Furtive
The equivocal gesture of the grandfather
at death's door
turning a hand toward his loved ones:
goodbye, or scorn?
Between the dead man and the young girl in mourning
the hours secretly turn aside.
Leaning toward him she divines
her own epitaph:
Fate followed me step by step
furtive
like a lover.
But an assassin follows the same way
Exhilaration
The shout, the abyss alongside, the eager breathlessness: behold our anxieties—the exhilaration of our loves, as well.
Orpheus, torn to pieces by the Bacchae, recalled Eurydice at the height of pleasure. The same lightning lit their faces.
Earth
Spelling a word murmured by our capillaries
tracking
the blood that pulses at our wrist
loving a dilation of the veins
clandestine
participation
in our long voyage:
laid end to end
all our blood vessels
go twice around the earth.
Earth,
your insects, your flowers, your deities,
have you arranged them along these routes?
from With Death, an Orange Segment between Our Teeth
Marie-Claire Bancquart
translated from the French by Wendeline A. Hardenberg
Listen to the poems read in the original French by Wendeline A. Hardenberg:
These three poems, like so much of Marie-Claire Bancquart's work, are about life, death, and love. I chose to translate them for the striking images they depict: death as both lover and assassin, indistinguishable from each other; a Greek myth called into service to merge death and sexual climax; our own blood vessels as paths through life. To translate Bancquart is always to walk a line between the lofty and the earthy, because she writes so plainly and simply about universal experiences, but also veers off into literary references, obscure vocabulary, and moments of silence that are not intended to be easily parsed. A moment of difficulty for each poem: my favorite line from "Furtif" is the last one—"mais un assassin suit de même." The first solution I came up with is the one I eventually used ("but an assassin follows the same way"), but I will be the first to lament the loss of the original's quick, menacing rhythm, swallowed up in the multi-syllabic necessity of "follow" and "same way". I am, however, very pleased with my rendering of the last line in "Vertige" ("Même foudroiement sur les visages") as "The same lightning lit their faces." I think part of it is that the number of syllables remains constant, which, although unintentional, certainly helps the rhythm, but there's something about using the verb "lit" in place of the preposition "in" (which would be the literal translation) that conveys the necessary energy. Finally, I wrestled with "Terre" and its "tuyaux à sang" (literally "blood tubes") for an absurdly long time. I knew there was a word for it that didn't sound so ridiculous in English! When I finally managed to recall the existence of "blood vessels," I was positively ecstatic. Such are the rewards of translation.
Marie-Claire Bancquart (b. 1932) is a prolific and prize-winning French poet, novelist, essayist, critic, and Professor Emerita of French literature at the Sorbonne (Université de Paris-IV). Her most recent book of poems, Violente vie, was published by Le Castor Astral in 2012. She lives in Paris.
Wendeline A. Hardenberg (b. 1983) is a faculty librarian at Southern Connecticut State University who pursues literary translation as part of her creative activity. She has previously published an excerpt from Aubry’s novel Perséphone 2014 (Persephone 2014; Mercure de France, 2016) with Asymptote in 2019, as well as a different excerpt from La Folie Elisa (Elisa Folly; Mercure de France, 2018) with Columbia Journal in 2021. Her translation of Marie-Claire Bancquart’s volume of poetry, Avec la mort, quartier d’orange entre les dents (With Death, an Orange Segment Between Our Teeth), came out with Orison Books in 2023. She lives in New Haven, Connecticut.
