FRAME—NIGHT—RED ABODE
The heat of studios, we can extract this heat.
“Your body holds up a night-light, you are languorous.”
—title of the first dialogue—
The hero says he’s captivated.
When you are in this Santa Monica hotel you have a view of the ocean, you are in the interior of a décor purchased by more than 900 TV channels.
You like the blue that makes positive thinking easy, the whiteness of the walls looks like Greece but in LA it’s never too hot or too cold “I like the quality of life, our kids go to a private school” or any other dialogue in sale will be fine.
She walks on the beach, that ocean is not actually a place for swimming, we find sharks there and the opinion Californians have on them.
—We have to drive, I see, you don’t like driving you’ll have to get used to it, that and the gym.
The red light intensifies, the faces frown, 1979 or maybe 1982, no mass movements, the Cocteau Twins are big with young Californians at the time, in L.A. there were some fake punks who lived in luxurious villas, they organized parties on the patios of their plastic surgeon parents.
[I met a brunette there who looked like Mia]
But also some arty directors and rising actors; sometimes the servers became stars, shortly after, but no one really knew how to lose themselves like here.
Dialogues numbered 1 through 13
—I want to re-read some books, books stimulate me and make me stronger, at the cinema (the image makes everything) there’s this condensation on the camera that prevents seeing in, depth, it is very tempting to be guided by an atmosphere.
—It’s possible to be lured by silence and to wish for the sound to guide us.
In LA two women kissed each other, I remember this moment; was it just a spot for a vintage porno in faded colors (a popular aesthetic in the field of design)?
—I watched these two blonde women, naked, who had maintained long pearl necklaces, in a wicker chair, the light was blue, their blondeness was blue, and this blue became tangled in many layers, with their legs and their ankles becoming mauve on the photo once enlarged.
Red desk-blotter, first window
Rectangle, transparency, dark edges—
The heroine became a second role in the background categorized emerging pin-up, in this independent film, she slaved away (the quality of the image makes everything).
—We’ll call her Mia, blond, father German, mother Irish, physique Hitchcockian but without the ambivalence, voluptuous curves, Mia wears a brown wig that brings out her blue eyes and the paleness of her complexion.
(In this boarding school, no one knows who is who, no one knows who is I)
—But, yet it’s the same woman, I’m sure I recognize her.
—Yes actually, but the image doesn’t make everything.
So, various hypotheses
—I did not go to the cinema for years but I included myself in my list of unfindable films
Questioning, question marks
Repetition of the final sentence
Motives, suppressed adjectives
—The final scene didn't make me feel anything
but deep inside, she is devastated
in a sculpted house
3 o’clock, in front of the housing development barely out of the ground, the residents come to get the keys, they open the door of their apartment
A form of submission
They fool around with each other
I had repetitive dreams: I am almost superstitious when I keep quiet
No sentence seemed really positive despite the blue
“Coldly received”
Fade to black
Thesis of survivors who are fed up with
Aliases & memento to forget them
Something welcome: the replacement of the rumor with a strident note
“You enter a new cycle you’ll see nothing will be the same, or maybe you’ll see nothing because everything will have changed”
Nothing needs to be explicable if the explanation is the only thing that stays
Something shorter
—This bitch ripped you off
Features other than direct access to the sea: the waste collection is becoming decent
We could say boiler if everything hadn’t been taken away
With me as an extension of you
I bet you are
Smiling I feel that you wish me well
from Sunny Girls
Sandra Moussempès
translated from the French by Hadley Sorsby-Jones and Sandra Moussempès
Sunny girls © Editions Flammarion, 2015
Sunny Girls distills themes that operate throughout the entirety of Moussempès’s work. The collection explores stereotypes and performances of femininity as a point of entry into a larger deconstruction of social hypocrisy. Its cinematic images of high femininity are underpinned by an emotional landscape marked by mystery and unease. The poems configure femininity as a series of beautiful masks and delight in their dramatic gravity while revealing their dissonant unreality. They explore the feelings that are allotted to women within the masks of femininity, moving from rivalry and jealousy to attraction and ambivalence. Their power derives from their ability to look without flinching at the gorgeous darkness that upholds sunny exteriors, and to forsake certainty for the decadence of liminal spaces.
The difficulty and the pleasure of translating Sunny girls lies in making room for its slow, spacious music to resonate in English as it does in French. Moussempès creates connotative richness and a sense of multiplicity in her poetry by playing with words that carry multiple meanings. These dualities are often untranslatable, and I fear losing the important layer of subtext that sheds light on the patterned repetitions and correspondences that animate the poetry. Another challenge to translating the music of Sunny Girls is its absurd syntax. Moussempès frequently substitutes or omits traditional prepositions and conjunctions, and she uses complex verb tenses that are challenging to render exactly in translation. I have tried to preserve as much of the syntax of the original poetry as possible, in the hope that its occasional fractures in English will generate places of continuity with Moussempès’s jarring, expansive language.
The difficulty and the pleasure of translating Sunny girls lies in making room for its slow, spacious music to resonate in English as it does in French. Moussempès creates connotative richness and a sense of multiplicity in her poetry by playing with words that carry multiple meanings. These dualities are often untranslatable, and I fear losing the important layer of subtext that sheds light on the patterned repetitions and correspondences that animate the poetry. Another challenge to translating the music of Sunny Girls is its absurd syntax. Moussempès frequently substitutes or omits traditional prepositions and conjunctions, and she uses complex verb tenses that are challenging to render exactly in translation. I have tried to preserve as much of the syntax of the original poetry as possible, in the hope that its occasional fractures in English will generate places of continuity with Moussempès’s jarring, expansive language.
Sandra Moussempès was born in Paris in 1965. Her poetry works on the internal interactions of a cosmetology of the mirror. She writes primarily in fragments that trouble stereotypes, particularly those surrounding femininity, by creating linguistic environments rich with anxiety, cinematic beauty, and déjà vu. Moussempès is a former resident of the Villa Médicis and a laureate of the Villa Kujoyama, and she has published eight books with publishers including Poésie/Flammarion, Éditions de l’Attente, and Fourbis. Also a singer and a photographer, Moussempès infuses her poetry with her sensitivity to auditory and visual affect. Sunny Girls, her most recent collection, was published with Poésie/Flammarion in 2015.
Hadley Sorsby-Jones studies literary arts and comparative literature in French and English at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. She is the editor-in-chief of a small literary magazine called Thin Noon and a recipient of the 2016 Kim Ann Arstark Memorial Award in Poetry. Her poetry has been published in bluestockings magazine and the College Hill Independent.
