from Air Triste

Guy Jean



Piazzolla on the bandonéon, The Pantango Trio plays Air Triste-Soledad
I dance
My partner glues to my gut her blues
of hopes misled, lifeless labors, dreams uncolored

Blues of distant lands, of all the world
long like exile, adrift,
old as death, early death—sudden and always yet to come.

Animals forget. They live, they die.

Dancing woman, let us dance an air triste,
one that leaves the furtive tracks of an animal on the dew
inside us, where a bird of prey fingerprints angels in the fresh snow.







The cordwood wall exposes to the sun his stumps.
In winter it will warm us with fire.

Similarly, will my own love on your wounds
paper a perfume of white birch?

Your love, too dense to digest,
enters the bone
a night watchman—
takes the form of what it sees.

Woman, swallow my cinders.
I want to die my eternity in your body.







My steps marry the odors of love.
I place hands on her hips,
the savage rhythms of sex resonate there, still—

I lift my gaze,
face without eyes or lips
the open void, teeth
of a frozen heart.

Tango of the funeral parlor,
My steps sink below ground.


translated from the French by Jen Lagedrost and Catherine Fagan

Read the original in French

Listen to the poems read in the original French by the author:

Working with the musically and syntactically complex French brings up numerous differences between French and English that create obstacles as well as opportunities for creative movement. In Guy Jean's French-Canadian poems, verb tenses shift (or seem to) from present to future to past without our linear American-English logic. Gendered nouns and pronouns—such as "le bois cordé" or "cordwood," later referred to as "il," the masculine pronoun for "he"—build the possibility of anamorphous metaphors and a potential for personified strangeness in English. French uses "ne . . . pas" to negate verbs, which physically splits the negation, resulting in a construction that does not exist in English. Additionally, there are false cognates and unanticipated resonances across words: "crâne"  (n. skull) and "crâner" (v. to show off) must be negotiated like stepping stones across a river.

The translator must balance being creative with being faithful to make the poem work in English. With the lines "dents ouvertes sur le vide / cœur glacé," a literal translation risks a cliché in English: "teeth open over the empty, / frozen heart." Toying with syntax, "open over the void teeth / of a frozen heart" aims to keep some of the edge removed in translation. The order of adjectives paired with nouns, too, is different. "Tango mortuaire" translates as "mortuary tango," but we can keep the French order by using "Tango of the mortuary" or "Tango of the morgue," which create a metaphor and a stronger effect in English.

Finally, French has reflexive verbs, such as "s'achève" ([it] ends itself); but there is also, "je me sors," which means, "I leave" (not "I leave myself"). "Tu me manques" means "I miss you," but a more literal translation would be, "you are missing from me," which has far vaster poetic implications in English. It is often these seeming traps or dead ends between languages that turn into trap doors and portals, unexpectedly transporting the reconstruction of syntax into an experience of art.

Guy Jean resides in Gatineau, Quebec, where he is much involved in the development and promotion of literature. He collaborates in creative and translation projects with artists and poets in Quebec, USA, and Europe. He is the author of eight books of poems, all published in Québec. English translations of his poems have appeared widely in magazines and journals in the US, and have been published as a chapbook, If I Were Born in Prague, by Argos Books and as a collection, Mourning Ploughs the Winter, by Marick Press.

Jen Lagedrost is a poet, writer, and translator who grew up on an organic vegetable farm in rural Ohio. Her poems and reviews appear in Pleiades, Stone Highway Review, Midwestern Gothic, the San Diego Poetry Annual, Minerva Rising, and the poetry anthology Bearers of Distance, among others. She is a contributing editor at Poetry International and HINGED: Journal of Converging Arts.

Catherine Fagan hails from Southborough, Massachusetts. She is a poet, writer, translator, and teacher of rhetoric and writing. She has been a submission reader for the Cider Press Review and a contributing editor at Poetry International.