Lessons from Venice, Denise Desautels, transl. Alisa Belanger
Ekstasis
Editions, 2020
Alisa Belanger’s translation of Lessons from Venice, by the Québécoise poet Denise Desautels, was perhaps a casualty of the early pandemic, of our common and collective incapacity to see beyond the immediate present. We regretfully have little of Desautels’s work in English, which is surprising given the honours she has received – but less so when we consider the fluidity of her writing, which creates wonderful challenges for translators. So it is worthwhile to (re)visit Alisa Belanger’s second translation of Desautels’s poetry, after Things that Fall (Guernica, 2013).
Like many of Desautels’s collections, Leçons de Venise is built on ekphrasis – here, three sections each focus on one sculpture or installation by Michel Goulet. In the translation, Goulet’s name has disappeared from the cover pages and the reproductions of the sculptures are absent from the book altogether (in my original French copy from 1990, they were printed apart from the book and inserted at the beginning of each of the three sections, like leaves pressed within pages that become a part of the book). Even the references to the artwork at the end of the book were removed. The chair on the original cover is replaced by an unattributed stylized picture of Venice; the editing process pivots the poems away from the artwork toward the city, from the lessons to Venice itself. As a result, we miss something of the intertwining of the poetry and the sculptures.
Without immediate access to the original, some lines become unnecessarily enigmatic: “The chairs piled in the bed boards have struck a pose” (19) is an almost literal description of the sculpture, adding metaphor only to the impression given by the placement of the objects. Likewise, a direct reference to Cézanne or to the sculptor becomes metaphorical, wildly open to interpretation:
“I cannot forget that there is a bed, chairs, a table, guns, more cumbersome than the fruit bowls in a painting by Cézanne.” (25)
“The sculptor piled up chairs that face us and that we observe; he set them against a wall inside the posts of a bed.” (28)
While ekphrastic poetry can gain its autonomy from its original object and need not remain tethered to it, Desautels writes through the artwork; in the case of Goulet’s installation of chairs in public spaces, she sits on the artwork and plays the literal and figurative meanings of this sitting. Writing then becomes a collaboration after the fact, the poems attesting to the life of the artwork as others do of past experiences and encounters. The absence of images to accompany the translation then points to Desautels’s practice of weaving the metaphorical and the material, whether it be in relation to artwork or to everyday acts and experiences.
The preface by the poet Louise Dupré to the English edition does explain Desautels’s relationship to the artwork and artist – and gives some clues about her writing practice in relation to art. “Art favors introspection, an unexpected encounter of internal realms, contemplation of certain familiar objects,” Dupré writes (6), also highlighting the sorrow that runs throughout the poems – alongside the sharp desire to cut through time and history I find more generally in Desautels’s poetry.
That said, the absence of the artwork in the book takes nothing away from the poet’s concern for the very material existence of the sculptures, which remains clear in the poems. Each of the three sections explores a sculpture after which it is named, as well as the world onto which it opens in its own modality. The first section, “Motif / Mobiles,” plays with entanglement and distance in relation to objects, naming the gaps and the movement through them as well as the clutter and movement around them. The second, “Factitious Faction,” on precarity and states of dangerous balance, is full of sudden actions and eruptions. The third, “Work Table” (which could also have been translated as “The Work’s Table”), explores the inscrutability of purpose in other peoples’ objects and their potential uses.
As the second section begins with a description of the sculpture (“Ten rifles, real ones, are lined up against the wall,” 39), we can enter the space of the artwork. While the translation makes room for Desautels’ breath (short lines interspaced within longer lines) and quick turnarounds, some of the translator’s choices take away from the sharp precision of the original. “Lie in wait” suggests either an element of surprise that clashes with the clear presence of the rifle, or a horizontal position that is contrary to their vertical placement. And “I’m recycling them” takes away from the dual meaning of “Je les récupère,” recycling and taking back – “I’m reclaiming them” would have been a more direct choice, like “I’m recovering them.” In other cases, some choices are off-putting: “Rifling through the soul’s reasons,” while “rummaging” and “scouring” were acceptable alternatives, might have been a bit too on the nose.
On the whole, the translation does clearly render the movement present in the poems and lead to a translation that is more than worth reading, as it gives us the most important elements of the work and of the style. This second section backs away from ekphrasis, into reality: with each poem we get a wider perspective. This sculpture intermingles with Giacometti’s Women of Venice, which takes on a firm supporting role. And further out, suddenly but softly, through five dated poems and especially one poem that recounts a letter from the speaker’s friend Louise (unintentionally giving an anticipatory echo of the English preface by Desautels’s friend Louise Dupré), we encounter a historical moment in the lives of so many women in Canada, but especially perhaps in Québec: the massacre of fourteen women at Montreal’s École polytechnique on December 6, 1989. The event is thus approached softly in the collection, even as the poet faces its brutal irruption in reality. And even as Desautels marks the powerlessness and futility of language when faced with such violence, she displays its force outside of the moment when women are faced with their deaths, when violence simply looms. This section becomes a meditation not on firearms, but through firearms, against the direction they indicate in their aim and in the aiming, against the movement they create when they are fired, toward the source of violence, against it, taking on the role of sentry, moving in onto thought where it can be inflected, becoming a rifle rather than a statue. She maintains the capacity for distinction and highlights that the fight is continuous: “Lifting a shadow, then another, there is so much resistance before the true story.” (58)
In the third section, the artwork becomes
something else, is reborn anew in each poem, leads the speaker back to herself.
Chairs lead to other chairs, break habits by making them explicit and
conscious. We find descriptions of the sculpture and of the objects it evokes,
descriptions that are at once precise and direct, and grand. We feel how art breaks the order of things. The
title of the collection is at its clearest here: the lessons are tied to what
precedes and follows the experience of the work of art, the aura art takes on
not because its location, but because of what its location makes possible. And
yet Desautels is able to maintain (and Belanger is able to render) hesitation
in facing what the artwork suggests and the response it elicits:
“At the moment when writing, my hand falters. An empty space in the self...
Only a shell before the luxury of words. An isolated event: thinking.” (80)
One of the strengths of the original collection is in the occasional halt to the rhythm of the prose poems Desautels imposes through single, percussive and profound end lines that read like aphorisms.
While in the first poem, the translation cuts the ambiguity the wrong way (“In Venice, beauty is a response to mourning that doesn’t exist” (13) where “to the mourning that doesn’t exist” would have been more faithful), others are quite happy finds. “The sculptor will learn that I ensue in history” (59) is a clear choice through a rarely used word where there was originally both decision and ambiguity. “Then I imagine myself polishing firearms” (57) maintains the reversal, the cut in the poem and in experience. “No happiness is hidden behind sounds loaded with ashes” (53) carries the image as well as the dry desolation without resignation of the original.
Jérôme Melançon is aware that there is not usually an ‘s’ after a possessive apostrophe at the end of a proper name ending in ‘s’, but does want to point out that the ‘s’ is Desautels is silent, and the absence of a possessive ‘s’ would make a very strange gap in these sentences indeed. He lives in oskana kâ-asastêki / Regina, SK and has published three chapbooks with above/ground press, two collections with Éditions des Plaines, and one with Prise de parole. He sometimes translates poetry for periodicities as well as other text in other places, and is currently working on translations of books by Denise Desautels and by Phyllis Webb.
