Translation Tuesday: Excerpts from Proofs of the Living by Andrée Chedid

Groan / without a voice / in our accents

This week’s Translation Tuesday features the work of Andrée Chedid. Expertly translated for sound and content by Lauren Peat, these poems crack like a conceptual whip—the poet writes, “The cry of being / Rattles our targets / Unweaves our wefts.” With a density of imagery and sound as well as a commitment to a somber reflection on modern consciousness, these poems recall the poetry of the French Symbolists, who constructed dense systems of meaning that evoke magnitudes from the mundane or eerie. The vaguely mathematical nature of the poems, captured in “proofs,” means that the reader is driven towards a certain point, or climax, without realizing exactly where they have arrived. Sometimes the subject matter is haunting; at all times it is captivating.

proofs of being

The call of every birth
Cracks the world order

Its verb looks for us
Its breath divests

Planted into marrow
Pulling speech from the field of words
The cry of being
Rattles our targets
Unweaves our wefts
Flips the streaming hourglass
Holds us to the path————

 

proofs of time

In the days of my youth
The earth was heavy with centuries

I echoed with life
I was stuffed with dreams

I loathed the trappings
That tainted alliance

I adopted death
Who kept me in line

. . .

In the days of my old age
The earth is a new vine

Life:
this bread of reverie

Death:
this ripened grain.

 

redeeming the dark

I bet on these boats
Slipping from moistness

This thrust of lightning
Far from the plotting of mists

These knots of shadow
Undone by speech

This flight of sparks
Erupted from labyrinths

. . .

These skylights piercing the opaque
These moons redeeming the dark

I bet on these clarities
Profound and perishable

On the intense faced with blank chance
On the dawn faced with decline.

 

of the living and the dead

Sick of ice, of half-light

Our dead

Stick
without a trace
to our windowpanes

Groan
without a voice
in our accents

Waver
in the frail pursuit
of their abolished flesh

. . .

Gripped by ice, by half-night

Their hearts
veil themselves
for the earth

Their snuffed-out hands
strain toward
our gleaming

The specter of their arms
seeks to retain us

. . .

But our living footsteps
unfurl without their escort

Our lives
outlive their cries

Our hours
consume their contours

Only reflections that remember
Sometimes revive them in a brief blaze!

Translated from the French by Lauren Peat

Born in Cairo, Andrée Chedid spent her early years hopscotching between Egypt, Lebanon, and France. She eventually settled in Paris, where she was deemed “the lady of two rivers”—the Nile and the Seine. A prolific prose-writer and playwright, Chedid claimed that poetry was her favourite form, one to which she returned “as though it were the essential spring.” She won the Prix Goncourt for poetry in 2002, and was named a Grand Officer of the Légion d’honneur in 2009. She died in 2011.

Lauren Peat is a British-Canadian writer, literary translator, and lyricist. Her poems have been set to music by acclaimed Canadian composer Katerina Gimon, exhibited at Boston’s Faneuil Hall, and featured in publications such as The Puritan and If You’re Not Happy Now, an anthology by Broadstone Books. She holds an MFA in poetry from Boston University. Currently in Mexico, thanks to a Robert Pinsky Global Fellowship, she is working on a project fusing poetry and longer-form writing.

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