Elanor Spring : you, by Chantal Neveu, translated by Erín Moure

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.

Jérôme Melançon : De mauvais augure, by Erika Soucy

De mauvais augure, Erika Soucy
Triptyque, 2026

 

 

A mother tells her son: “you will never be the cause do you hear me // never the cause” (tu ne seras jamais la cause tu m’entends // jamais la cause). Into this statement that makes her sentence explode, she places all the anger she has toward the world, all the knowledge she has of the harm it will bring – a knowledge that’s moved beyond fear, into something worse – and all the love she has for her son. She surrounds him, protects him, steadies him, readies him. There is no moral implication here: cause, cause, and not fault, faute. There will be awful things, but not because of him.

Set early on in Erika Soucy’s collection De mauvais augure (Ominous, or Ill Omens), this line marks a moment when the themes fall into place, just before the topic becomes clear. Getting older, being a single mother, facing great threats from the world, caring for a son who is becoming a teenager – all these experiences are enough to occupy one’s emotions and calendar. But doing so when wars and genocides mean that the world is crumbling and seems to be coming to an end adds a taste of cataclysm to a strained existence that will bring the speaker to accumulate non-perishable food and basic necessities for a time when things do come crashing down. Still, she feels no threat to herself; rather, she fears she may not be able to fulfill her role: “am I useful machine am I / white like lying / am I / worth betting on” (suis-je machine utile suis-je / blanche comme la menterie / suis-je / le cheval payant).

Among the collection’s themes, there’s poverty as well – a lack of hands for the fingers she needs to count money on, the incredible image of a submarine for a life in debt, neither floating nor sinking. In response, on the opposite page, is a Communist Manifesto lived in times of austerity summarized in a single poem:

class struggle
is a pulse
a blood sample 

that is bound to me, one spectre to another
my head in gold
my ass at the bottom of the barrel
a bowl of water
for austerity

 

la lutte des classes
est un pouls
une prise de sang 

qu’on m’attache d’un spectre à l’autre
la tête dans l’or
le cul dans la dèche
un bol d’eau
pour l’austérité

This poem functions through a hidden structure that’s forced into imbalance: the opposition between health tests and the lack of necessities; the hidden framing between class struggle in general and austerity politics, that new offensive within class struggle; the animalization of the speaker and the short lines interrupted only by a call of the human to be something more than the animal or ghost she is reduced to. The poem, of course, also cuts through these lessenings of the self by affirming its symbolic, critical being.

Soucy has such great talent. Look again at the passages I chose earlier: the repetition of the middle of a line, the surrounding of a question with questions. She wields words, sentences, line breaks, stanzas; she weaves images before our eyes, without letting on what she is putting together until after we’ve moved on to more words. She uses the least number of words possible and makes them say so much more than they could ever have been meant to. Take these lines:

j’ai vu mourir
de grands chanteurs et des coqs
vivre à ma table
 

I’ve seen the death of
great singers and roosters
live at my table

The opposition between dying and living, the equal number of syllables between the first and third line, the proximity between “great singers” and “roosters” (a rooster, or coq, being a way to describe someone who is too proud and haughty and loud), the near-haiku quality because of the seven syllables in the middle line, a rhythm that is difficult to maintain, the inversion of infinitives and their subjects, the pushing together of the quasi-subjects with a syntax that treats them differently, the disappearance of the actual subject of the stanza before the image (j’ and ma barely register with the vivacity of the vs, even with the secret parallel between the vs and the ms in the first and third line)... all this tied with the thinnest thread into the smallest knots to hold together a baroque painting.

Rage and hatred cut through so many of the pages, with calculated, willful strokes. The speaker concludes a poem by asserting: “I am better and better at loathing / I spit / with wisdom,” before beginning the next by describing herself as “enraged and able / useful” (je déteste de mieux en mieux / crache / avec sagesse; enragée et capable / utile).

This first section focuses on the speaker’s own relation with capitalism, patriarchy, and war. In the second, she turns to her son and what she leaves him with, what world she leaves him in. Using the imagery of the flood, she casts protection like a net which may just as well miss him as restrain him. Here poverty, or class more precisely, means that there are no lifeboats left and no signs to read (“it was written in the sky / but we are at the bottom of the sea”; c’était écrit dans le ciel / mais nous sommes au fond de l’eau). One poem presents a different future as possible, but as placed beyond hope, beyond the efforts to entrap them while maintaining them just barely afloat:

the door
I swear
leads to the song of the waves
and to appeasement 

shall I burn the arks
keeping us from the flood
or is it with a saw that I would rather
destroy

swim the seamen are singing
swim as long as you can they are speaking
of eating you 

the door
would I dare swear
that it leads to better

  

la porte
je le jure
mène au chant des vagues
et à l’apaisement 

fais-je brûler les arches
nous gardant du déluge
ou est-ce avec une scie que je préfère détruire 

nage les marins chantent
nage tant que tu le peux ils parlent
de te manger 

la porte
oserais-je jurer
qu’elle mène à mieux

See the decisiveness of action set against the undecidability of the cause: do the arks keep them from the flood, or will protection will be brought by destroying them? There is something beautiful and there is calm and peace on the other side of the door – but is that really better than the state of survival?

The book ends with a section of prose poems dealing with that question, titled “Pragmatic Survivalism.” The speaker here – the mother, and Soucy herself – looks at her son through the images of Gazan teenagers, boys killed or forced to kill, girls raped; of Ukrainian teenagers and families; of detainee camps outsourced all over the world; of Canada’s own camps which would be created in the Prairies or in the North. She sees the war machine advancing toward her; she makes her priorities clear: “A teenager’s life is worth more than rare land and freshwater” (Une vie d’adolescent vaut plus que des terres rares et de l’eau douce). She weighs Québec’s proximity to the United States, her vulnerable status as a writer, the need to preserve books, the chance that the books she owns by trans authors might lead to her arrest. She counts the weapons she owns. She names fascists fascists. She explicitly ties their violence to that of a man in her family, to Nazis. She feels the pull of collaboration with the enemy, the desire to attempt saving her family, knowing that “Poetry arrives when life is still tolerable” (La poésie arrive quand la vie est encore tolérable). Yet she also sees her inability to be anything but a writer, who writes the truth, who rebels against inhumanity, who is exposed.

The answer, then, is not to seek peace or appeasement. The speaker tells her son to be neither dove nor crow, and rejects both symbols for behaviour, but to be a child, to be a teenager, and learn to spot the vultures instead. She offers him respite but not calm. In one poem I see the metaphor of violence and destruction like current running through their bodies, her passing on the grounding rod, indicating that they only have so much bite, so much fight in them, and that it’s his turn to speak:

speak I say
I hand you the rod
let go of the outlet
of the current
it’s up to me to hold it
our teeth rot it’s a family trait 

a sign

parle dis-je
je te tends le pieu
lâche la prise
le courant
c’est à moi de le prendre
nos dents pourissent c’est de famille 

un signe

In this acting together, we see to what extent De mauvais augure is a book of resistance, a book for the moment being – since there is always a moment, since we ceaselessly find ourselves in moments of destruction and need to continue living in their midst.

 

 

 

 

 

Jérôme Melançon writes and teaches and writes and lives in oskana kâ-asastêki / Regina, SK. His fourth collection, Prairial·es, is now out with Prise de parole. Let us not forget his three chapbooks with above/ground press: Bridges Under the Water (2023), Tomorrow’s Going to Be Bright (2022), and Coup (2020) – all soon to be followed by a fourth! – his occasional translations, and his book of philosophy, La politique dans l’adversité (Metispresses, 2018). He has also edited books and journal issues, and keeps publishing academic articles that sometimes have to do with some of this. He is on various social media under variations of @lethejerome, notably at bsky.social.

 

Wioletta Greg : Five poems, translated by Kasia Jaronczyk

 

 

Lessons in Astronomy

                                     for my son

 

The middle-aged woman, your mother,
one day will tell you, that while reading
a paper on the origins of the Solar System
on the deck of the Wootton Bridge Inn,
she glimpsed spectres of timeless planets
in the eyes of gillyflowers.
And a snail traced the Milky Way
on a paper napkin. 

That day, the great heron eggs hatched in the floodplains,
and the sky was so clear
that she could ask it for answers
you sought in your astronomy books,
but she preferred to watch the road
where a speeding lorry
branded with ‘Starway’ crushed
wild apples on the asphalt. 

 

Spithead in November

  

After the storm, the tide recedes.
The pier dissolves in the fog.
On the beach, ravens devour mussels
smashed against the stones. 

I stroll along the silt-coated
levee, counting ships, and suddenly
in the fissures of the grey sea wall
discover thousands of green, living snails.

 

 

Boys Selling Lemonade

They live next door, on my housing estate.
Their grandmother is dead, dad’s locked up,
Mum’s benefits barely cover food,
the cheap wine she sips in secret
listening until midnight to Lady Gaga’s song

from A Star Is Born: ‘Tell me somethin’, girl,
are you happy in this modern world?’

In the morning they carry empties to the shop,
buy lemons, sugar, sparkling water
and in the damp kitchen prepare lemonade.
It’s raining. Only seagulls feast by the rubbish bins
on the estate. The wind knocks over the table,
flaps the tablecloth like a flag of an unknown country. 

I pay them a pound for a cup and, sipping the drink
that tastes of soap and sour rainwater,
I remember how, during summer holidays,
I stood by the road selling cornflower wine
I had fermented on a windowsill,
and on Śmigus-Dyngus^[1] I topped up perfume
with ditch water and sprayed the neighbours
for some money, an Easter egg, or a candy bar.

 

 

The Lullaby

 

Sleep – tomorrow will bring Polish TV,
a pack of fags on the doorstep.
A fairy godmother will top up the coin-shower,
and you can relax under a hot stream.

Sleep! A rivulet of cider flows across the floor.
The lit joint transforms into the fern flower^[2].
Your dreams come true. You will return home. 

Sleep! You will stop drinking, leave the farm
where stems cut your hands,
and teatime is sacred.

Sleep! The nights on the promised island are shorter.
The alarm clock shrieks at five in the morning.
Your bicycle, stiff with cold, waits by the gate.
Will you go mushroom picking with grandpa?

 

 

The Pear                                              

                                                                for Maciej

 

I stole it from Virginia Woolf’s garden
on that rainy day,
because it reminded me of the scent of your skin;
I furtively slipped it into my pocket
while tourists photographed
the flower beds and waterweeds in the pond
and took selfies by the writer’s grave. 

On the way back along the banks of the River Ouse
I clenched my hand around the cold fruit,
remembering our trip to Rodmell:
the cows on the path and our dog barking –
he was supposed to be our only child,
but died a few months later. 

There is a kind of silence when
the ticking of a clock
becomes the rattle of train wheels,
you leave the station door ajar
and stand before me with a bouquet of roses.
For a few seconds time suspends
in the flesh of a rotting pear.

 

 

---

[1] Śmigus-Dyngus – a Polish Easter Monday tradition in which people playfully splash one another with water to celebrate spring and renewal.

[2]The fern flower  – a mythical Slavic plant said to bloom only on Midsummer Night and grant luck or hidden knowledge to whomever finds it.

     

 

Wioletta Greg (Wioletta Grzegorzewska) – a Polish novelist and poet. She is the author of several poetry collections, and four novels: Secret Cloud Conductor, Wolf River, Additional Soul, Accommodations (trans. by Jennifer Croft), and Swallowing Mercury (Guguły, trans. by Eliza Marciniak). Her work has been translated into numerous languages, including Czech, English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Slovenian, Korean, Welsh. Her books have received wide international recognition. Her poetry collection Finite Formulae & Theories of Chance (Arc Publications, UK; trans. by Marek Kazmierski), was shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize in Canada, one of the most prestigious international awards for poetry. She was also longlisted for the Man Booker International Prize (2017), and shortlisted for, among others, the Prix Pierre-François Caillé, the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation, the Nike Literary Award, the Gdynia Literary Award, and the Michalski Prize. She is the recipient of the Golden Owl Award in Vienna, and the Majewska Prize (London, 2022). She lives in Great Britain.

Kasia Jaronczyk is a Polish-Canadian writer, artist and microbiologist. She immigrated to Canada at the age of 14. Her debut short story collection Lemons was published in 2017 by Mansfield Press. She is a co-editor of the only anthology of Polish-Canadian short stories Polish(ed): Poland Rooted in Canadian Fiction (Guernica Editions, 2017). Her stories were short-listed for the Bristol Prize 2016 and long-listed for CBC Short Story Prize 2010. She has published in Canadian literary magazines such as TNQ, Room, Prairie Journal, Carousel, The Nashwaak Review, Postscripts to Darkness, and in anthologies Wherever I Find Myself. Essays by Canadian Immigrant Women (Miriam Matejova, Ed. Caitlin Press, April 2017) and The Bristol Short Story Prize Anthology (2016. Vol 9.). Find out more about Kasia on her website: https://kasiajaronczyk.weebly.com/

 

Carolina Dávila Díaz : Cutting ties : translated and transfluxed by Ryan Greene

 

 

 

Visual description: A gif featuring red text on an ivory cream background, the colors approximating the printed version of Carolina Dávila Diaz's book, animal ajena, published by Cardumen (an imprint of Laguna Libros) in Bogotá, Colombia in 2022. Around the text, there is a circle that looks digitally sketched, its edges mimicking the tactility of hand-drawn marks. The text itself consists of two texts, arranged in two columns. The column on the right is upright, legible, in either English or Spanish (depending on when you look). The column on the left is upside down, in the other language. Periodically the gif springs into motion, the outer circle rotating 180 degrees in one direction and the text rotating 180 degrees in the other. Thanks to the rotational shift in perspective, the language of legibility shifts. And then shifts. And then shifts... 

 

 

Static textual transcription:

Cutting ties

You gnaw at your nails
Everything sets me on edge you say
and the irritation grinds on 

You retain the pain of the organic
calcium peels off in your fingers
and your mouth drips wet with acidic spit 

Better the inhospitable you think
blood has been the tribute
Better this muck and mire
your blood your own blood never again 

Tradition spins you shift your gaze
you move with another familiarity
and you forge new kinships 

You look at your fingers
you slide them like freshly sharpened pencils
a slash struck through names
you won’t respond to anymore 

(homo) neanderthalensis
(homo) sapiens
cyborg

from alien animal
by Carolina Dávila Díaz
tr. Ryan Greene

 

 

Romper el lazo

Cortas con los dientes las uñas
Se me destempla todo dices
y aún no termina el rechinar 

Conservas el dolor de lo orgánico
el calcio se descascara en los dedos
la boca se llena de saliva ácida y liquidísima 

Mejor lo inhóspito piensas
la sangre ha sido el tributo
Mejor este cenagal
tu sangre tu propia sangre nunca más 

Rota la tradición volteas la mirada
te mueves con otra familiaridad
y creas nuevos parentescos 

Miras tus dedos
los pasas como lápices recién afilados
un tajo sobre nombres
a los que ya no respondes 

(homo) neanderthalensis
(homo) sapiens
cyborg

de animal ajena
(Cardumen, 2022)
por Carolina Dávila Díaz 

 

For an added treat, click on the gif below to experience an interactive "transfluxion" of three lines from the poem (works best on screens bigger than a phone).

Visual description: Another gif, with ivory cream text on a red background, its colors inverted from the gif above. Here three lines from the poem hover with arrows below. As the recorded mouse clicks on the arrows, we become aware of the text as a (seemingly) three-dimensional entity rotating along one of its axes to reveal either the text in the other language or a small snippet of paratext. The text itself reads "tradition spins you shift your gaze / you move with another familiarity / and you forge new kinships" and "rota la tradición volteas la mirada / te mueves con otra familiaridad / y creas nuevos parentescos".

 

 

 

 

Carolina Dávila Díaz is a poet and editor from Bogotá, Colombia. Her book Como las catedrales won the National Award of Poetry in Colombia in 2010. She is also the author of Imagen (In)completa (2018), animal ajena (2022), and Buenavista, un kilómetro (2026) and co-editor of La trenza, a poetry, essay, and illustration magazine. She is part of Contaminación Cruzada, an artistic and poetic intervention project that explores the possibilities of language in public spaces. She lives in New York, where she is pursuing a Ph.D. in Latin American Literature and Art.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Ryan Greene writes, translates, makes, and caretakes books in "Phoenix, Arizona," the city where he grew up. His most recent translations include projects with Carolina Dávila, Elena Salamanca, Claudina Domingo, Ana Belén López, Yaxkin Melchy, and Giancarlo Huapaya. He's learning.