JULY
1st
As I was putting things away, I recognized her dog’s gaze in Clint Eastwood’s. It was a cut-out Japanese porcelain teacup in the Japanese teacup that. The children were the first. Next, there was a parakeet to whom she was saying: it’s late, go home. She was afraid when I was alone and night was falling. The month before, she remembers that I called her from the deserted park one evening. The lights flickered and I was drunk. When the cabinet in which she arranges the Japanese teacups Grandma gave her collapses, I keep the tears in which I imagine them preciously.
2.
To see her at the end of that afternoon—the totality, to see her—she stopped in front of an inscription that made her out to be the best, memorable, excellent. Outside, the smoke of a mushroom becomes the smoke rising from a shelf. I can’t say if she was brief or escaping an extreme plan of clarity. To see her escaping, that was the movement. At once, it’s night. Tears hang in equilibrium above a vertical sheet. Eyelashes bat at smoke in search of a more exterior conflict. Constant is an incalculable number of times. I’m not saying they constitute disappearance—I’m saying they’re not sure they see her.
3.
Cutting grandma’s hair with sewing scissors turned out to be easy despite using scissors made for something else. From lingerie dismantled piece by piece, I counted the circles of erased names. The book, variously annotated, marginalia reclaiming the margins. I think she was describing a doll the body was like. Momwey is the object of my confusion. With him, I fancy myself a companion that brings me closer to names other than himself.
4.
I’d like to write sentences that contain each other like Russian dolls. A secret could persist, lodged in their hollow wooden stomachs: a rose is in a rose, a bee in a bee. I dreamt that we mounted your head upside down, such that you had to hold on to your shoulder to stop from falling, your head inverted. That one who isn’t saying anything, over there, your face speaks for him. Now that I’m looking at you, it seems like someone’s running on your haircut.
from The Vitals
Marie de Quatrebarbes
translated from the French by Aiden Farrell
Listen to "July 1st" read in the original French by the author:
Marie de Quatrebarbes’s Les Vivres (The Vitals; P.O.L., 2021) is a fragmentary recomposition of a daily journal, documenting the months of July through December of an unspecified year, that takes the experiences of grief and memory as its subject. Grief and memory throw stakes into the continuity of time: the former acting as a marker and then a trigger of the latter, which then acts as a narrativizing force over the past. The emotional violence of the sudden disappearance of a loved one, followed by the prompt, almost rushed, and affected retelling of the past, are the impetus for de Quatrebarbes’s experiment in the fragmented sentence. Throughout The Vitals, sentences end on subordinating conjunctions, prepositional clauses take over for main clauses, and subjects and objects interlock, obscuring, for example, whether a person is a figure or an hourglass. The intended effect is a lack of resolution, to whatever extent this can be controlled, reflecting the condition of never being able to say hello to a loved one again. In de Quatrebarbes’s carefully oblique prose poems, the question of what can be remembered becomes inextricable from the questions of how does memory happen and how does memory warp both the past and the present.
de Quatrebarbes’ French in The Vitals breaks down the rules of grammar and narrative continuity just far enough that a sense of them still remains, however interrupted by their quite literal absence. Translating this kind of challenge to normative grammar became more than identifying vocabulary: it required identifying brokenness and then breaking down English as similarly as I could. As a result, aspects of the translated text are necessarily displeasing to a conservative ear, such as in “July 1st”: “It was a cut-out Japanese porcelain teacup in the Japanese teacup that.” And: “The month before, she remembers that I called her from the deserted park one evening.” The discomfort that might be created from these intentional misalignments of order and time, tense and conjunction, draw attention not to what is happening in the text but to what the text, and likewise memory and grief, is made of. What might be looked for in Les Vivres is not coherence but the manipulation of narrative and grammar as the form coherence takes—everything about how coherence registers instead of why or what it registers. De Quatrebarbes plays with language as both a site and filter of coherence, denying it and seeing what fills the space created by its absence.
de Quatrebarbes’ French in The Vitals breaks down the rules of grammar and narrative continuity just far enough that a sense of them still remains, however interrupted by their quite literal absence. Translating this kind of challenge to normative grammar became more than identifying vocabulary: it required identifying brokenness and then breaking down English as similarly as I could. As a result, aspects of the translated text are necessarily displeasing to a conservative ear, such as in “July 1st”: “It was a cut-out Japanese porcelain teacup in the Japanese teacup that.” And: “The month before, she remembers that I called her from the deserted park one evening.” The discomfort that might be created from these intentional misalignments of order and time, tense and conjunction, draw attention not to what is happening in the text but to what the text, and likewise memory and grief, is made of. What might be looked for in Les Vivres is not coherence but the manipulation of narrative and grammar as the form coherence takes—everything about how coherence registers instead of why or what it registers. De Quatrebarbes plays with language as both a site and filter of coherence, denying it and seeing what fills the space created by its absence.
Marie de Quatrebarbes has published several books of poetry, including Les vivres (The Vitals; P.O.L., 2021) and Vanités (Vanities; Éric Pesty Éditeur, 2023), as well as a novel inspired by the life of Aby Warburg, Aby (P.O.L., 2022). She edited an anthology dedicated to contemporary poetry by young French women, Madame tout le monde (Madame Everyone, Le Corridor bleu, 2021).
Aiden Farrell is a poet, translator, and editor living in Brooklyn, NY. His work has appeared in Denver Quarterly, Spectra Poets, and Asphalte Magazine, among others, and he has published two chapbooks: lilac lilac (Portable Press @ Yo-Yo Labs, 2023) and organismalgorithm (Fence Digital, 2022). The Vitals is his debut full-length translation.
