Quatre Poèmes

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.”