no future out of writing out growing.
plankton kicks me in the jaw jawing at night
twists nightmares around tears away from me
my mountain beaming with its stormy.
kid’s lifetime spanning my life.
his little crab squeaks in my throat
at this hour of reality gone ferocious.
his drawing of faces with smiling eyes
locks my life up, or is it me who locks up life?
the words popping in my head sound stupid but that’s all I got.
intumescences and perforation of the idea of progression,
administered with a spoon by the father and mother,
then perpetrated by teaching and its machinations.
my game bag terminal end of its own abscesses
I’m on my way to the state of being widowed,
ticket punched in what city?
my body of the future curls up
can’t accept my failure in the cage where I’ve been successful
for fifteen years, subcontracted meanwhile by right-wing big shots
repositioning places for pleasure.
I hope the instrumentalization flow coming out
of their hands and mouths
will be screened for them.
I can tell my skull’s shaking under the bell
next thing I’m gonna take the tongue in the gut.
the question of knowing how to continue my constructed meticulousness
proliferates in my throat.
this age’s requisitions are no longer in keeping with
the skin I sewed together back when
working as my own construction’s carpenter.
time unrecognizably wearing.
time I put on today
to make sure I don’t lose what I carry.
how to get the fruit in my head to bear fruit
without drifting off into other plans as soon as I get myself underway?
impossible task.
justice!
it’s up to me to grant it to myself!
acting rationally and out of instinct,
it’s only this way
that my soul will reassume its mission,
will legitimize what is adequate
to what has and will establish me.
my vain efforts, so intense during slots to move around,
train me in apnea.
my birth passes away from my rebirth attempts
where my fingers are pointing,
nudged awake by any idea’s startle
at my crops’ pallor.
no one can fly by gaining momentum outside of themselves.
the way I hear it, the age is telling me to keep the doors open.
give me my cloister.
MY DEFECTIVENESS FACILITATED YOUR GROUND. FINDINGS OF AN EMANCIPATED WOMAN. THANK YOU (IN THE KITCHEN)
Elke de Rijcke
translated from the French by MARGENTO
Listen to the original read bythe poet:
Translating Elke de Rijcke is a huge challenge; therefore despite the prominence of her poetry in the Francophone world, it is no wonder that she has hardly been translated into English. She is an exemplary figure within contemporary Belgian verse (and academia) in that she posits poetry in close dialogue—if not fusion—with the arts, performance, and science. What places her at the front of these trends is how her poetry imports cross-disciplinary and intermedial heterogeneities into each line, and onto the (screen) page. Her sequences manage to alternate, branch out, and rehash themselves in an information-technology-like manner, and thus turn into “virtual” soundscapes/stages for a performativity that comes in iterative waves, just like newsfeed updates and thread refreshes.
Therefore, the translator has two main tasks: rendering linguistic, sonic, and rhythmical echoic variations across long textual distances (this is true of modern long poems in general); and re-staging syntactic and idiomatic developments that are accretive and contiguous while also disruptive, contradictory, and cacophonous. Starting from the first line of the featured poem, the translator is confronted with density and multi-dimensionality. “[S]ans avenir hors d'un écrit sur qui pousse” could be read in several ways, some of which contradict each other: “no future outside of [a] writing” (or “except for writing”), but also, particularly in light of the end of the line, and quite oppositely, “no future coming (growing, hatching) out of [a] writing,” and therefore, “no future [living to make] off of writing . . .” And these are only a couple of the possible readings of just the first line that speaks of (future) growing while growing itself rather smoothly towards (futureless?) undecidability . . .
De Rijcke masterfully informs such complexities with an uncomplacent and uncomplying political stance, as she exposes discrimination by amplifying relevant loci to grotesque distortion with self-reflexive irony. In doing my level best to capture that, I translated, for instance, “requalifier les lieux” as “repositioning places,” taking advantage of the North-American term used in real estate (renovating, revamping places) as well as in (un)employment, to try to render the political/gender-relevant context.
These translations posed endless challenges like the ones above as well as others, but I do hope these timid attempts will further attract attention to her fascinating work in the English-speaking world and beyond.
Therefore, the translator has two main tasks: rendering linguistic, sonic, and rhythmical echoic variations across long textual distances (this is true of modern long poems in general); and re-staging syntactic and idiomatic developments that are accretive and contiguous while also disruptive, contradictory, and cacophonous. Starting from the first line of the featured poem, the translator is confronted with density and multi-dimensionality. “[S]ans avenir hors d'un écrit sur qui pousse” could be read in several ways, some of which contradict each other: “no future outside of [a] writing” (or “except for writing”), but also, particularly in light of the end of the line, and quite oppositely, “no future coming (growing, hatching) out of [a] writing,” and therefore, “no future [living to make] off of writing . . .” And these are only a couple of the possible readings of just the first line that speaks of (future) growing while growing itself rather smoothly towards (futureless?) undecidability . . .
De Rijcke masterfully informs such complexities with an uncomplacent and uncomplying political stance, as she exposes discrimination by amplifying relevant loci to grotesque distortion with self-reflexive irony. In doing my level best to capture that, I translated, for instance, “requalifier les lieux” as “repositioning places,” taking advantage of the North-American term used in real estate (renovating, revamping places) as well as in (un)employment, to try to render the political/gender-relevant context.
These translations posed endless challenges like the ones above as well as others, but I do hope these timid attempts will further attract attention to her fascinating work in the English-speaking world and beyond.
Elke de Rijcke is a bilingual poet who has been published in French and Dutch. Her most recent book, June on April (Juin sur Avril), will be published by Editions Lanskine in 2021. Her poetry engages in formal experiments, focusing on sophisticated sensorial experiences, poetic perception and cognition, and the materiality of language. It reflects an acute interest in the history of books, arts, and sciences. On a conceptual level, de Rijcke has worked on the possible declinations of feminine eros and identity. She teaches contemporary literature and aesthetics at ESA (École Supérieure des Arts) Saint-Luc and ERG (École de Recherche Graphique) Brussels. Since 2018, she has also been co-animator of the pluridisciplinary platform Physical Poetics.
MARGENTO (Chris Tănăsescu), Asymptote’s Editor-at-Large for Romania and Moldova, is a computational poet, performer, and academic active in Europe and North America. While continuing his work on the Graph Poem project, he is currently editing a computationally assembled Belgian poetry anthology.
