you, Chantal Neveu, translated by Erín Moure
Book*hug Press, 2024
Throughout her prolific career as a translator, Erín Moure’s work dances between the strange spaces language inhabits. Her recent translation, the book length poem you by francophone writer Chantal Neveu, directly considers the complexities between relationship and language, whether it is expression between two or many, the harmony of reaching duality with another, or language’s inability to grasp feelings towards the self and the other. These notions feel entirely compatible with translation as Moure deftly beckons a full-voiced poem from the French, yet simultaneously retains the shimmering otherness of a translated work underneath. As such, the strange polyphony of familiar and other becomes reified.
Here, the other refers to every conceivable other– multiple iterations of personal pronouns become at once strange and recognizable, as even the self has the capacity for the unknown. In the slight narrative present, the poem gestures towards love, infidelity, motherhood, and the sensuality of bodies, but the driving forces are entirely language-dependent. The sharpness of the words surround themselves, glancing off of the primary pronouns “I”, “you”, “she”, “he” and “we” which fade in and out, intangibly sparkling, “I want you fully / desire to possess you entirely”. Just as the self and the other are knowable and unknowable, so too is the exactness of the reader’s senses. What you is capable of is intimacy at arm’s length- exposure without total revelation, revelation without complete knowledge.
nothing is
and the air
the image
This direct refusal to indulge in over-explanation results in a unique clarity, the ability of every line to contain its own energy and multitude of interpretive possibilities; as one line says, “you clear space”. In this way, the construction of the poem lends itself to spaciousness, mimetically enacting time spent with another, the breath between bodies. Despite the lack of linear narration, the erotic nature of the poem is a force all its own, calling attention to tangible instances of separation and closeness. In these lines, love is a power that mimics the lovers
themselves: overshadowing, lingering, trembling between every line Neveu writes:
is any existential plane untouched by eros
you ask me to pull myself together
I’m undecided
exiled
we both agree
desire generates aberrations
love is bigger than any of us
Love weaves itself into each tangible aspect of language as a fractal, visible on the page in unrelenting lines. Love and language glance off one another, creating a sense of intertwining devotion only to be distanced and othered in the same breath. Despite the acknowledged magnitude of eros, it nevertheless is ubiquitous, seeping into the cracks of each pronoun, as devastating as it is restorative. The poem asks that we let ourselves be saturated with our own ineptitude at pairing eros to words and makes us unable to stand completely on firm ground.
In loving, we must take the other as they are, or appear to be in whatever light we perceive them: “we fathom each other / molecules vibrate / we are proportional”. Every pronoun corresponds to each other, misunderstands each other, returns again to language and love in spite of our losses. In loving, in language, we construct the other and ourselves, imagining that our desires are somehow compatible. Neveu writes, “expressing desires / available / requesting nothing / you dispense with words”. Here, the duality of expression and the absence of articulation reverberates through the lines, creating a space where contradictions flourish and become possible. We cannot bear (and must) the knowledge that we may never fully understand one another, in the same way that we cannot fully understand each line of language in this poem. To seek complete understanding is then to miss the beauty that the other reflects into ourselves. In the translator’s postface, Moure describes the poem you as “one of the precious metals, a gem extracted from its rocky source.” Aptly, this asks the reader to be the chisel of extraction in much the same way the poem serves as a chisel to the reader. As the reader must extricate the poem, line by line, so you extricates the reader from themselves, upending understanding in favor of multifaceted movement. In this way, the reader and the poem are again the self and the other in relationship, “honouring the initial induction / the immediate joyous adhesion / vocal / physiological”. The exactness of the lines presents the need to adhere to one another and seek to create a glimmering oneness which is ultimately reliant on the reflection of others.
The beauty of Moure’s translation is a chisel itself– her ability to exact the precise preciousness of each word and moment from the original French gives you its gem-like radiance. Like a stone, examining the poem closely gives way to detail and precision, each line sharp enough to slice. Throughout the poem, Moure has chosen to leave certain words in the original language, adding another layer of relationship. Moments where words are left untranslated add to the sensation of otherness, even if the reader is familiar with French. This choice gives the work an additional dimension of recognition which begins as a jolt of strangeness. Lighting upon “l’a-venir” for example, Moure leaves the word with its multiplicity, as it means both “future” and, as it’s constructed with the hyphen, “what is to come”. The single word becomes simple and complex, surrounded by the whiteness of the page and containing its own self, its own other, its own duality. Applying this to the act of translation, of bringing a work from one language to another, Moure gives the reader certain true cognates in which to feel othered. One line reads, “en silence”, beginning with the French word for “in” and then ending with the possibly French, possibly English “silence”. The act of translation becomes living and open, beckoning language’s interpretation. Moure’s translation and exquisite attention to each facet of the poem imbues the work with uncapturable energy and movement.
In the translation of Neveu’s you, Moure furthers and amplifies the unknowable relationships that shimmer even as they alter. The reader is at once invited in and excluded, spoken to and eavesdropping, equilibrated and unbalanced. you presents an opportunity to be lost and found in equal measure, to examine more closely ourselves and others, to remain willing participants in eros and language, and in each scintillating line, “we don’t resist the vectors of enthrallment”.
Elanor Spring is a poet and translator from Boise, Idaho. She holds a BA in French and a BA in Creative Writing from Boise State University. She’s currently a graduate student at the University of Maine in Orono studying Poetry and Poetics. Her work can be found in Oroboros, fig.press, and forthcoming from P-Queue.
