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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