JUILLET
1er.
En rangeant des affaires, j’ai reconnu le regard de son chien dans celui de Clint Eastwood. C’était une tasse en porcelaine japonaise découpée, dans la tasse japonaise qui. Les enfants furent les premiers. Ensuite, il y eut une perruche à laquelle elle disait : il est tard, rentre chez toi. Elle avait peur quand j’étais seule et que la nuit tombait. Le mois qui précède, elle se souvient que je l’ai appelée un soir, dans le parc désert. Les lumières clignotaient et j’étais ivre. Lorsque s’effondre le meuble dans lequel elle range les tasses japonaises offertes par mémé, précieusement je conserve les larmes où je les imagine.
2.
À la voir en cette fin d’après-midi, la totalité, la voir, elle s’est arrêtée devant l’inscription qui la donnait pour super, mémoriale, excellente. Dehors, la fumée d’un champignon improvise la fumée qui monte d’une étagère. Je ne peux dire si elle fut brève, ou bien s’échappant d’un plan extrême de netteté. Àla voir échappée, le mouvement fut. Àla fois, c’est la nuit. Les pleurs se tiennent en équilibre au-dessus du drap vertical. Les cils battent la fumée àla recherche d’un conflit plus extérieur. Constante est un nombre incalculable de fois. Je ne dis pas qu’ils constatent la disparition, je dis qu’ils ne sont pas sûrs de la voir.
3.
Couper les cheveux de grand-mère avec des ciseaux de couture se révéla fort simple, en dépit des ciseaux qui n’étaient pas faits pour cela. De la lingerie démontée point par point, je comptais les ronds aux noms effacés. Le livre, multiplement annoté, les phrases dans les marges reprennent les marges du texte. Je crois qu’elle parlait d’une poupée dont le corps était comme. Momwey, c’est l’objet de mon trouble. Avec lui je m’imagine un compagnon qui me rapproche d’autres noms que lui-même.
4.
J’aimerais écrire des phrases emboîtées comme des poupées russes. Loger dans leur ventre de bois creux un secret peut préserver : une rose est dans une rose, une abeille dans une abeille. J’ai rêvé qu’on t’avait monté la tête à l’envers, si bien qu’il fallait te tenir l’épaule pour que tu ne tombes pas, la tête renversée. Celui qui ne dit rien, là-bas, ton visage parle pour lui. Maintenant que je te regarde j’ai l’impression que quelqu’un court sur ta coiffure.
de Les Vivres
Marie de Quatrebarbes
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.
