In Asymptote’s most recent Winter Issue, translator Emily Graham brought Linda Maria Baros’s visceral and enigmatic poem “Aucun homme ne t’a défendue” into English as “No man has defended you.” This “transitional” poem comes from Baros’s collection La nageuse désossée. Légendes métropolitaines (The Deboned Swimmer: Metropolitan Legends), which combines a folkloric atmosphere and militaristic ideas to create a resonant call to action. In the following interview, Asymptote contributor Marina Dora Martino speaks with Emily Graham on her experience bringing the “allure” of Baros’s poetry into English.
Marina Dora Martino (MDM): “No man has defended you” is a powerful stand-alone piece, but I am curious about how it relates to the rest of The Deboned Swimmer. Can you tell us a bit more about where the poem stands in the collection?
Emily Graham (EG): “No man has defended you” is the final poem in “Tarmac,” the section that opens The Deboned Swimmer. The collection is broken up into several of these sections, all named after areas or details of an urban landscape, like “Walls,” “Roofs,” “Underground.” Each section ends with an italicised piece that is at once part of the section and apart, a moment of transition. And this is what “No man has defended you” is, though the poet decided to lose the italics once the poem was taken out of context. Each of these end-of-section transitional poems goes back to the figure of the enigmatic swimmer. In these poems, there is often a sense of strife and oppression, but there is also a yearning. These swimmers seem to have something that the narrator craves and wants to be a part of, and each italicised poem seems to add to her pursuit in reaching it. “No man has defended you” is very interesting in this sense, as the contrast between this undercurrent of violence and the narrator’s admiration for the swimmers is particularly strong.
MDM: In your translator’s note, you talk about how there is no gender-specific word for “swimmer” in English, but the nageuses in Baros’s French original are definitely marked as female. How important is it for the swimmers in this poem to be identified as women?
EG: It is very important for the poet—the swimmer figure is explicitly gendered from the very title, La nageuse désossée. There being no English equivalent, it was a little hard to navigate this gender-specific word, and I really had to take it poem by poem and line by line. For instance, I was planning to translate “les vestiaires des nageuses” as “women’s locker room,” operating a choice on which side to bring forward in that line, but when I spoke to Baros about it, she was adamant that the swimmers had to be present in the poem, so I decided on the non-gendered “swimmer’s locker room.” It preserves a certain cohesion of sense and sound, and I thought, better to have a line that sounds right and has a little side note than to mess up with the rhythm and the imagery!
MDM: One thing that struck me about this poem is how natural, how “at home” it feels in English, while also preserving a lot of the strangeness from the original, both in the syntax and the lexicon. How challenging is it to map Baros’s original poems in the English language?
EG: Baros’s language is completely unique—in her poems, I have come across words that I would never hear in conversational French or English. Especially in this poem, I felt like the words fell into place on their own, which is not always the case. They have the same brutality and intimacy, just transposed onto a different soundscape. For example, in the line “la brume de la vocation éjaculatoire,” “ejaculatory” was easy to translate, but “brume” and “vocation” were much less obvious. They sound so alluring in French, and I wanted something that sounded to me as alluring in English. Although “haze” and “calling” use a different set of sounds, I find that they give out a similar atmosphere to “brume” and “vocation,” something that has to do with “haze” being also a short, breathy word, and “calling” longer and more consonant-heavy. It just felt like it was all magically making sense.
MDM: About Baros’s idiosyncratic language, you talked about the experience of handling her complex and unusual language, concepts, imagery, and going off on “literary excavations.” Can you tell us a bit more about that?
EG: Well, when I’m translating Baros I always have a Google page pulled up. She makes allusions not only to literary or cultural things, but also scientific phenomena, warfare, historical events I had never heard of. Once I was translating a poem of hers, in which she talked about these underground mines that exist under Paris and kept coming up as a theme in her poems. Then I was talking to a French woman—a history professor of all things—in a café in Paris, and I mentioned these incredible mining tunnels that I was learning about thanks to Baros’s poem, and the woman was bewildered. She had never heard of them! I learned a lot translating Baros, it’s just so much fun. I love that I find out about things I would have never come across otherwise.
MDM: Let’s go back to “No man has defended you.” The deboned swimmers here are mirrored by elusive male figures that you defined as “shapeshifting.” What is happening between them in this poem, and how does their relationship develop in the rest of the collection?
EG: The clash between the female swimmers and the male figures is one of the most prominent threads in the collection. They don’t necessarily appear in every poem as characters, but they are present in the atmosphere created by the choice of words and imagery. Even when the male figure is not mentioned, the poems are permeated with a malevolent force that feels deeply connected to the shapeshifting men we are presented with in “No man has defended you.” Let’s not forget as well that this is the first end-of-section italicised poem in the collection. Some of the italicised poems work as a brief moment of respite, in which the violence and the oppression lessen, and the language softens, becomes less warlike. The swimmers in particular often emerge as a relief from the anxiety of the narrative and are surrounded by a love and devotion that doesn’t seem possible under the patriarchal force at play in other poems. These undercurrents become more noticeable when one has the bigger picture, but they are clearly present in “No man has defended you” as well.
MDM: The male figures in “No man has defended you” seem to be as malevolent as incompetent, something that you also talk about in the translator’s note when you say that Baros here poignantly expresses “both her agony and her authority.”
EG: Yeah, I totally agree, they are kind of incompetent. I think Baros here is reflecting on a society in which people are “naturally” born into places of power, but they don’t necessarily know what to do with it. The men in the poem wield such a heavy force and yet half the things that they do are torn down by the strong, ironic, biting narrator faster than they can tear her down. They might have the physical power, but she has the emotional power.
MDM: I’ve been curious to learn more about the poem’s structure. Can you tell us more about it?
EG: One of my favourite things in the poem is the indentations, and also the variations in line length. The poem reads like a list, with the refrain “no man has” repeating itself and mutating throughout, and there is something mesmerising about that, a bit like an incantation. There is also an element of the mnemonical, as if the poem were made of reassuring lines learned by heart, something that has been drilled into the narrator’s memory and that the narrator can recite for reassurance. I think this is enhanced as well by the superficially disconnected images, and the rhythmical, almost desensitised chain of them.
MDM: You have translated a lot of Baros. How has your relationship with the work changed?
EG: I had been translating Baros for a year before reaching out to her and asking her about the rights and so on. I had already gotten used to her voice by then, learned her rhythms and the ways in which her talent can go from biting and acidic to restrained or soft. But the biggest change in the work has been when we started to work creatively together. With her guidance on top of my experience of her work, I truly started feeling like I had a relationship with the voice, and I could sense where it was heading from the first line.
MDM: Thank you Emily, this has been great. I have one last question for you: Why is Linda Maria Baros an urgent voice to translate into English?
EG: First and foremost, it’s because I love her work. I want to translate her so that more people can get what I get from reading her. I think the shifts in her tone are so special—the visceral, the unattractive, the harshness of her anger and the depth of her passion. I’ve never come across any voice so abrasive and unafraid, calling people out with such a level of bluntness. This collection is an indictment, a call to action, almost a manifesto sometimes, and I just love that she can do that while also being enigmatic, complex, and ubiquitous. Especially with a poem like “No man has defended you,” I think anyone, not only female identifying people, can step into Baros’s poetry and recognise the struggle. Thanks to her emotional mastery, even if you don’t discern exactly everything that is going on, or if you don’t see yourself in the specifics, there is something universal about it, something that you feel in your bones.
Marina D. Martino is a poet and translator. She is currently based in Venice, where she writes, works and learns a thing or two about water.
Emily Graham is a writer and translator of contemporary French poetry. From Cleveland, Ohio, she lived in Connecticut for four years before returning to the Midwest, where she is currently an MFA student in literary translation at the University of Iowa. She is the recipient of the 2022 World Literature Today Student Translation Prize in Poetry for her translation of Baros’s poem “Je sors dans la rue avec l’ange.”
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