De Au Décousu de l’aile

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.