WALK 1
Myself who was going to discover the clouds and write them at the same second,
(as said the flaring of memory)
heard the paper rustle to the illegible letter that
yie haeeed trace
suddenly
and that soon meant: WALK
Coming out remembering clouds
Like the blind representing the circle
And there, between the high fens, I cut a passage shoulder height
And see the phototrope bowing at my steps
And then yie walkck ck ck more than the suns becoming heavy and black
then arrived at the surrendered country,
the earth leaving me cold under its nails
My soles already used and reddening
from where?
in a deaf-mute anguish, they told me to walk,
Wordless, without desire, outside of life, they would fulfill me over-there
shavings from the all of them knocked
am spinning
and advancing in a petrified urge
vaccinated
Long live the 19th Century!
the earth is almost too loose
the moles that maybe have stopped leaving, the term
the term that you only learn in a book
and if the grass is so sweet in the spring
My silence
having covered all the rustling leaves, all the steps,
not one embrace
the stones, even they, have returned to me, and will never again have the
strength to welcome a child,
they think it intolerable.
And clearly ignore the whole of the mausoleum of verse that they have always again
raised up against me, and
So we will elegantly and melancholically kneel before the spots in the sentences to come,
Walled up = without experience = pure heart = first verb = poetry!
having constructed with my tutors my first memories, having made an album,
having fabricated onto my body forbidding a chrochronology
Clamourless the house of silence flies off
Everything leaves me now
Far from the stones that watch me
And stagger to life
And all those eyes in the city that await me
And the froth and its reasons
HOUSE 1
yi don’t have your houses,
nor your castles,
yi never repeat anything,
even when yi repeat your sentences for myself, but nothing in me is rebecome
that which was
who can say as much?
We should abandon everyone, fling walls of stone at you
And the whole city plunged their hands in me to find itself, only believing in
the roots,
You have tattooed all the messages, have become the window of
your absences
Then the poets came daubing, falsely grottish, their desires upon me; rolling in
my ashes to perceive what nature could still impose upon them
my god, exoticism!
having walked chewing a long sentence,
but only having two horses and ribbons, clothes, their remembrance
and already your city having too many things and already you wanted to forget
them to me
HOUSE 2
She told me
I like to hear the veil of sounds.
the clinking dishes in the basin, the sounds of humidity, those of spots that
undo themselves in water
to recognize the patterns of porcelain to the texture of droplets.
Yi tell myself,
that she made a dyke in the night,
her parents, the maid, the pitcher, and then the water
she fell asleep to the emptiness of their sounds
And from now on yi know the lucky word, the first trap,
new suffering from a tassel of life that never knew how to catch,
fastened to the earthhh,
never the arms to the sky, but it’s also good
there’s only one go around the merry-go round!
Talk to her of the silence of stones?
wrote “I was always content and satisfied . . . until the man came and made
me learn to imitate, but I knew what I had written.” And this sentence, the poets
believe more than all the others.
What a marvel that the statement trickling from an abused child’s ingenuity
who cries the reassuring crack of the whip, as the closet was sweet that shut
out life’s horrible sounds
Infans = nature? Have you seen bulls corner a steer in a pond and drown it,
just a little, keep it from leaving. Yes, I’ve seen the carcasses of hares half eaten
by the father, certainly, but some rabbits are shut up in burrows until they’re
adults?
O, , listen to the poetry of the child-closet!
HOUSE 3
When you walk across the streets of Nuremberg
Think of those who drank with straws,
My question mark,
Straw in the gulf, the first headlines,
Bourgeois Europe of tabloid stories
Tourists come to see me, the attraction of abuse
O the poetry market!
We torture in rooms, where there are candlesticks, kaspar, we
choose the color of candles and
the pillowcase is soft
But the satin slip also contains the liquid remorse,
And the punctured child is lighter than the dead child
have saint-sebastien’s pale side but my
anguish is without pictures for you, it is verb,
My mouth full of your words, am a story,
we should have molded a kaspar near The Ship of Fools, but my torments are
neither silicone nor bronze,
And even if they plunged a dagger in my chest, and they still suspect me,
All the flow of blood in my breast inspired in them only depositions, ink and
paper, and even if I said it, to please you, christ’s words, at the very end, it’s
written, they look under the fibers of my tongue for the lie. Yie is a marching
tabloid!
like the dead rabbit, you would have enveloped my body in all the colcolumuns
from Hamburg to Stuttgart, trembling titles, but no canvases for me. The red
that printed the cave, my steps uncertain, the dust in my mouth, not yet
worthy of museums,
And yes, look, they remove the wheel from the public place, a more gilded age
than my own, more mob excitement at the noise of breaking arms,
of the guilty,
of what?
More than the smell of sweat of the condemned, more than the cries of the
mob that mix with those of the cunning, more shoulder or the feet of your
neighbor in a trance to crush your own and to make you miss the mouth of the
tormented, but
headlines
that only have the smell of ink, hey, have
entered in the bourgeoisie?
from stone kaspar
Laure Gauthier
translated from the French by Christopher Alexander Kostritsky Gellert
Listen to the original read by the poet:
Laure Gauthier invites a polyphony of voices in her poetic work, and her practice is deeply rooted in sound poetry. She also frequently collaborates with contemporary composer and visual artists. This mingling and confusions of voices (and genres) is especially relevant for these excerpts from stone kaspar (kaspar de pierre), as the text is based on archival work and contemporary press accounts of Kaspar Hauser. Hauser was ‘discovered’ on the streets of Nuremberg in 1828 and claimed to have been locked in a closet throughout his childhood. He is presumed to have been the unwanted illegitimate child of noble parents. After the affair begin to circulate in the papers, he was assassinated by an unknown assailant.
The text has already been translated into German and Italian, but this is the first time it will appear in English. One of the difficulties in its translation was accounting for the breakdown of the first person “je” in French and finding an appropriate substitute in English that would do justice to Gauthier’s undoing of individual subjectivity and consciousness that Western languages format through speech. I have variously translated the deconstruction of “je” (“j’” and “jl”) as “yie” and “yi” to echo and confuse the English “I” and “thee,” as Gauthier sonically confuses “I” and “he” in French.
The question of language is fundamental to understanding Hauser and his “reception” into modern life. The story of his appearance circulated in some of the first tabloid stories to appear in nineteenth-century bourgeois Europe. For Gauthier, Hauser’s life—his “discovery” and subsequent mediatization—crystallizes certain aspects of modern life, such as an appetite for headlines and scandals, a complaisance toward abuse, and the iconization of the individual. Kaspar Hauser’s life had previously been the subject of Verlaine’s poem “Gaspard Hauser,” and more recently, of the psychologist Françoise Dolto’s critical work Kaspar Hauser, le séquestré au cœur pur (The Prisoner with a Pure Heart, 2002), but Gauthier positions herself against what she considers the “Christlike” fetishization of these accounts.
Through her archival work and its deconstruction in the poem, Gauthier also critiques the idolization of Hauser’s language, which was considered “pure and poetic” by his contemporaries. Instead, she reconstitutes it as a language both threatened and in movement. She recreates space for his language to temporarily inhabit the work (house 1, house 2, abandon 1, abandon 2, diagnoses, and a street). These situations recreate and redistribute language and syntax to open up space in a protective vigilance.
The text has already been translated into German and Italian, but this is the first time it will appear in English. One of the difficulties in its translation was accounting for the breakdown of the first person “je” in French and finding an appropriate substitute in English that would do justice to Gauthier’s undoing of individual subjectivity and consciousness that Western languages format through speech. I have variously translated the deconstruction of “je” (“j’” and “jl”) as “yie” and “yi” to echo and confuse the English “I” and “thee,” as Gauthier sonically confuses “I” and “he” in French.
The question of language is fundamental to understanding Hauser and his “reception” into modern life. The story of his appearance circulated in some of the first tabloid stories to appear in nineteenth-century bourgeois Europe. For Gauthier, Hauser’s life—his “discovery” and subsequent mediatization—crystallizes certain aspects of modern life, such as an appetite for headlines and scandals, a complaisance toward abuse, and the iconization of the individual. Kaspar Hauser’s life had previously been the subject of Verlaine’s poem “Gaspard Hauser,” and more recently, of the psychologist Françoise Dolto’s critical work Kaspar Hauser, le séquestré au cœur pur (The Prisoner with a Pure Heart, 2002), but Gauthier positions herself against what she considers the “Christlike” fetishization of these accounts.
Through her archival work and its deconstruction in the poem, Gauthier also critiques the idolization of Hauser’s language, which was considered “pure and poetic” by his contemporaries. Instead, she reconstitutes it as a language both threatened and in movement. She recreates space for his language to temporarily inhabit the work (house 1, house 2, abandon 1, abandon 2, diagnoses, and a street). These situations recreate and redistribute language and syntax to open up space in a protective vigilance.
Laure Gauthier Laure Gauthier is a poet and transdisciplinary author who conceives her texts as spaces for watchfulness–both poetic and political. In a hyper-rationalized world, Gauthier questions the place of the senses and sensitivity, notably voice and touch, and of the document and the archive. She recently published kaspar de pierre (La lettre volée, 2017) and je neige (entre les mots de villon) (LansKine, 2018). In February, 2021, her transpoetic album Eclectiques Cités will be released by the collective Acédie58 and in September, 2021, les corps caverneux will be published by LansKine. Gauthier’s texts have a polyphonic dimension that allows for the creation of a vigilant distance between objective and subjective poetry; and she often investigates the materiality of text and sound with musicians and visual/sonic artists. She publishes frequently in international journals such as Po&sie, Phoenix, Sarrazine, l’Etrangère, as well as manuskripte (Austria) and Insula Europae (Italy).
Christopher Alexander Kostritsky Gellert works on the inscription of text in the physical world through collective literary investigations and relational poetics. For the past five years, through his cycle of open forums, Pourquoi lisons-nous, he has been investigating contemporary reading practices in France through performative interviews that create links between empirical and theoretical knowledge around reading and literature. In collaboration with the visual artist Alexia Anutofermo, he investigates how textual practices become manifest in lived space. The pair are currently co-authoring a collective fiction with residents of Paris’s northern neighborhood of La Chapelle through a cycle of art and writing workshops in partnership with neighborhood cultural and social centers. This work will give rise to a constellation of invisible cities representing divergent possible futures for the neighborhood. Together they founded the transdisciplinary artists’ collective Tramages. Kostritsky Gellert’s page-based work has appeared in Point de Chute, Fracas, parentheses, FORTH Magazine, and Belleville Park Pages.
