Jérôme Melançon : Lessons from Venice, by Denise Desautels, transl. Alisa Belanger

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.

Kim Fahner : The Universe and All That, by John Oughton

The Universe and All That, John Oughton
Ekstasis Editions, 2023

 

 

 

 

John Oughton’s newest collection of poems, The Universe and All That, begins with a preface that clearly sets out the poet’s beliefs about the nature of time itself, as well as the place of poetry in the world. He writes of how brief a human lifespan is, as just “a flicker in endless darkness.” What poetry allows us to do, Oughton suggests, is to “navigate, at least emotionally and through images, these long expanses” of time. In the face of difficult times—whether personal or global—“a good poem still works,” allowing humans to consider “big thoughts” and larger ideas of how time moves, and of how humans work into that philosophical equation.

Following the preface of The Universe and All That, Oughton looks back nostalgically,  tracing the architecture of his family tree. In the first poem, “Architectural,” he writes: “Parents are pillars,” the people who “are all we see” until “the world opens/between, around them.” Soon enough, children grow up and become “columns” that “support only sky,/clouds, and space.” Following on the heels of this first poem, both “Arthur” and “Jack” are loving tributes to the poet’s grandfather and father. One is a carpenter who could read knots of tree branches and who could “frame up reality/to stand a century.” The other is a scientist father who is more comfortable speaking about bees and trees than of humans and their complex interactions. Even after his death, though, the father’s lessons live on.

In amidst observational poems that root themselves in the regular rhythms of life, there are poems about love. They feel held inside the body of the collection, in terms of structure, surrounded by poems that document the tiny details of lives lived. In the cleverly structured couplets of “Uncouplets or Fifty Ways to Love Your Leaver,” the poet alternates between two voices, from “She dumped him because” to “He dumped her because.” The reasons offered are both logical and ridiculous, from lines like “He dumped her because she narrowed his creativity,/which he proved by never writing another poem” to lines like “She dumped him because he couldn’t see her grief, or angels.” Here is Oughton’s witty, yet tender side revealing itself in his work.  

In “Footwrote,” Oughton reflects on the nature of love when a college student stamps out the word LOVE on a snowy campus lawn: “each time I pass the window I see/love is the way boots walk/love is leaving/love is leaking into the ground/love is lessening by the hour/love a fading intention.” In “Long Distance Love,” the poem slips back and forth across the page, embodying the way in which long distance relationships can both excite and challenge lovers: “So many roads between you    me/and planes/that tilt as we navigate them,” until the piece ends with the poet theorizing that the lovers “will embrace/somewhere over Manitoba.”

There are poems, too, that reflect on the ways in which we age, and how the world changes with the passage of time. In one poem, “22 Forest Hill Drive,” there is reference to a childhood home, when the poet realizes that he “can’t go home again.” Both “Summer Camp” and “Down I Dug” are pieces that also reflect on childhood times, as places to begin, but not as places to remain, except to go back to visit them briefly in memory and nostalgia. 

The final ekphrastic section in the collection is something that will make the reader feel as though they’ve walked into an art gallery. Oughton’s keen sense of craft is obvious here, too. In observing  Judith Davidson-Palmer’s photographs, Flowing I and II, he reminds us of how the viewer can be altered by considering art: “You only see what eyes set for/I look: water is never still/look longer and the leaves keep changing/look long enough and I/have changed.” In “House, Pool,” he describes the effect of Marjorie Moeser’s Key West, saying: “This is Key West/after you throw away/the compass,/unlock your longing.” The poet suggests that observing artwork, just like observing life’s tiny details and the visible proof of time’s passage in a human life, are things that lead humans to change, grow, and evolve.

The Universe and All That feels like a philosophical, poetic portal of sorts. John Oughton’s poetry is rooted in the rhythms of regular, everyday life, but it is his keen use of sensory imagery, metaphor, and humour that often work together to direct the reader towards contemplating larger philosophical concepts.

 

 

 

 

 

Kim Fahner lives and writes in Sudbury, Ontario. Her latest book of poems is Emptying the Ocean (Frontenac House, 2022). She is the Ontario Representative for The Writers' Union of Canada (2020-24), a member of the League of Canadian Poets, and a supporting member of the Playwrights Guild of Canada. Kim's first novel, The Donoghue Girl, will be published by Latitude 46 Publishing in Spring 2024. She may be reached via her author website at www.kimfahner.com