grand in Paris. But the move to Europe was a sobering one as the young man came face to face with the fact that although he was a French citizen, the colour of his skin openly set him apart. It would serve as the beginning of an understanding of himself in relation to an African heritage and a legacy of slavery and colonial domination. With fellow students, Léopold Senghor from Senegal and Léon Damas from Guyana, he contributed to the development of the concept of “Negritude” or black consciousness, a revolt against colonial values that not only formed the foundation of an intellectual movement but shapes his celebrated poem.

Return to My Native Land (Cahier d’un retour au pays natal) first appeared in print in 1939, the year Césaire left France and moved back to Martinique with his wife and first child. Over the years it would undergo several revisions before the definitive French language version was published in 1956. The English edition reviewed here is a recent (2024) rerelease of the 1969 translation by John Berger and Anna Bostock, edited and introduced Jamaican writer and scholar Jason Allen-Paisant. In his introduction, Allen-Paisant writes of his personal history and connection to this work, noting that his appreciation grew slowly, ultimately bridging the seventy-seven years age difference between himself and Césaire:

In time, I became aware that this poem inspired movements of liberation and cultural assertion across Africa and its diaspora. But above all, Césaire’s poem was about my body. It was a sound in which my body was at home. This enchanting sonic power (its rhythms suggestive of the drum, of chanting, of ceremony) is hard to strip away. Still today, even now that I understand the meaning of nearly all its words, I connect with this poem through its sound.

Although Césaire found his poetic expression through surrealism, there is a broad narrative arc to Return to My Native Land. The early section speaks of the poverty and decay of his hometown, recalls childhood memories, and acknowledges the pull of Europe as means of escape. Leaving home is seen as the only way one can find oneself. It is to become part of a long history of dislocation:

To leave.
As there are hyena-men and panther-men,
so I shall be a Jew man
a Kaffir man
a Hindu-from-Calcutta-man
a man from Harlem-who-hasn’t-got-the-vote

Famine man, curse man, torture man, you may seize him any moment, beat him, kill him – yes, perfectly fine to kill him – accounting no one, having to offer an excuse to no one

The wandering man, homeless, trying to find a place and meaning , grows increasingly angry and bitter in a world in which his people are either hated, seen as wretched beasts, or loved as novelty and entertainment. At times the anger takes on a wider, universal tone:

Words? We are handling
quarters of the world, we are marrying
delirious continents, we are breaking down
steaming doors,
words, ah yes, words! but
words of fresh blood, words which are
tidal waves and erysipelas
malarias and lavas and bush-fires,
and burning flesh
and burning cities . . .

Know this well:
I never play except at the millennium
I never play except at the Great Fear

Accommodate yourself to me. I won’t
accommodate myself to you!

As much as this is a work that seems to sing off the page, it can be harsh and demanding. The language can be quite brutal and disarming, the images, often dark and visceral, as the poet confronts his own feelings of disgust, guilt, shame, and anger in his response to the world around him and the history that shaped it. But gradually he begins to find a strength and direction in himself and a vision of future he wants to see for his people. Self-acceptance does not lead to weakness but to defiance:

Make me rebellious against all vanity but docile
.           to its genius
like the fist of our extended arm!
Make me the steward of its blood
make me the trustee of its rancour
make me a man of ending
make me a man of beginning
make me a man of harvesting
but also make me a man of sowing

The man who rises as the poem nears its close is one who accepts his biology but refuses to be defined by it. He is called and calls his people to rediscover and reclaim their humanity after centuries of dehumanization and trauma through a reimagined return to their African roots. That is the native land to which he has, in spirit, returned. In body, however, he will remain in the land of his birth and continue to explore these themes through his writing and plays, and put his passions into practice in political life. Aimé Césaire died in 2008 at the age of ninety-two, but Return to My Native Land, remains a critical call to action and profound anti-colonial statement that is now, eighty-five years after its first appearance and almost seventy years after the release of the definitive French edition, more important than ever.

Return to My Native Land by Aimé Césaire is translated from the French by John Berger and Anna Bostock, with an introduction by Jason Allen-Paisant, and published by Penguin Books.

“and every day / you elucidate a knot”: Of Desire and Decarceration by Charline Lambert

When a poet’s work first appears in translation, it is rarely more than a single volume or an edited selection. Even then, it can take decades for a prominent foreign language poet to be finally be translated and published in English. But for young Belgian-Francophone poet Charline Lambert (b. 1989), the situation is quite different—her first four books of poetry (originally published between 2016 and 2020) have recently been released in one single, dual-language volume titled Of Desire and Decarceration. As her translator, John Taylor, explains in his Introduction (an earlier version can be found online here):

The motivation for bringing forth this substantial corpus is that the four books respond to each other, grow out of each other. They are like stages—beginning with the evocations of bewitchment, temptation, restraint, and detention besetting Ulysses, Circe, and Penelope in the poet’s first book, Hemp and Ivy—of an ongoing quest to grasp the mysteries of desire and gain insight into its innermost relationship, not only with the body, but also with language.

Her work is vibrant, ecstatic, alive—rich with imagery drawn from mythology, philosophy, nature, science and physiology. As someone very familiar with Taylor as a translator and a poet, I can see why he was so immediately captivated by her emotionally and linguistically inventive poetry which he has brought into English with such care and attention.

To read Lambert’s first four books—each an extended sequence of verse and poetic prose pieces—in sequence is to experience the poet’s deepening exploration into questions of identity, where an embodied self-expression is examined at the minute, physiological level in concert with an expansive metaphysical self-realization within an external world of earth, wind and water. Although subject, voice, and form shift as one moves from volume to volume, her writing is typically spare, and the same essential human forces—desire, solitude, spirit, joy—are present, even if they may be the source (or the outcome) of struggle and pain, while her occasional use of uncommon, even esoteric, words reflects the limits and the potential of language to capture complex states of being—in the body, the mind, and the world. There is a tension in the interplay of all these elements that courses through her work, finding new expression with each successive book.

Her first book, Hemp and Ivy (Chanvre et Lierre), as noted above, reimagines Ulysses’ encounter with Circe and brings Penelope in to the drama. All three characters struggle with desire and temptation in their own ways. For Ulysses, bound to his mast, his desire and the lengths he must go to avoid a tragic fate is depicted with vivid intensity:

.     A desire swarms, coming from even farther
than the esophagus, a desire rounder than the
navel, more burning than the urethra. A resonant
canalizing desire, which widens the dikes of the
arteries and erodes the epidermis. It will later
become a song, if it is not hemp.

.     Circe’s fate is a patient fate.

*

.    Naked ivy on the mast, a column of climbing
vertebrae.
.    In volutes of breath and nervous arabesques,
he hoists himself into the sky.
.    He unfurls his great back muscles of wing or
verve.

From this mythologically themed excursion, Lambert’s work turns towards a more abstracted poetic examination of the themes and questions that inspire her. Her second book, Dialyzing (Sous Dialyses) turns on her idiosyncratic approach to language. As Taylor indicates: “Lambert’s writing, which often appeals to scientific and medical terminology, also sets into motion a poetic and self-analyzing process of ‘dialysis.’” Akin to the medical functions and procedures associated with the term, her subject here is removing an element from her body—physical, emotional, or mental—examining, processing, purifying it through the act of writing and returning it to the embodied form in which she exists. “She is ‘dialyzing’,” hence the title as Taylor has chosen for his translation. This sequence of poems also begins to hint at the struggle to break down the boundaries between the body and the self, a theme that will be explored more directly in her next book.

Lambert’s poetry is perhaps at its most explicitly scientific here, witnessed in the incorporation of unexpected  natural and physiological terminology in striking ways as her subject explores the intricacies of her own desires in a manner that blurs or escapes the limitations of the physical form and merges with a natural environment:

.    At the edge of a cliff, potent dialysis, she
fights over the infinite with the ocean. But they
breathe at the same gill.

.    Their breath escapes, enters through a crack,
dashes to lose itself in the volutes of her pleura-
colored dress.

There is a breathless intensity to her verse that is especially evident in this sequence as her subject repeatedly loses, dissembles, and reconstructs herself in a windy, watery, earthy space:

.     She unstitches each vertebra from her
spine, carries out the denuding of her neck, her
windpipe, her thighbone.
.     Erects them into a new nudity of columns.
.     Anchors it in soil, and watches herself grow.

But in the end, she is enveloped once more.

With her third book, Decarceration (Désincarceration), Lambert seeks to redefine identity and existence beyond the prison of embodied existence. The idea of breaking free from an incarcerated state of being (incarnation) is openly explored now in succinct, precise verse, addressed to “You”—a movement, at least in the progressive reading experience, closer to the speaker’s own self. The fleshy matter of the body has a limit that can seem impossible to override, so the first step is to free the language you employ to define your being:

You are a countable solitude.

You are a light shattered
into beams.

You are
A barely recognized fire.

*

You want to decarcerate the language from you,
decar–

cerate these words from your plexus
and every day
you elucidate a knot.

The struggle to emerge is a tension between solitude and longing as a path to both self-identification and transcendence. It is critical to be free to form and shape yourself before being named, defined by a  body and a pronoun.

Before evaluating
the situation,

draw up an inhuman
report

*

Re-forming oneself as meander, winding
into the maze before
the accident,

before having to be called
something.

This poetic invocation is open and affirming, and can be understood in more than one sense. In his introduction, Taylor speaks of the many challenges he encountered in his attempt to preserve or replicate the distinct word choices, puns, and double entendres that Lambert revels in. I would suggest that, as a primarily but not entirely unilingual Anglophone reader, one’s appreciation of her poetry is not dimmed for the inevitable loss of some of the allusions and word play. As for her fondness for unfamiliar words and scientific terms, many are essentially the same in both the French and English versions, and my dictionary did see considerable use, something which only served to enhance my reading experience (and vocabulary).

Finally, with A Salvo (Une salve), Lambert’s fourth—and in this context, final—volume, her poetic quest reaches a certain degree of resolution, and an understanding of Taylor’s impulse to translate and present these works together as one becomes clear. Again the voice shifts, as the poet’s speaker adopts an imperative tone, addressing the sensual and physical experience in relation to a natural and cosmic reality. An intense, incantatory rhythm propels this relatively short sequence, with its recurring double-stranded refrain “Inhabit the night / Enter the sea.” This is established in the opening pages as a rejection of the soul crushing cage of darkness:

Never again sight, its eyes aborting the horizon,
.    that rude roughness in the psalms of the hand
.    from which the song of the clouds is removed.

And an invitation to a kind of whole body rebirth in the water:

Washing oneself–while seeking a flesh in which
.   to be, a skin to embody oneself in. A swim.
.   A lapse of time. A parturient’s dawn. Then,
.   nothing will better express thickness than
.   fraying and fleetingness.

The strength of A Salvo lies, not only in its sustained energy—as befits its title—and in Lambert’s own maturity as a poet, but, in the deep satisfaction that arises from reading it as the culmination of the existential quest that unites her first four books of poetry. What a joy it is to have them together in one volume.

Inhabit the night—and these crystals of being,
.   emaciated out of deterioration, become meteors.
Enter the sea—and what you have already
.   experienced, decimated into a thousand
.   scintillations, becomes a sparkling splinter.

Of Desire and Decarceration by Charline Lambert is translated from the French by John Taylor and published by Diálogos.

 

 

 

Looking back at a year of reading: 2024 edition

Each year when I review the list of books that I have read, I face the same challenge deciding what to include and what to leave out of a final accounting. As usual there are the books that I know, even as I am reading them, will be among my favourites for the year. Just as I know the ones I don’t like, the ones I won’t even mention or take the time to review. Basically, everything else that I have reviewed, was a good book.

This year, my count far exceeds a respectable “top ten” or “baker’s dozen” and there are some striking factors at play. One is that the ongoing  violence in Gaza has heightened my focus on Palestinian and Arabic language literature—long an area of interest and concern. Five of the Palestinian themed books I read made my year end list. As well, I have paired several titles, typically by the same author or otherwise connected, because the reading of one inspired and was enhanced by the reading of the other (not to mention that such pairings allow me to expand my list). Finally, as reflected by my top books, I read and loved more longer works of fiction this year than usual (for me). No 1000 page tomes yet, but perhaps I’m overcoming some of my long book anxiety.

And so on to the books.

Poetry:
I read far more poetry than I review, but this year I wanted to call attention to four titles.

Strangers in Light Coatsevokes by Palestinian poet Ghassan Zaqtan (Arabic, translated by Robin Moger/Seagull Books) is, perhaps, a darker than his earlier collections. Comprised as it is, of poems from recent releases, it actively portrays a world shaped by the reality of decades of occupation and war.

My Rivers by Faruk Šehić (Bosnian, translated by S.D. Curtis/Istros Books) is a collection particularly powerful for its depiction of a legacy of wars in Bosnia/Herzegovina including the genocide in Srebrenica. His speakers carry the burden of history.

Walking the Earth by Tunisian-French poet Amina Saïd (French, translated by Peter Thompson/Contra Mundum) is such a haunting work of primal beauty that I can’t understand why more of her poetry has not been published in English. Perhaps that will change.

Nostalgia Doesn’t Flow Away Like Rainwater by Irma Pineda is one of a number of small Latin American poetry collection from poets and communities that have not been published in English before. This book, a trilingual collection in Didxazá (Isthmus Zapotec) and Spanish with English translations by Wendy Call (Deep Vellum & Phoneme Media) was particularly special.

 

Nonfiction:
This year, my favourites include a mix of memoir and essay and a couple of works that defy simple classification.

The Blue Light / Among the Almond Trees by Palestinian writer Hussein Barghouthi (Arabic, translated by Fady Joudah and Ibrahim Muhawi respectively/Seagull). Blue Light chronicles Barghouthi’s years in Seattle as a grad student and the eccentric circles he travelled in, whereas Among the Almond Trees is a much more sombre work written when he knew he was dying of cancer. The two books complement each other beautifully.

French intellectual, critic, ethnographer and autobiographical essayist Michel Leiris is a writer who means so much to me that the occasion of the release of Frail Riffs (Yale University), the fourth and final volume of his Rules of the Game in Richard Sieburth‘s translation, was not only an excuse to pitch a review but an invitation to revisit the earlier volumes. Definitely a highlight.

I Saw Ramallah by Mourid Barghouti (Palestinian/Arabic, translated by Ahdaf Soueif/Anchor Books) is a moving memoir detailing the author’s return to his homeland after thirty years of exile. Reading it reminded me that I had a copy of Scepters by his wife, Egyptian novelist Radwa Ashour (Arabic, translated by Barbara Romaine/Interlink Books). This ambitious work blends fiction, history, memoir, and metafiction and I absolutely loved it, but my decision to include it here, like this, rests on the memoir element which complements her husband’s in its account of the many years he was exiled from Egypt—a double exile for him—especially the years in which she travelled back and forth with their young son to visit him while he was living in Hungary.

Candidate for the book with the best title, perhaps ever, Dostoyevsky Reads Hegel in Siberia and Bursts into Tears by Hungarian scholar  László Földényi (translated by Ottilie Mulzet/Yale University) was an endlessly fascinating collection of essays exploring the relationship between darkness and light (and similar dichotomies) through the ideas of a variety of writers, thinkers and artists.

 

Fiction:
As usual, fiction comprised the largest component of my reading and, as I’ve said, I read more relatively longer works than in the past. Normally I have a special fondness for the very spare novella and, of course, my list would not be complete without a few shorter works, including one more pair.

The Wounded Age and Eastern Tales  / Noone by Turkish writer Ferit Edgü—translated by Aron Aji (NYRB Classics) and Fulya Peker Cotra Mundum) respectively—who is sadly one of the writers we lost this year. His work, which draws on the time he spent teaching in the impoverished southeastern region of Turkey in lieu of military service, is filled with great compassion for the people of this troubled area. But his prose is stripped clean, bare, and remarkably powerful.

Recital of the Dark Verses by Luis Felipe Fabre (Mexico/Spanish, translated by Heather Cleary/Deep Vellum) is an award wining translation that seems to have garnered less attention than it deserves. This comic Golden Age road trip follows the misadventures of the body of John of the Cross on its clandestine voyage to Seville. Brilliant.

Celebration by Damir Karakaš (Croatian, translated by Ellen Elias-Bursać/ Two Lines Press) is an exceptionally spare, unsentimental novella about the historical forces that pulled the residents of Lika in central Croatia into World War II.

Spent Light by Lara Pawson (CB Editions) is a book I’d been anticipating since reading her This Is the Place to Be. Strange, at times disturbing, often hilarious and always thoughtful, this is one of those books that (thankfully) defies description.

If Celebration is historical fiction at its most spare, Winterberg’s Last Journey by Czech writer Jaroslav Rudiš (German, translated by Kris Best/Jantar Publishing) is the exact opposite. Ambitious, eccentric, and filled with detail, it follows a 99 year-old man and his male nurse as they travel the railways with the aid of 1913 railway guide. What could possibly go wrong?

Children of the Ghetto I: My Name is Adam by Lebanese author Elias Khoury who also died this year (translated by Humphrey Davies/Archipelago Books) is the final Palestinian themed work on my list. This is a challenging and rewarding novel about a man born in the ghetto of Lydda during the Nakba that examines complex questions of identity.

Star 111 by Lutz Seiler (German, translated by Tess Lewis/NYRB Imprints)is the autobiographically inspired story of a young East German would-be poet’s experiences among an eccentric group of idealists in Berlin in the immediate aftermath of the fall of the Wall. I was familiar with Seiler’s poetry before reading this, but I liked this novel so much that it lead me to follow up with his essays and the work of other poets important to him—the best kind of expanding reading experience.

Mauro Javier Cárdenas’ third novel American Abductions (Dalkey Archive) imagines the latest iteration of his hero Antonio in a future in which Latin American migrants are systematically sought out, separated from the children and deported. With a stream of single sentence chapters, he creates a tale that is both fun and uncomfortably too close for comfort. Quite an achievement!

Last but not least, my two favourite books this year are Hungarian:

In The End by Attila Bartis (translated by Judith Sollosy/Archipelago Books), a fifty-two year old photographer looks back on his life—his successes and his failures. He reflects on his relationship with his mother, his move to Budapest with his father in the early 1960s following her death, life under Communism and the secrets held by those around him, and the role the camera played in his life. Presented in short chapters, like photographs in prose each with its “punctum,” the 600+ pages of this book just fly by.

Like Attila Bartis, Andrea Tompa also comes from the ethnically Hungarian community of Romania’s Transylvania region and now lives in Budapest. Her novel Home (translated by Jozefina Komporaly/Istros Books) follows a woman travelling to a school reunion, but it is much more. It is a novel about language, about what it means to belong, to have a home and a mother tongue. It’s probably not surprising that my two favourite novels involve protagonists in mid-life, looking at where they are and how they got there. As to why they’re both Hungarian—I suppose I’ll have to read more Hungarian literature in the new year to answer that.

So that is my 2024 wrap up. I’d like to think 2025 will be better than I fear it will, but at least I know there are countless good books to look forward to.

Happy New Year!

“in the nostalgia of a world / from before this world”:  Walking the Earth by Amina Saïd

all paths
lead to the same place
journey is illusion’s horseback

the world’s embers
blacken its wanton footstep

they burn
our anxious tongues

within its form
the poem seeks itself

Poems for wanderers, or the poem as a series of wandering, emergent forces, Walking the Earth by Amina Saïd hums with an intoxicating, primal energy that speaks to something fundamentally vital and human, in a sense that is too easily buried in the noise and chaos of our constantly plugged-in contemporary reality. Born in Tunisia in 1953, to a French mother and Tunisian father, Saïd was raised in both Arabic and French. At the age of sixteen she moved to Paris with her family where, when she entered university, she decided to study English literature so not to have to choose between her two native languages. Her poetic vision, however, draws on French and Arabic sources and the sunlit Mediterranean landscapes of her birthplace.

Today, Saïd can be considered, according to Hédi Abdel Jaouad, the author of the Preface present text, as the “most potent—and prolific—poetic voice in Tunisia today, if not in the whole of Francophone Africa.” Yet, until this point, no complete, single volume of her work has been made available in English. Now, thirty years after its original 1994 release, Walking the Earth (Marche sur la terre), in Peter Thompson’s translation, finally corrects this oversight.

This haunting sequence of poems, untitled and distinguished only occasionally by dedications, or by shifts in format or theme, has a hushed meditative quality reinforced by the poet’s spare, concise language, subdued and mystical tone, and the recurrence of common motifs. The world her speakers evoke is shaped by primordial elements in concert with journeys across a vast unformed terrain:

earth is this round dream

in its heart
stones fusing

their fire tongues
gouge the pathways of blood
where another fire burns

In her prefatory Note, Saïd writes that this, her seventh book, can be understood as a search for “place”—one that moves from the intimate to the universal—her own journey and that of many who pass through spaces “as much geographical as mental.” She is thinking of the displaced, those driven to move by war or disaster, but also the wanderer and traveller. Wandering is a theme of particular importance in Maghrebi (Northwest African) literature, and one that touches the poet, as someone who writes to hold an intermediary space between the Orient and the Occident, deeply:

My belonging to these two worlds both legitimizes the quest for place and generates a proliferation of doubles: shadows, voices, witnesses, angels, those who keep vigil. . .

This quest for place is born of a profound feeling of exile. Isn’t any creative person “exiled,” a nomad, an eternal wanderer seeking a place—a utopia, a place imaginary, impossible, dreamed of—which poetry can, with a sudden flaring, show in an unforeseeable image?

The quest that stretches across the pages of Walking the Earth is rich in mythological and archetypal images. The recurrence of specific motifs—light, darkness, stones, deserts, shorelines, blood, fire, tongues, voices, screams, silence—contributes to the cyclical feel of the work. Walking is an existential act while language and words are formative elements:

a voice recites
a voice despairs
the choir takes heart

a hand inscribes
ancient alphabets

the light awakens

As the sequence progresses, it becomes clear that the search for “place” is ultimately a search for meaning. The poem itself is the journey, even if the end is but another beginning. It is a path a reader can walk over and over again, and arrive at a different “place” each time.

the poem scents itself
with deepest night

I inscribe myself with sand and dust
in the nostalgia of a world
from before this world

I’m absent
from the mirror of the tribe

Walking the Earth by Amina Saïd is translated from the French by Peter Thompson with a Preface by Hédi Abdel Jaouad and published by Contra Mundum Press.