de Avec la mort, quartier d'orange entre les dents

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.