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  READ MORE…