Poems by Tania Langlais Translated by Jessica Cuello

they talk of your nerves
they prescribe 
country air to tame your ghosts
but without voice
above all
without voice
I cradle you


~


we know now
she never boarded
the ferry
she’s dead it’s clear
because listen
to the roar
the roar of the sea 


~


because explanation
must come later
in her listless
mood
something reads
so plainly:
Percival
had a weak heart



~

look, dead horses
rise with you 
they return to the house 
overcome 
with brightness 
you say 
we are back
at the beginning 
and the first morning
will be peaceful


~

I always see myself
as an emotional
creature
a seagull
the night before the tragedy
I was healing
faintly maybe
but I was healing


~


three weeks later 
on the eighteenth of April
they found your body
near Southease Bridge
they say the light was weak
and the river sweet


~


the water closes
over this story
you explain yourself 
for a moment 
then pray:
in the tale we must see 
a secret language
of abandonment

on évoquera tes nerfs
les médecins parleront
prescriront la compagne
un fantôme à discipliner
mais sans la voix
surtout
sans la voix
je te bercerai





nous savons maintenant
qu’elle n’est jamais montée
à bord du ferry
elle en est morte c’est clair
c’est à cause du bruit
ce bruit de la mer





car la théorie
doit forcement
venir après
dans son état
désoeuvré
quelque chose qui se lirait
en clair:
Perceval
avait le coeur fragile





voici que les chevaux morts
se relèvent avec toi
rentrent à la maison
stupéfaits de clarté
nous sommes arrivés
au commencement, dis-tu
et le premier matin
sera paisible






je me considère toujours
comme une créature
affectée
une mouette
la nuit juste avant le drame
je guérissais
imperceptiblement peut-être
mais je guérissais







près du pont de Southease
on a retrouvé ton corps
trois semaines après
en avril le dix-huit
on dit que la lumière était fragile
et la rivière très douce







l’eau se referme
par-dessus cette histoire
tu t’expliques un instant
puis tu pries:
il faut voir dans l’épique
un code de l’abandon

Translator Note

Quebecoise poet Tania Langlais’ most recent book, Pendant que Perceval tombait, draws from overlapping sources: literary fiction, literary biography, and a third voice which enters subtly, the voice of the poet. This book-length poem occurs over the course of a single day and encompasses both the day of Woolf’s suicide and the death of the character Percival from Woolf’s novel The Waves. It’s striking in its spareness and structure. I have read nothing else like it. I was fortunate to zoom with Langlais and, while she is a poet reluctant to discuss her work directly, she revealed that the book originated from a grant to explore the character Percival from Virginia Woolf’s The Waves and quickly became a poem obsessed with Woolf—not, she asserts, from a perverse curiosity with her suicide, but from a compassion for the woman that Woolf was, a woman trying to heal.

To enter this book is to enter a state of grief, to negotiate with “la douleur.” During my conversation with Langlais, our conversation turned intimately to the repetitive language of grief. Perceval is composed of a cycle of recursive images; they contain a wavelike rhythm and the insistence of galloping hooves. Like The Waves, multiple narratives are present and so it wasn’t initially clear whether lines referenced Woolf or the character Percival. Langlais says in an March 2021 interview that Pendant que Perceval tombait is a casse-tete (puzzle) and I discovered that the more I trusted myself and took risks, the more the poem opened, much in the way that a riddle reveals itself. The poem rejects a linear progression and the separate poems are almost interchangeable. Their order is not what counts, but the sense of recurrence. I had to take care to translate recurring lines consistently because repetition is deeply attuned to the nature of grief in the poem. Without it the exceptional beauty of the book would be lost. 

If translation is the longing to near another, an idea I got from translator Philip Metres, this particular translation is a longing not only to recreate the work of Langlais, but to honor Woolf. A young friend of mine would call this fan-fic, but I believe it speaks to an older love, one from childhood—of writers and their worlds. The fact that in this book these two worlds—fictional and real—intersect without demarcation is poignant too. Often our relationship with a literary work is as real as any relationship, just as any relationship with a writer we have never met can feel intimate and life-changing, a stay against loneliness.

Tania Langlais is the author of Douze bêtes aux chemises de l’homme and she received the Prix Émile-Nelligan at age 20, the youngest person to ever receive this award. Born in Montreal in 1979, she currently lives in Outaouais. Pendant que Perceval tombait is her fourth book and was awarded The Governor General’s Award of Canada and Le Prix Alain-Grandbois de l’Académie des lettres du Québec. Her work has not yet been translated.

Jessica Cuello’s most recent book is Yours, Creature (JackLeg Press, 2023). Her book Liar,  was selected by Dorianne Laux for The 2020 Barrow Street Book Prize. Cuello is the recipient of a 2023 NYSCA Artist Grant. She is poetry editor at Tahoma Literary Review and teaches French in Central NY.

29 May 2025