Aleph
after Aimé Césaire
Step by step our shadows
Refract
More mineral
We are
Each step shrinks us
Appraising
We withdraw
Into ourselves
With each step
Crumbling
*
Always
They return
To their place of birth
Always to silt
Our words
Opening
Against time
Turning about:
Our agitation
And axis.
The hut where the moon stays
The poet, like the Indian, ear glued to the ground. He perceives what has happened—and resonates still—and what is coming.
He comes, overwhelmed, from the fallow colors of the dry season.
He hears Creole coming from Creole throats (rare and moving).
He notes the singular way in which we stare at one another.
Geography’s an act of “indicating.” A figure. Like all writing, it’s first of all marking, an imprint made through walking.
What is more catastrophic than writing and the earth?
*
For us, the passage from Creole to French and vice versa is a subtle art, similar to footwork in soccer: to alternate between elegance, social decorum, and the pure pleasure of words, of speech in your mouth. The main art lies in the conjugation, to make sure it assuredly shimmers.
There are muffled places where your instinct would be to force your voice. In the Caribbean, due to the frequently chaotic topography (from hill to hill) and scattered geography (from island to island) we’re used to the leap. We’ve adopted the habit of calling out for each other.
This leaping topography and geography (from hill to hill, and from island to island) has its echo in Creole in the way forms are multiplied: di i di sa / mennen pou mennen-y alé / ralé menm i ka ralé-y. Heritage of the Caribs’ language.
The poet sees the islands (“yes, they are many, the islands, and beautiful”) like a text whose consonants would be but boulders on which to place his foot before springing into the open sky and sea, as in these Carib words:
bonambaé — kabonakati — amalaka.
“That he bursts in his leap through what cannot be imagined or named . . . ”
*
Eti jou ka kouri ouvè kon an wélélé.
The day arrives like a quarrel. Such a tangle of lovers that came together in the dream. Like the kingbirds you sometimes see collide mid-flight, in a great flutter of wings. And they part so forcefully that they leave a shimmer in our eyes, a piece of white sky.
*
The Caribbean could be considered a workshop for the modern world: with its deportations, its exterminations, and also its “wildly multiple” side, its “ubiquity of voices and sounds.” Its diphthong.
“For sale . . .
reassembled voices … the only chance to free
our senses!
For sale priceless bodies ( . . . )
For sale applications of computation and unimaginable
leaps of harmony ( . . .)
For sale bodies, voices . . .”
*
Full moon. The clouds make us remember our wanderings. Our escapes. Like the archipelago in its deployment: the poem.
Where is the Caribbean? What is its place?
“This world of dew
is a world of dew
and yet, and yet . . .”
“You must hurry.
History will close.”
The hut where the moon stays opens the time of the day before.
Multiple, multitude
Summa ratio est Deus
“And a mixed multitude went up with them . . .”
Many bodies are ground up kneaded
fashioned
soot and smoke mixed in earth
shoulder-shoulder away-toward death
Technikos and its radiant aura,
Era of glazing: modality in-oculus
Servitude of mouth and heart
multitude over all the earth
(“their words to the end of the world”)
Slaves to symbols’ power
far-far long lonngone model figure
forge iron foundry
hearth punch and bolster
Gypsum mask worn by Titans, god’s killers
“their throat, a tomb”
and their rosaries
and their repeateth
and their beastients reek of redundancy.com
sublime-science-without-end
Sludge inhaled scattered dis-
seminated smells of fried fat
fantastic bouquet of benevolence
goodwill dispersed in the universe
roots and boughs heals-all
high branches
healing angry erysipelas boils
as a salvaging of man’s body and ’oul:
jumble-tumble scribes and parchies
jumble-tumble bitches, sloths
prelates and young boys (huh?)
Seems there be space fo’million angel
letters are brats
Chimeras with a white face
Shackled to each other with golden chains
Sons of Aleph pulled from nothing
Splendors traveling across the earth
Bold white trails, run
Flow, search
seize, subjugate
Move the millstone, North Wind
Spiraled
sacred sphere, sweet cauldron.
Zagreus neutered, butchered,
Stuffed with donkey meat
here is mankind, endlessly split.
The Above, the Below
His disciples said to him: from above to below we know.
But from below to above we do not know.
He replied: is it not all one—below to above and above to below?
Thus they went out
And the stars, legions and messengers without number
in the space of the sky
And the letter, in the mind,
where beings are suspended
this one that one face-to-face
And ever since This was unleashed
And the sea upended towards
the sea, portent and conception,
reunites and reconciles
waters in the hand’s hollows
Figures and orders man’s face:
traits sculpted after the signs
etched in the tremors of time,
examined by the four horizons
thus,
Presence in the Below beautifully adorned
yes, she is beautiful, sparkling: the air flares
in her image and resemblance
The Above, gate and opening of the world,
joyous melodies that dance
dancing cadence and rhythm that rise Without-end
tempo, flickering fire
Two faces same,
Light / darkness ravishing each other
Carrying each other
in the thunderous song
The earth that harvests All and uses it as nourishment
that harvests and obscures
Thus from the place from which the sea and days emerge,
day One
clears the paths into the abyss
Pressing the waters half-half,
The waters and the waters
Conceals and unveils in the secret of
Two, the world’s House
three rays over the abyss,
interlace in each other water breath and fire,
a single word, an utterance
a single letter
wedged
between sky and earth
The rain falls
And the curtain that separates
Wisdom, discernment, and
Knowledge
that grand illusion
beckoning from hidden nooks
scattering
seeing without sight, whispers without voice
Mocking the home, region of birth, bone on bone,
place
miniscule murmur
enclosed words gleaming an enclosed radiance
clarifying as they shed light
through the darkness, from the gulf
the cavern,
from the throat’s enclosure,
voice against lips
fine voice that spouts
climbing waters and tombs once again
Speech that broods and shelters under its wings
daughter of light
The joy nestled forgotten in the fertile earth’s folds
breath in breath
knot of life
nothing, articulated
On which the world comes and goes
and thus remains
what dispenses names, in clarity
births, colors, hymns
Eternal flame of pure gold the miracle
Speech one/all that unveils the body-there,
the place of the world sky and earth,
let breath speak to listen hear
enchant
And Sentinel at Sunrise
leads to radiance.
Four Poems
Monchoachi
translated from the French and Antillean Creole by Eric Fishman
Click here to read more poetry by Monchoachi from the Fall 2017 issue.
Read the original in French and Antillean Creole
Listen to the poet introduce and read the original of ‘The Above, the Below’:
Monchoachi’s poetry complicates the cliché that “writing is translating.” This complication occurs at multiple levels. Most simply, he writes in two different languages: Antillean Creole and French. His earliest works, from the 1970s, were written exclusively in Creole. Two of his volumes from the 1980s (Manèg and Nostrom) contained the poet’s facing translations in Creole and French. In the four poems presented here, Creole often “surges forward” to break the predominately Francophone linguistic frame.
Yet this “translation” is also present below the surface of the poems, in the foundation of Monchoachi’s approach to writing. Monchoachi was trained as a philosopher, and one of the remarkable features of his writing is the way he is able to wield different intellectual frames without losing the music and imagery of poetry. He shifts between modes of thought as a way to disrupt the dominance of Western perspectives, channeling sources as varied as the rhythms of Antillean funeral rites, the silenced voices of Mayan codices, and the visions of Hebrew mystics.
The leaps between languages and registers present particular challenges for translation, as interlingual wordplay abounds. However, translating these poems into English also presents unique opportunities. As Derek Walcott described: “There is a euphony of ideas in the nature of the French language, whereas English, and Creole . . . have a euphony of images, of simile.” Rendering the poems in English thus allows different facets of la pensée créole to emerge. Throughout these translations, I’ve also explored ways to employ Caribbean Anglophone dialects as analogs to Antillean Creole.
“Aleph” comes from Monchoachi’s 2002 collection L’espère-geste (“Gesture-that-unburdens”). “The hut where the moon stays,” which comes from a stand-alone volume published in the same year, hovers between poetry and essay: a Caribbean ars poetica linking language and geography. “Multiple, multitude,” and “The Above, the Below” have not been previously published—even in French—and come from two of Monchoachi’s forthcoming volumes.
These new poems will eventually join Monchoachi’s ongoing poetic cycle Lémistè (“Mystry”). In each book in this cycle, Monchoachi turns to the history of a different region, exploring the paths that led to the devastations of our modern world—and uncovering altenrative ways of being. In the first volume, he examined the Americas. The second, Partition noire et bleue (Black and Blue Score), focuses on Africa and Oceania. (Patricia Heartland’s translations of several poems from Lémistè 2 appeared in a previous edition of Asymptote.)
“The Above, the Below" depicts the creation of the world, and will eventually be included in Stretti, a volume exploring ancient Jewish thought. “Multiple, multitude” is part of the forthcoming Fugue v. Fug, which reimagines the invention of vowels in ancient Greece. For Monchoachi, language is the foundation of thought. Therefore, he believes that it was the invention of vowels that enabled the Greeks to delude themselves that they could fully describe the world—and by describing, dominate it.
Yet this “translation” is also present below the surface of the poems, in the foundation of Monchoachi’s approach to writing. Monchoachi was trained as a philosopher, and one of the remarkable features of his writing is the way he is able to wield different intellectual frames without losing the music and imagery of poetry. He shifts between modes of thought as a way to disrupt the dominance of Western perspectives, channeling sources as varied as the rhythms of Antillean funeral rites, the silenced voices of Mayan codices, and the visions of Hebrew mystics.
The leaps between languages and registers present particular challenges for translation, as interlingual wordplay abounds. However, translating these poems into English also presents unique opportunities. As Derek Walcott described: “There is a euphony of ideas in the nature of the French language, whereas English, and Creole . . . have a euphony of images, of simile.” Rendering the poems in English thus allows different facets of la pensée créole to emerge. Throughout these translations, I’ve also explored ways to employ Caribbean Anglophone dialects as analogs to Antillean Creole.
“Aleph” comes from Monchoachi’s 2002 collection L’espère-geste (“Gesture-that-unburdens”). “The hut where the moon stays,” which comes from a stand-alone volume published in the same year, hovers between poetry and essay: a Caribbean ars poetica linking language and geography. “Multiple, multitude,” and “The Above, the Below” have not been previously published—even in French—and come from two of Monchoachi’s forthcoming volumes.
These new poems will eventually join Monchoachi’s ongoing poetic cycle Lémistè (“Mystry”). In each book in this cycle, Monchoachi turns to the history of a different region, exploring the paths that led to the devastations of our modern world—and uncovering altenrative ways of being. In the first volume, he examined the Americas. The second, Partition noire et bleue (Black and Blue Score), focuses on Africa and Oceania. (Patricia Heartland’s translations of several poems from Lémistè 2 appeared in a previous edition of Asymptote.)
“The Above, the Below" depicts the creation of the world, and will eventually be included in Stretti, a volume exploring ancient Jewish thought. “Multiple, multitude” is part of the forthcoming Fugue v. Fug, which reimagines the invention of vowels in ancient Greece. For Monchoachi, language is the foundation of thought. Therefore, he believes that it was the invention of vowels that enabled the Greeks to delude themselves that they could fully describe the world—and by describing, dominate it.
Monchoachi is a Martinican poet, essayist, and translator. Over his forty-year career, he has published more than a dozen volumes of poetry—in both French and Antillean Creole—as well as three essay collections. He has also translated Samuel Beckett’s Endgame and Waiting for Godot into Antillean Creole, among other plays. Monchoachi was active in anti-colonial and immigrant justice movements, and currently runs Lakouzémi (“the zémi chorus”), his small publishing house and Antillean cultural organization. He has received the Carbet Caribbean Prize, the Max Jacob Prize, and the International Francophone Studies Council Prize.
Eric Fishman is a translator, writer, and elementary school teacher. His collection of André du Bouchet’s poems, Outside, is forthcoming from Bitter Oleander Press (co-translated with Hoyt Rogers). Eric studied English literature and translation at Yale and French literature at Université de Paris. He is currently working on an anthology of Monchoachi’s poetry, supported by a grant from the Collectivité Territoriale de Martinique.
