we don’t spend our lives in the belly of the fish
we don’t spend our lives in the belly of the fish
water has never been older
we return to the rites
rather than remember to
escape from the moments that cannot
catch our breath
mouthing the words we love
I speak to cross over to what I cannot hear
on ne passe pas sa vie dans le ventre du poisson
l’eau n’a jamais été aussi vieille
on retrouve les rites
plus qu’on ne s’en souvient pour
sortir des moments qui ne peuvent pas
reprendre souffle
tenant les lèvres sur les mots qu’on aime
je parle pour traverser vers ce que je n’entends pas
Henri Meschonnic, Voyageurs de la voix, Verdier, 1985
Translators statement
As translators, we try to embrace strangeness and a sense of alterity—what we have difficulty hearing and what we do not know how to assimilate. Translating involves listening to what resists transposition into the patterns that tradition offers. Accessing Meschonnic’s unique style of using simple language, little punctuation, spareness, and lack of titles to approach deeply existential thought challenges our word choice and syntax. To convey the oral quality of Meschonnic’s poems, we use only the most everyday verbs and nouns (his poems are nearly adjective-free) and look at individual words (no matter their simplicity). A second challenge translating is the tendency in French to universalize that often leads to the most general reference, while in English poetry universals are often reached through an outer surface of sense-data. We lean towards slightly more concrete particulars. Finally, we try to honor the rhythm of the French, placing the stress on the last syllable of each line, as is mostly the case throughout the poems. We listen for the subject in the enjambment, in the accentual organization, in the words Meschonnic rhymes and the links he forges between different words.
Gabriella Bedetti’s translations of Meschonnic’s essays and other writings have appeared in New Literary History, Critical Inquiry, and Diacritics. She and Don Boes are seeking a publisher for The Butterfly Tree: Selected Poems of Henri Meschonnic. Their translations appear in Puerto del Sol and are forthcoming in The Southern Review.
Don Boes is the author of Good Luck With That, Railroad Crossing, and The Eighth Continent, selected by A. R. Ammons for the Samuel French Morse Poetry Prize. His poems have appeared in The Louisville Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, Prairie Schooner, CutBank, Zone 3, Southern Indiana Review, and The Cincinnati Review.
Facebook: @don.boes.1
Henri Meschonnic (1932-2009) is best known worldwide for his translations of the Old Testament and the 710-page Critique du rythme: Anthropologie historique du langage, yet his poems exist in more than twenty languages. His nineteen poetry collections have won the Max Jacob International Poetry Prize, the Mallarmé Prize, the Jean Arp Francophone Literature Prize, and the Guillevic-Ville de Saint-Malo Grand Prize for Poetry. He uses common language located in a particular moment, and yet there’s a wonderful vast scope of time in the choices of images and metaphors—very simple words that become very complex in dimension, waiting on humans to become tellers of “an end of the world where the trees bend / under the weight of butterflies.”
