from To the Splintering Wing

Brigitte Gyr

PETAL AND TEMPORAL



Clematis that splits the stone
far from the stump, jaws
and lairs,
you trace your seasons
onto nonchalant branchlets.


Time is your nomadic flower.





TRELLIS OF SILENCE



Across straits of greening tongues,
trellises of silence, mauve gulls
and the garnet of berries fondled by shade.
Amid the rusts, it sows forgetfulness,
the ashen iron of the blades.


At the rim of death, the wing’s splintering.





Saturated with meaning, the time of a bygone
is to the hourglass what the grain of sand
is to the desert—a watery silence that emerges
out of nothing and from nowhere.





FRAGILE



My only contribution: to the void
A gift of eye and pulp
walled within the invisible.

Presences of brittle daytimes
that collect their yields
an infant’s laugh on the shore.





MARINE CHILDHOOD



The seed of water immerses her childhood.
Milky presences lurk
in the threads of the sea.





Rekindling the thousand blues of the sea,
A captive I.





TOMORROW GONE BY



The nightingale fades in the field of sand,
a red feather upon a yellowed page.


The writing pays its dues of dried blood.





Impossible wandering in the estuary of bodies,
where the hideous is a clone for beauty and
its flamboyant exile.
I am the one that runs toward a Blindness.





Inside the stone that the snow
has sought to inseminate,
the insect with the golden abdomen
was flaying his song
in the grips of the profane.





The carnivalesque night, a fleeting image
erased by the slow maturing of blood
inside the wheat stalks.

translated from the French by E. C. Belli

Read the original in French

Listen to the original read by the author:

Critics who write about Brigitte Gyr tend to remark on the cutting nature of her language despite its stripped back appearance. Poet Roselyne Fritel writes that “a great poetic breath emerges” from Gyr’s lines: “A single word out of place might shatter its crystal.” The enigmatic, aging, loss, death, and the fragility of the body all inhabit the work. When asked to reflect on her process, Gyr finds that her creative moment is a rather unconscious act, which then only fully comes into perspective through the lens of the conscious mind. Additional layers of meaning always lurk. Something is held in safety, too; or perhaps it is captive. Over the years, her lines have morphed syntactically to become more direct. A layer of silence still persists in her revelations, however.

Her books don’t take well to separation, and it is sometimes unclear to the reader whether a single book is one long poem with sections appearing on each page, or whether these are discrete poems filling the volume, but all of a soul. Oftentimes stripped of a title or a number, their individuality or their belonging to a larger whole remains ambiguous. The seams of a given poem or poetic passage are porous. Systems matter less to Gyr than capturing the echo of her moments: maybe she preaches the flexibility of systems in these fluid refusals.

Female-identifying writers from Switzerland are harder to spot than their French, German, or Italian neighbors, with Swiss women being granted the right to vote and stand for election finally in February 1971, and their work often finding itself contextualized within the French, German, or Italian canons, depending on the language in which they write. (Romansh is yet another conversation.)

The main challenge of translating Gyr lies in rendering her cutting language while preserving the apparent stillness of the text.

Brigitte Gyr (b. 1945) is a Franco-Swiss poet and translator. She was born in Geneva, where she studied law and political science and practiced law for many years. She moved to Paris in 1976, where she now resides with her husband. She has a daughter. Over the course of her career, she has translated dozens of volumes and written numerous plays and works for children. Her poetic works include Au Décousu de l’aile (Jacques Brémond, 1988), Lettre à mon double au fond du puits (Jacques Brémond, 1996), Avant je vous voyais en noir et blanc (Jacques Brémond, 2000), which won the Prix Claude Sernet in 2001, Parler nu (Éditions Lanskine, 2011), which won the famous Prix de Poésie Charles-Vildrac of the Société des gens de lettres in 2012, and Étirée sur le vide (Éditions La Petite Fabrique, 2012), among many others. Her two most recent books are Partition tombée en poussière (Éditions La Rumeur Libre, 2021) and le vide notre demeure (Éditions La Rumeur Libre, 2017).

E. C. Belli is a bilingual poet and translator. Her second book, A Sleep That Is Not Our Sleep (Anhinga Press, 2022), was selected by Cathy Park Hong as winner of the 2020 Philip Levine Prize for Poetry. Her debut collection of poems, Objects of Hunger (Southern Illinois University Press, 2019), won the Crab Orchard Poetry Series First Book Award. She is the translator of I, Little Asylum by Emmanuelle Guattari (Semiotext(e), 2014) and The Nothing Bird: Selected Poems by Pierre Peuchmaurd (Oberlin College Press, 2013). A recipient of a 2010 Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowship for New Americans, her work has appeared in Europe: revue littéraire mensuelle and PO&SIE (France), among other publications.