sans avenir hors d’un écrit sur qui pousse.
du plancton me bat la bouche à la nuit,
m’invulse le cauchemar et arrache à moi.
ma montagne rutile de ses orageux.
l’âge de l’enfant répand dans l’âge de ma vie.
son petit crabe de mer crisse dans ma gorge
à l’heure où la réalité est devenue féroce.
son dessin de visages aux yeux souriants
ferme ma vie à clé, ou est-ce moi à clé qui ferme la vie ?
les mots qui sourdent dans ma tête sont abêtis mais les seuls à piloter.
intumescences et perforation de l’idée de progression,
administrée à la cuillère par le père et la mère,
puis perpétrée par l’enseignement et ses machinations.
ma gibecière est terminale de ses abcès.
je vais vers un état de veuve,
perforée dans quelle ville ?
mon corps du futur se recroqueville
je n’accepte pas ma faillite dans la cage où j’ai été performante
pendant 15 ans, sous-traitée à présent par des têtes de droite
qui se délectent à requalifier les lieux.
j’espère que l’instrumentalisation qui leur coule
des mains et de la bouche
leur sera criblée.
je sais que mon crâne tremble sous une cloche
et que mon ventre encaisse le battant.
la question de savoir comment continuer ma minutie construite
prolifère dans ma gorge.
les réquisitions de l’époque ne sont plus conformes
à ma peau que j’avais cousue
lorsque j’étais la menuisière de ma construction.
le temps s’est vêtu de méconnaissable.
le temps que je mets aujourd’hui
pour ne pas gaspiller ce dont je suis porteuse.
comment faire fructifier le fruit dans ma tête
sans couler sur d’autres plans dès que je me mets en œuvre ?
impossible tâche.
justice !
c’est à moi-même de me la donner à moi-même !
agir de raison mais à partir de l’instinct,
ce n’est qu’ainsi
que mon âme réintègrera sa mission,
légitimera ce qui est adéquat
à ce qui m’a fondé et me fondera.
mes efforts vains, si intensifs en minutes à mettre en place,
m’entraînent en apnée.
ma naissance s’éteint à mes tentatives de renaissance
vers où pointent mes doigts,
réveillés à chaque sursaut d’idée
qui se rétracte à la pâleur de mes récoltes.
nul ne peut voler en prenant son élan hors de soi.
mais à mon oreille l’époque me signifie de garder les portes ouvertes.
donne-moi mon cloître.
MA DÉFECTUOSITE FACILITAIT TON TERRAIN. CONSTATATIONS D’UNE FEMME ÉMANCIPÉE. MERCI (DANS LA CUISINE)
Elke de Rijcke
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.
