This Translation Tuesday, we feature two extraordinary poems by the celebrated Haitian-Québécois poet Marie-Célie Agnant. Drawn from her first collection, Balafres, ardent readers of Asymptote might recall Agnant’s work from our Fall 2016 issue featuring Canadian poetry. But these two poems reveal a more personal dimension of the socially engaged poet, as translator Danielle Legros Georges shows us, with its heady mix of myth and memory.
“Balafres, renamed Gashes in English, consists of 36 poems originally written in French, some spanning several pages, others epigrammatic. Agnant’s is a poetics grounded in the Haitian engagée tradition, a literature of social commitment; one in which political dimensions are not divorced from aesthetic ones. The poems here, however, are among her love poems—which are not so well-known. In translating them, I was, at moments, challenged (and subsequently charmed) by Agnant’s images, image-systems, and metaphors. In “Orphée,” for example, the question arose of how best to treat the breath (souffle) of the lover in mon corps/ balafon d’obsidienne / mes cuisses bilimbao et / mon souffle touffeur de savane. Was the sultriness of the breath to be emphasized, the dry heat of it, its connection to biome, or a combination of these? Such have been the knots to untie toward equivalence.”
—Danielle Legros Georges
Orpheus
Honestly, break your pen
I’m neither
exquisite nymph nor
Madonna walled
in the great book of your dreams
far from the realm and frippery
of your words
move on
Break your pen I am not
this goddess
fairy
Aphrodite
with seawater eyes
who haunts your dreams
Break your pen and your mirror
look at me and
love me
with both hands
full-bodied
Love my skin
dark as your childhood nights
my mouth
rebellious nutmeg
my body
obsidian balafon
my bilimbao thighs
the heat of my breath like a savannah’s
Break your pen and your mirror
brush my hair
palma-christi wild lianas
and
keep your fingers away from your pen
your heart
far from the dreams
in which crystal nymphs with their azure-water eyes dance
beneath a sky
blue with clouds
Ecstacy
To Cynthia
my promise of a woman
Sleep my child
so beautiful in your dream
burning candle
bird in the sky
toward the shore of your choice
Find the cacti that flower
the clowns and balloons
the perfume
and music
Fly my child
forage the oases
the moon’s fields
Taste your sleep to the last bit
stamp in your memory
this first ecstasy
Sleep my child
it is still spring
Translated from the French by Danielle Legros Georges
Marie-Célie Agnant is a writer, translator, and activist whose novels have been widely-translated and include The Book of Emma (2004) which evokes the hardships endured by enslaved women in the Caribbean and the challenges to giving voice to this history today. Writing across literary genres, she has produced poetry, fiction, tales, and books for young readers. She received the Prix Alain-Grandbois of the Academie des Lettres du Quebec in 2017 for her most recent collection of poetry, Femmes des terres brûlées (2016). Her critically-acclaimed work offers poignant refusals of silence.
Danielle Legros Georges is the author of Island Heart (2021), translations of the poems of Haitian-French writer Ida Faubert, among other titles. Her poems have been widely published, anthologized, and included in international artistic commissions and collaborations. In 2014, Georges was named Poet Laureate of the City of Boston. She is the creative editor of sx salon, a digital forum for explorations of Caribbean literature; and a professor of creative writing at Lesley University.
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