Four Cutouts

Claude Ber

Cutout 1

Little, minuscule indecision of existing. Afraid of the spectacle of its own destruction. In the silent ark of vanished loved ones, an absent stone. And a magnolia. The back of muteness. In its murmur or its loquacity. Simultaneously cheek by foul. In the overstep of the mouth. Like a tilt from the edge. The arc of an inadmissible space. A trapdoor in the forehead. Where the village idiot’s stories and the sparrows come from. The socratic gadfly of Athens. Vigilance. A jumbled buffoonery at the turn of the millennium. Like snails spilled through the wires of a rusty salad spinner, the juice of language.





Cutout 2

The scent of perfume and sweat. Whispered words. The thick fur of time. Then the skinning. The escalator caterpillars deep below the station concourse. Its ceremonious slowness carries the cavalcade of hurried travellers with all the bombast of a procession. A slowing freezes them softened and blurred on the metallic sheets of wall. Distant fresco interrupting itself in pauses. In glittering empty lengths of steel. Becoming obvious in disappearance. The absence of drama and pain. A cinematographic slide across the still screen of time. Sandwiched between the agitated stampeding above and below. In contemplative retreat. Zero gravity. Fascination of angels and aircrafts. Luxury of purposeless ascension. Neither sky nor fall. The metaphysical innocence of the elevator.





Cutout 3

A fine rain is misting on the palms and stone pines. Their branches quiver as if from the weight of birds. The trickle of droplets along the trunks. With a waterfalllike scattering, a sight as much as a sound. Beak against bark. Or the snapping of mandibles wired to a soundsystem’s amps. Micro macro criss-crossed. Even combined. The cosmos captured in the tin can I pull open by the loop on the cover. And that same loop worn as a ring on the finger. Ring tossed ark keeled. The rainbow of a new covenant. In the eager pitter-patter of the rain. Its haste to finish to come back into the earth. For the laterite of the soul and the withering of the heart what rain? I drink the last of the future from the bottle. A swig of sparkling water that tastes like plastic. And I contemplate the faraway from the viewpoint of a motorway rest stop. Stripped from this angle. A grey slab of rainy sky, a grey slab of asphalt. And between, the minuscule frieze of bonsai trees welding zinc and zinc together.





Cutout 5

With the sweater I fold an absent body. A body dressed in absence. Virtually possible. In the intimacy of his scent between the stitches. Presence knitted by my hands that mechanically tear off the strands of lint at the wear of elbows and wrists. I sample disappearance with my fingertips.


translated from the French by Elodie Olson-Coons

Read the original in French

Claude Ber’s La mort n’est jamais comme (Éditions de l’Amandier, 2009) is preoccupied with absence and subtraction, fragmentation and incompleteness. The title’s simile—or dissimile: “death is never like”—hangs empty, unanswered. The book opens with the line “Ce qui reste parfois je l’appelle poème” (“What is left sometimes I call poem”): a reminder of the incomplete nature of representation, or indeed writing.

Respecting, celebrating that incompleteness, had to lie at the heart of any project to translate Claude Ber. I chose to focus on a series of horizontal or prose poems from within the work: the découpes. (Ber prefers to distinguish between vertical poems and horizontal poems rather than poetry and prose—an acknowledgement of a change of rhythm for the eye and the ear, a refusal to separate genres.) The découpes are ambitious and contradictory, fragmentary texts with immense and interweaving frames of reference.

The word découpe carries with it the sharpness of its associations—cloth, butchery, papercraft. These cutouts are fertile and dark and playful, allusive and rich with wordplay. The text is difficult and deft; it echoes and mirrors inner and outer worlds. But translating the text wasn’t half as difficult as not translating what lay outside, or underneath, its surface.

Reading and rereading, asking the author and the internet the wrong questions, cutting into the surface ice: this was the core of the work, if I was to have any hope of leaving the right things unsaid. Linguistic transposition came a distant second.

Of course it’s so tempting, when you’ve Laroussed and OEDed yourself to the lightbulb moment, when the poet has spelled something out in an email, to want to share it, to make it explicit in the translation. But withholding or loss lies at the centre of Claude Ber’s poetics—what is left—and I believe any translation of her work should strive to mirror that sense of absence, conjuring up rich and almost endless possibilities.

Claude Ber is a French poet, essayist, and playwright with a dozen books to her name, the latest of which, Epître Langue Louve, was published in 2015. She has also contributed to various art books and anthologies. She has taught at French universities including Sciences Po in Paris, and is an active participant in a number of international conferences and festivals. Her books have been translated into several languages. The poems published here are from her collection La mort n’est jamais comme, which won the Prix international de poésie francophone Yvan-Goll in 2004.

Elodie Olson-Coons is a bilingual ghostwriter, editor, and translator currently based in Switzerland. Her writing has been featured in Music & Literature, The Island Review, [PANK], Paper Darts, Lighthouse, and The Literateur. She is currently working on a full-length translation of Claude Ber’s Epître Langue Louve. She tweets @elllode.