You’re teaching me age
(my love)
and passage
the unexpected the useless
the self-restraint of night
the others with the key to their universe
soft stamps and japanese paper
the precious incredulity of eyes
ignorance dressed in rare things
you’re teaching me snow
like a sordid, enchanting complaint
and you’re teaching me nothing I’m making it up
you are age and passage
and now the deep green, horizontal scattering of your years
*
The shadow’s dogs sniff out your immobility
the insatiable deafness of bodies
the skies are green urns
the times decided the spaces dead
the winds signal nothing where everything falters
and the fangs lengthen on the ground
*
Small yellow chairs
where we sink into
the oncoming dark
of the lake and the night
the tablecloth where we placed
cups of coffee and fruit
slowly sways its petticoats
little moon-like feet
make the gravel whisper
they carry on dancing
the outpouring of lost fountains
*
I’d have liked to keep turning
two successive acts of sun
in the flight of the pigeon
facades the colour of embers
overhead the call of the open sea
with a single cloud rolled into a ball
the half-sadness of the elm
such silence, almost brand new
we’re not sure we ever lived at all
from Poems
Marie Uguay
translated from the French by Lauren Peat
Marie Uguay, Poèmes, © Éditions du Boréal and Stéphan Kovacs 2005.
Listen to:
These poems were written during Marie Uguay’s valiant battle with bone cancer, an illness that claimed her life at age 26. Written in the margins of her posthumous manuscript Autoportraits (Self-Portraits; Noroît, 1982), they were regrouped under the title Poèmes en marge (Poems in the Margins) in the 2005 collection Poèmes (Poems; Éditions Boréal, 2005).
As Jacques Brault suggests in his introduction to Poèmes, Uguay’s battle with cancer has “led many critics to reduce the poetic to the biographical.” And while many of the poems do circle this battle, they more importantly transcend it, crafting a new way of seeing out of their willingness to sit with suffering’s messages. This way of seeing is mythic, and sometimes cryptic, but always tempered by a fine-grained attention to the particular details of particular things.
For me as a translator, it is this double vision, this at-once-ness of mythic and minute, that presents the most difficulty. “Tu m’apprends l’âge,” for example, plays with the simultaneous meanings of âge, alluding to the passage of time on a large scale (an era) and on a small scale (the age of a person). For the most part I have opted for age, which encompasses both senses of time.
Another challenge, also related to double vision, is the French language’s preference for objects attached to their articles. In French, even the most amorphous of nouns—silence, for instance, or time—must be portioned out: a silence or the silence; a time or the time. Uguay often plants these articles like stepping stones between images or ideas, as in the lines: “the unexpected the useless,” and “the times decided the spaces dead.” I have tried to preserve these articles as much as the texture of English will allow, because they seem to me an integral part of Uguay’s poetics.
Much of Uguay’s work reckons with life’s wrenching finitude—a reality that could easily overwhelm a person, snowing under their ability to speak. And yet this finitude finds analogues, Uguay suggests, in the familiar realm of the particular: “the insatiable deafness of bodies” and “the half-sadness of the elm” (emphasis added). Perhaps the dream of eternity does too, in the tablecloth’s “petticoats” that “carry on dancing,” in the unbroken “outpouring of lost fountains.”
As Jacques Brault suggests in his introduction to Poèmes, Uguay’s battle with cancer has “led many critics to reduce the poetic to the biographical.” And while many of the poems do circle this battle, they more importantly transcend it, crafting a new way of seeing out of their willingness to sit with suffering’s messages. This way of seeing is mythic, and sometimes cryptic, but always tempered by a fine-grained attention to the particular details of particular things.
For me as a translator, it is this double vision, this at-once-ness of mythic and minute, that presents the most difficulty. “Tu m’apprends l’âge,” for example, plays with the simultaneous meanings of âge, alluding to the passage of time on a large scale (an era) and on a small scale (the age of a person). For the most part I have opted for age, which encompasses both senses of time.
Another challenge, also related to double vision, is the French language’s preference for objects attached to their articles. In French, even the most amorphous of nouns—silence, for instance, or time—must be portioned out: a silence or the silence; a time or the time. Uguay often plants these articles like stepping stones between images or ideas, as in the lines: “the unexpected the useless,” and “the times decided the spaces dead.” I have tried to preserve these articles as much as the texture of English will allow, because they seem to me an integral part of Uguay’s poetics.
Much of Uguay’s work reckons with life’s wrenching finitude—a reality that could easily overwhelm a person, snowing under their ability to speak. And yet this finitude finds analogues, Uguay suggests, in the familiar realm of the particular: “the insatiable deafness of bodies” and “the half-sadness of the elm” (emphasis added). Perhaps the dream of eternity does too, in the tablecloth’s “petticoats” that “carry on dancing,” in the unbroken “outpouring of lost fountains.”
Marie Uguay (1955–1981) was born in Montréal. She published two books of poetry within her lifetime: Signe et rumeur (Signs and Rumours; Éditions du Noroît, 1976) and L’Outre-vie (Beyond Life; Noroît, 1979). Three posthumous collections—Autoportraits (Self-Portraits; Noroît, 1982), Poèmes (Poems; Noroît, 1986) and Journal (Journal; Éditions du Boréal, 2005)—were published after her death at the age of 26. Additional poems, including those translated here, appeared in an enlarged edition of Poèmes (Poems; Éditions Boréal, 2005). Praised for her “extraordinary capacity for wonder” and “receptivity to the everyday” (Introduction; Éditions du Boréal, 2005), Uguay is widely considered a “shooting star” (Canadian Encyclopedia, 2016) within the history of contemporary Québécois poetry.
Lauren Peat is the author of the chapbook Future Tense, which was published by Baseline Press in 2024. Her poems, essays and translations have appeared in Arc Poetry Magazine, Only Poems, The Malahat Review, The New Quarterly and World Literature Today, among other publications. Her writing is also featured in the repertoire of acclaimed vocal ensembles across North America. Translation Editor for the online poetry magazine Volume, she lives in Vancouver, Canada.
