from Riddled Time

These pieces come from Alain Lance’s selected poems, which won the Prix Guillaume Apollinaire in 2001. The title of his collection, Temps criblé, might be translated as “sifted time,” an apt title for a collection that spans writings from 1962 to 1999—almost four decades. But there is a second meaning too. Temps criblé could be translated as “riddled time,” as something shot through by bullets, marked by conflict. Though he was only five years old when the Second World War ended, Alain Lance’s poetry is shot through with remains of the war, of many wars. He was born in December 1939, in a small village near Rouen, but the prime of his childhood was spent in Nazi-occupied Paris under the Vichy regime. Years later, in Tübingen, Germany at age seventeen, Lance wrote his first poem. It was a moment that was telling for his future as a writer: he became not only a prominent post-war poet, but also an accomplished translator from the German.

Lance’s words and the spaces between them, whether riddled by bullets or time, are more than just a record of the Second World War. They follow a sentiment of conflict and loss that continues today, tracing those bullets not only back through time, but forward in their trajectory, through Vietnam and many other wars, a string of conflicts that seems to continue almost without end. In Lance’s work, past wars are not past; they linger in troubled memories and weighted words. But even as Lance’s work carries a heavy history, he still finds space for play within his language. His work is at times propelled by wordplay, rhyme, repetition—gestures that coalesce, in the face of trauma, into moments of order and hope.