Tu m’apprends l’âge
(mon amour)
le passage
l’inattendu l’inutile
la retenue de la nuit
les autres avec la clé de leur univers
décalque et papier japonais
la précieuse incrédulité des yeux
l’ignorance affublée d’objets rares
tu m’apprends la neige
comme une complainte sordide et enchanteresse
et tu ne m’apprends rien j’invente
tu es l’âge le passage
et maintenant le très vert éparpillement horizontal de ton âge
*
Les chiens de l’ombre flairent ton immobilité
l’insatiable surdité des corps
les ciels sont des urnes vertes
les temps conclus les espaces morts
les vents font signe de rien où tout flanche
et les crocs s’allongent sur le sol
*
Petites chaises jaunes
où nous nous enfonçons
dans l’obscurité venue
du lac et de la nuit
la nappe où nous avons déposé
des tasses de café des fruits
bouge lentement ses jupons de bal
petits pieds pâles comme des lunes
qui font chuchoter le gravier
perpétuent dans leur danse
le jaillissement des fontaines perdues
*
J’aurais voulu garder me retournant
deux actes successifs de soleil
dans le vol du pigeon
les façades couleurs de braises
au-dessus l’appel du grand large
avec un seul nuage roulé en boule
la demi-tristesse de l’orme
un tel silence presque nouveau
nous ne sommes pas sûrs d’avoir vécu
de Poèmes
Marie Uguay
Marie Uguay, Poèmes, © Éditions du Boréal and Stéphan Kovacs 2005.
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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.
