V
Lives pass by before you
while you pass by
trees
breath
a magnetic network
wires outside the network
intensities
and refuse
solar gods and dark ones
the inhabited the unconscious
the not yet criminal
and the eternally inoffensive
who think themselves powerless
and lower their eyes
before a world that stains
and howls
dreams pass before you
that don’t know
where illusion begins
where the sky ends
while you pass by.
IV
I lived on a wide path
shadows bent over it
their flanks supple and docile
at the hour when the sun set
I lived on a Roman road
that keeps the sweat of reckless
dancers feverish
their torsos clad with nightfall
I lived in the flexible moment
of a time that will not settle
on a reprieved city
where splendor is the norm
I lived by not knowing
where tomorrow ends
III
I walk in your shadow
but I don’t think about you all the time
I’m not always walking
on the cobblestones of rebirth
in consecrated temples
or millennial orchards
skies drench my face
my love
and it’s not from thinking of you
nor the little soul holding out a hand
to the one who doesn’t brush against it
sensibly waiting
for the wheels that would gladly
crush it out of this disaster
errant thoughts rain on me
that seem to belong to others
whose shadows walk over me
II
If you knew the time that goes through me
While I go toward you.
I
You don’t know who’s going past.
While You Pass By
Samira Negrouche
translated from the French by Marilyn Hacker
Listen to the original read by the poet:
Samira Negrouche’s poetry is polyvalent. Sometimes it is strongly narrative/dramatic, grounded in Algerian/Kabyle landscape and history, or limning the intricacies of a relationship—erotic, filial, sororal. Sometimes it aspires to the condition of another art—it might be the third instrument in a trio, or choreographic notation for a dance. I think of this sequence as having choreographic aspiration, a dance solo disembodied, while at the same time (as the dance might) reflecting on an essential human need, the motion that keeps bodies and minds alert and alive.
Samira Negrouche was born in Algiers where she still lives. Author of seven poetry collections and several artists’ books, she is a poet and translator and also a doctor, who has privileged her literary projects over the practice of medicine. Prone to multidisciplinary projects, she has frequently collaborated with visual artists and musicians. Recent collaborations include performances Quai 2I1 with violinist Marianne Piketty and theorbist Bruno Helstroffer and Traces with choreographer Fatou Cissé. Her books include A l’ombre de Grenade (Marty, 2003), Le Jazz des oliviers (Le Tell, 2010), Six arbres de fortune autour de ma baignoire (Mazette, 2017), and Quai 2I1 partition à trois axes (Mazette, 2019). A bilingual book-length collection, The Olive-Trees' Jazz and Other poems, translated by Marilyn Hacker, will be published by Pleiades Press in February 2020.
Marilyn Hacker is the author of fourteen books of poems, including Blazons (Carcanet, 2019), A Stranger’s Mirror (Norton, 2015), and an essay collection, Unauthorized Voices (University of Michigan Press, 2010). Other translations of French and Francophone poets include Vénus Khoury-Ghata’s A Handful of Blue Earth (Liverpool University Press, 2017), Emmanuel Moses’ Preludes and Fugues (Oberlin, 2016), and Rachida Madani's Tales of A Severed Head (Yale University Press, 2012). She received the 2010 PEN/Voelcker Award, and the international Argana Prize for Poetry from the Beit as-Sh’ir/House of Poetry in Morocco in 2011. She lives in Paris.
