life is under construction the scaffolding
does not complete the forgotten
moments so tiny
as the bits of air that
make up the sky we don’t see them
one by one since we are
inside
it’s when we block the sky with
our hand
that we age
all of a sudden
it is time
to hear
what we do not want to hear
hear what makes no noise
blood makes no noise
the dead bird
makes no noise
to walk on a cloud
makes no noise
let it go
do not make noise
to keep quiet
makes no noise
but all this silence
all those who are silent
make a noise to live longer
lying makes no noise
but lying and lying about lying
adds up to making a noise to no longer
hearing each other
a noise at the end of the world
death
makes no noise
so alive am I
in every eye where you are
I do not know where I am
my hands follow you
you are dressed by my sight
together we are
patients of life
we are what we are waiting for
the dead that live under
our eyelids
do not know they are dead
they travel through us the desert
and the journey
we too have been traveled through
on a night like no other
because the night travels through us
since then
time has been limping
through us and our words are
the passage and you said
I come from your future
we live from mouth to mouth
Four Poems
Henri Meschonnic
translated from the French by Don Boes and Gabriella Bedetti
Listen to the original read by Gaby Bedetti:
The translations featured here are the result of a collaboration between a poet (Don Boes) and a translator (Gaby Bedetti). Our project has been to translate a few poems from each of Meschonnic’s nineteen collections for a Selected Poems of Henri Meschonnic. We chose this sampling from that manuscript. These poems represent four of his nineteen collections: Je n’ai pas tout entendu (I Did Not Hear the Whole Story, 2000); Et la terre coule (And the Earth Flows, 2006); La vie je cours (Life I Run, 2008); and Nous le passage (We the Passage, 1990). These four poems only suggest the richness, range, and intensity of his poetic output.
Previously, six poems from Voyageurs de la voix (Voyagers of the Voice) were translated in “Jewish Poets of France,” Shirim: A Jewish Poetry Journal, vol. 7, no. 2, Oct. 1988. Our English translations seem to be the first since then of Meschonnic’s diaphanous, stripped-down voice. As with the poems of Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jacques Réda, the rhythm of Meschonnic’s poems exposes the subject. He follows Montaigne’s practice: “I do not describe being. I describe the passage . . . from minute to minute.” Untitled and unpunctuated, his poems are kin to W. S. Merwin’s “climbing out of myself/all my life.” Meschonnic writes, “I am not in what/I seek but in what escapes me.”
Our challenge as translators was to capture the continuous movement of the poems, a movement that suggests the possibility of passing energeia from subject to subject, of inventing within language new ways of being with oneself, others, and the world. Replicating this movement in English texts was difficult. We could hear and feel the rhythm of the French. We thought Meschonnic’s minimal vocabulary and relative lack of poetic features, such as images and metaphors (his poems are nearly adjective-free), suggested a somewhat clear path from French to English. However, we soon realized his rhythms and condensed language was in the service of mapping voices, not poems. His use of enjambment and only the most colloquial verbs and nouns made us take a hard look at individual words (no matter their simplicity), and therefore the world. In translating these poems, like Meschonnic, that accomplished innovator, we became “patients of life.”
Previously, six poems from Voyageurs de la voix (Voyagers of the Voice) were translated in “Jewish Poets of France,” Shirim: A Jewish Poetry Journal, vol. 7, no. 2, Oct. 1988. Our English translations seem to be the first since then of Meschonnic’s diaphanous, stripped-down voice. As with the poems of Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jacques Réda, the rhythm of Meschonnic’s poems exposes the subject. He follows Montaigne’s practice: “I do not describe being. I describe the passage . . . from minute to minute.” Untitled and unpunctuated, his poems are kin to W. S. Merwin’s “climbing out of myself/all my life.” Meschonnic writes, “I am not in what/I seek but in what escapes me.”
Our challenge as translators was to capture the continuous movement of the poems, a movement that suggests the possibility of passing energeia from subject to subject, of inventing within language new ways of being with oneself, others, and the world. Replicating this movement in English texts was difficult. We could hear and feel the rhythm of the French. We thought Meschonnic’s minimal vocabulary and relative lack of poetic features, such as images and metaphors (his poems are nearly adjective-free), suggested a somewhat clear path from French to English. However, we soon realized his rhythms and condensed language was in the service of mapping voices, not poems. His use of enjambment and only the most colloquial verbs and nouns made us take a hard look at individual words (no matter their simplicity), and therefore the world. In translating these poems, like Meschonnic, that accomplished innovator, we became “patients of life.”
Henri Meschonnic (1932–2009) is a key figure of French “new poetics,” best known worldwide for his translations from the Old Testament and the 710-page Critique du rhythme. During his long career, Meschonnic generated controversy in the literary community. As a poet and as a translator of the Hebrew verse of the Bible, Meschonnic contends that rhythm rules over meaning, flowing from the bottom up. For him, the revolution in the idea of language is the basis of a continuing change, not only in the poem but also in the idea of history and social life itself. His poems appear in more than a dozen languages; however, even now, almost none of Meschonnic’s poems have been translated into English. His poetry has received prestigious awards, including the Max Jacob International Poetry Prize, the Mallarmé Prize, the Jean Arp Francophone Literature Prize, and the Guillevic-Ville de Saint-Malo Grand Prize for Poetry.
Don Boes is the author of Good Luck With That, Railroad Crossing, and The Eighth Continent, selected by A. R. Ammons for the Samuel French Morse Poetry Prize. His poems have appeared in The Louisville Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, Prairie Schooner, CutBank, Zone 3, Southern Indiana Review, and The Cincinnati Review.
Gabriella Bedetti studied translation at the University of Iowa and the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. Her translations of Meschonnic’s essays and other writings have appeared in New Literary History, Critical Inquiry, and Diacritics. Meschonnic was a guest of the MLA at her roundtable with Ralph Cohen and Susan Stewart.
