Solio by Samira Negrouche Translated by Nancy Naomi Carlson, Review by Abigail Ardelle Zammit and Interview by Tiffany Troy

Solio by Samira Negrouche

Translated from French by Nancy Naomi Carlson

Review by Abigail Ardelle Zammit

Interview by Tiffany Troy

Publisher: Seagull Books

Publication Date: May 6, 2024

ISBN: ‎978-1803093383

Pages: 140

Although it was Marilyn Hacker who first introduced the poet Samira Negrouche to the English-speaking world, in Solio, it is Nancy Naomi Carlson, award-winning translator, editor and poet, who engages with two seminal works by the Algerian francophone author – Quai 2|1, partition á trois axes (2019) and Traces (2021). Despite the fact that the vocabulary of these two sequences is deliberately curated and contained, the challenge of transposition exists within the very fibre of Negrouche’s poetic oeuvre and the way in which she allows research and close observation to transmute themselves into hallucinatory images, repetition, dispersal, abstraction and elusive, interrupted story-threads. Although Negrouche’s work has been translated into many languages, it is perhaps English that is most resistant to poetic abstraction. That Carlson has still managed to translate with sensitivity and resonance is a testament to her expertise and fine poetic ear, not least when in the original text – as she explains in the preface – real and imaginary journeys/crossings are so deftly integrated within music, theme and poetic process – that selecting the right phrase can be problematic. 

Reading Solio is like attending a musical or theatrical performance – the reader is first and foremost a listener, learning the choreography of words repeated, distilled, amplified, and gifted back unto the world of beings and things where everything is in perpetual flux – the poet, as well as the humans and geographies she encounters. Quays are not fixed platforms, but floating aggregations of arrivals, departures, meetings and crossings across time, more like “keys,” perhaps, capable of variation and transposition, which is why the English title of the first sequence Quay 2|1 is so fitting for the text. Across the three sections of this work, the reader is also carried along, sometimes pulled back by a hallucinatory dirge, grabbing the tenuous lifeline of an image – “cobblestones soaked in night,” “the roof of the old city” (9) – and losing her bearings again because the “I” must perforce hesitate and ceaselessly recalibrate its gaze.  The paradoxical leitmotiv – “I’m rooted in movement” – remains true even when the speaker “barely move[s] forward” (p.15):

          or it’s the quay
          that moves forward
          breaks loose
          drifts away
          on the leathery skin […]

          or it’s my gaze 
          that glides
          gets closer to
          the quay
          brings me closer 
          to the quay

What Negrouche seems to be advocating through the English words which traverse and are traversed by her own, is an undressing (“I go naked,” 16) that divests the poetic self of superficial specificities so as to engage in a perpetual search for connections. The reader too must let go of the insular self – the narcissistic self, the me-me of that moment in time – to allow herself to be entered by the world, right there where “the breach” causes the acutest anguish, there where she passes through onion fields (16) and finds herself speaking to someone from a country where “braised endives” (42) are a staple food. Although by the end of Quay 2|1 “the lasting breach” is “where space / can finally be / touched” (69), the intermediary section expresses irritation and incomprehension. The long, narrow stanzas wash over the persona’s neck; she doesn’t know who is coughing on her (25) and can hardly believe how the other’s pain has entered her body – “are you coughing inside me / while I move forward?” (26). Though she would like to hear the stranger’s story about his Spanish-speaking Hungarian mother, “the humid din” (26) doesn’t allow it. In the end, nevertheless, the page breathes white space, the wave breaks into smaller verses; there is tenderness, communion, hope in a shared humanity: “what happens / happens first / on the tongue” (44).  

While both Quay 2|1 and Traces are the results of artistic collaborations, the first with violinist Marianne Piketty and theorbist Bruno Helstroffer, the second with choreographer Fatou Cissé, the texts themselves are like musical overtures enacting the speaker’s attempt to listen more closely, to allow herself to traverse the other, as well as to be temporarily inhabited by that other:

          I’m rooted in movement
          time passes through me
          beings pass through me
          they are me
          I am them (72)

Coming from the fraught spaces between Arabic, Algerian French and Tamazight, Negrouche’s poetry does not shy away from political commitment, which is why translation into the English language is both pertinent and necessary. Here is a text that not only abolishes boundaries through interdisciplinary collaborations, but that in translation, attempts to displace the accepted Anglo-thematic of the writing self. Although the poems skim many territories – “I came from the Algiers door […] I came from the N’Djamena door / I almost got sunstroke in Cotonou. / I was madly in love in Zanzibar” (113) – they are neither about one place, nor about one entity. If the poetic consciousness speaks in multitudes, what it practices is not fragmentation but dispersal, which is why when the wave breaks over the speaker in Traces, she gives antithetical versions of reality: “You let a part of yourself go along with the wave, / you move in the other direction” (104).

This is not merely writing as process, but the printed word as a quasi-atemporal, performative act. The page is its stage, and the words fade away or swell into prose poems; even in translation, they fill the mouth with alliterative memory (“On each mirage, each movement of a moored boat,” 86), they enact a discourse on boundaries through bold slashes (the sea doesn’t want me to cross it /// I watch the world move in my thorax /// 89), they conjure migratory histories through surreal images of boats and sails. Although at the start of the first sequence, the poet confesses that she hasn’t “been gifted to see / what slumbers in oblivion” (5), by the end, the voices she has imbibed, the languages that have entered her, have affected a shift, a momentary trespass: “I’ve been gifted / to live / what / in the white dawn / awakens” (74). The voice has become a channel through which the other can speak: less ventriloquism, more séance, not in its literal sense, but imbued with mystical overtones despite the poet’s scientific mind-frame. It seems to me that what these sequences insist on even á travers the English language, is that for any kind of amelioration of the human condition, one has to allow oneself to be permeable, to become a vehicle for ruptures that are not one’s own.  

The process of permeability, how it is obtained and how painstakingly it is maintained through the writing life, is almost untranslatable, which makes any attempt at transposition even more admirable. It is regrettable that a book so finely wrought should leave no space for the original Algerian French, its line-breaks and pauses – but even as it is, what the reader bears witness to is the hallucinatory aesthetic of its language. Where the translation excels, the whole topography of the text – lexicon, image, sound – is so intense that it threatens to rend the canvas, to break through:

          The town is a tongue the sea takes by storm
          the town is an overburdened tongue at the story’s border.
          At the border of the border
          the town overflows
          its tongue is swollen.








          You position yourself at its tip, at the place where restless
          verbs turn up.  (91)

Rooted in Movement: 

A Conversation with Poet Samira Negrouche and Translator Nancy Naomi Carlson about Solio

As translator Nancy Naomi Carlson writes in her translator’s note, Solio by Samira Negrouche mixes “music and mystery.” Negrouche thinks through the physical body and the body politique of an Algerian female writer in observing the “taut bodies dappled in white and momentum,” even when “you know they’re not white.” The sun “that’s reborn in the fresh surface of a silent winter morning / where I want to think about the nothingness that opens / where I want to think about the space that remains,” serves both to literally let in light but also to burn. This double take of color and of the meaning of heat is why Negrouche’s speaker “d[oes]n’t blame the dust for burning [her] nostrils, it reminds [her] not to sleep, that [her] attention is incomplete, that all crowds deserve full attention.” We revel in this deep attention, repeatedly, as we burst into laughter at the encounter with her “virile” “guardian angel” who hates “pink” and “canary yellow.” For what the poet reaches toward through this character is “a place, a country, a border, a layer, a dream or an impossibility.”

Tiffany Troy: Can you describe your collaboration? Samira, I’m interested in how it is similar to or different from your collaboration with the violinist Marianne Piketty and theorbist Bruno Helstroffer for Quay 2|1: A Three-Axis Music Score and with choreographer Fatou Cissé for Traces. Nancy Naomi, I’m interested in the choice to combine the two full-length volumes into one.

Samira Negrouche: Every collaboration is specific and special. With Marianne, Bruno and Fatou, it was clearly about co-writing a piece, a performance. We had to live and work and think together. We also had to understand each other’s way of writing: text, choreography, music but also public performance, scenography. Every time, it was a new way of creating dialogue, forms and listening to each other. 

With Nancy, we had quite a few discussions about poetry and translation, about French and English. We exchanged many emails, sometimes about very tiny details. I don’t always interact with my translators; it just happened this time that the whole process was very interactive and truly enriching – from choosing to put the two collections together, to editing Solio. 

I think I suggested combining the two collections, during my discussions with Nancy, and she agreed. We also discussed the title and imagined many possibilities, but Nancy came up with Solio, which seemed just perfect. 

Nancy Naomi Carlson: I couldn’t have said it better! I might add that I thought it would be best if the volume contained more than one book, as each was fairly short, and their combined impact was more than doubled. Samira’s rhythms are relentless, and the size of the project brought out this facet of her work.

TT: Yes! I definitely agree with the characterization of Samira’s poetic rhythm as relentless, and enjoy the combined impact of the two volumes as one in English translation. What does the title Solio mean to you and why do you think of it as a perfect title?

SN: I remember when Nancy asked me about the meaning of “solio.” I told her the story of how it appeared in the text. I heard it from a young man who was part of the Malinké community in Conackry where I was living and working for five weeks with Fatou Cissé. I searched for the meaning of the word in that community and all it could refer to; I also loved how the sound connected to other meanings in other languages. As a title, it says: pay attention, something will be said to you, also embrace the multiple meanings. It offers you a sun and a genealogy; it also invites you to dive into another dimension. I think it somehow reminds us how poetry is a deep sensitive experience. 

NNC: I came across the intriguing word “solio” in “11,” the book’s final section. It’s repeated six times, each time more urgently, until finally the “I” of the poem makes a startling revelation. In the Translator’s Foreword, I wrote, “This enigmatic word carries multiple meanings. In Ido (Esperanto) it means “threshold.” It also echoes words from other languages, including “sol” in Spanish, meaning “sun” (a very strong symbol in Algerian and African poetry) and “solium” in Latin, meaning “seat” and “throne.” It also is a word from the Malinke oral tradition in West Africa, used by griots to ask for the audience’s attention and serves as an apt ending to this collection, as well as the perfect invitation to read it. The polysemy of the word made it irresistible as a title choice, as it seemed an overarching image for the book. I chose to keep it untranslated, in keeping with the strategy of not over-domesticating the text. 

TT: Samira, in Quay 2|1: A Three Axis Music Score, you write, “the sun / is a metaphor / vitamin d / isn’t a metaphor / everything that can be calculated / forgets the metaphor.” And I’m wondering about how you construct an “I” and a “you” that is both human and at many points, a metaphor of place?

SN: The pronouns are multiple, fluid and metaphoric. It is a flexible dialogue that sometimes looks like a monologue, and at other times like an agora of multiple invisible voices. It is the other in you, the you in the other. It is a dialogue with another reality, community, period. Also a dialogue with the invisible whatever you put in that invisible: history, memories, dreams, visions…. 

The “you” can be a place, a country, a border, a layer, a dream or an impossible. It is hope or anger. It is all we could put in an elsewhere. How we see, understand and imagine that elsewhere and the people who belong to that elsewhere, today but also in the past. 

Past colonial empires are part of the agora even if I don’t name them clearly. You can feel the “I” swimming in history, life, politics, body, it flirts and plays with your senses. 

Sometimes the voice is very intimate, you can feel its fragilities and doubts; other times it is very assertive and powerful, the kind that takes all your attention. Something that looks like a collective experience, as if it speaks from a crowd of voices to a crowd of listeners. 

If we go back to Solio, we are invited to welcome a spectrum of voices and to let it show us where the dialogue happens, in time, in place and between beings. 

TT: Nancy Naomi, I’m wondering if you could talk a bit about whether any stylistic changes in translation are made with an eye of bringing Samira’s French to bear, again with an eye to this idea of the less concrete words (such as the sun) serving as an archetype or standing for greater or different ideas?

NNC: What an interesting question for a translator. Let me digress a bit here. The first poet I ever translated was René Char, whose dense poems are steeped in mystery and surrealism. The otherworldliness of Char’s words and themes drew me in, though I was faced with the dilemma of letting the words speak for themselves or helping the reader make sense of all the semantic leaps in the text. In the end, unable to consult with the long-deceased poet, I felt I couldn’t truly understand all the subtleties of meaning presented, and decided not to tinker too much with the French. I was only mildly surprised when I found out that Samira considers Char one of her literary influences, as stylistically they have much in common. Perhaps it was kismet that led me to Samira! As with my Char translations, I chose to translate what was on Samira’s page, rather than trying to hit the reader over the head with the weight of each word and what it stood for. In some ways Samira’s rhythm alerts the reader to the fact that something strange and miraculous is occurring in the line, and I tried hard to preserve the momentum of the original. 

One aspect of Samira’s writing I couldn’t preserve was her use of gender-neutral adjectives. In English the adjective is not subject-dependent. “Interesting” as an adjective can refer to a man, a woman, an elephant, or several paintings. In French, adjectives must “agree” with their subjects. “Masculine” subjects require masculine adjectives, and feminine subjects require feminine adjectives. Singular subjects require singular adjectives, and plural subjects require plural adjectives. Often the gender of French nouns can seem arbitrary. “Book” in French is masculine, as is “neck.” “Skin” is feminine, as is “surface.” Samira’s adjectives become particularly interesting when she combines genders, as in the adjective “nu.e” (a combination of “nu” (masculine) and “nue” (feminine), meaning “naked”). In English we can play with gender-free pronouns, to a certain extent, such as “s/he” and “he/she,” but we really don’t have a mechanism for rendering adjectives in this manner. 

TT: That is fascinating. Samira, how would that be rendered in performance? You mentioned how both sections are originally collaborations that are performed. I ask because it feels like a central part to the making of the poems and the form that the poems take. 

SN: When I work with other artists, I like to take time to listen to them and watch them working, performing and living. I am interested in the way they think and build their art, the way they translate the world in it. I also like the time we spend together, sharing daily life, exchanging thoughts about the way we read each other’s art, discussing possibilities of collaboration; also questioning our realities, the large and the intimate, what we want to say and share, through our art in general and through our collaboration more specifically. It is a whole process which is different from a collaboration to another. I see it as an experimental work. 

Structures and forms and themes discussed during the first steps nourish the writing. When I am ready to share parts of the text, I send it to the musician, the composer, the choreographer…and let them feel it and envision it. We could say I ask them how they would translate it or transcribe it in their art but that’s just a step in the process. They can also send me music, for example, to which I can react by writing something. That’s the writing part, but at this point, we already are thinking of finding a common language or vibe. 

Using the poems to build a dialogue on stage is something different, as it is a new step that needs another layer of work with the team I work with. We try things, we rehearse, we experiment…it’s very vivid and exciting. It happens in the voice, in the body, in the interaction with the other artists on stage; it is all the stage can bring. The idea is to create something that becomes another new object that is co-written by all of us and for that, each of us needs to listen to the process of the other. 

When it happens, it can create magic. 

We can say the book stands alone as poetry…the magic may happen with the reader and the live performance is another way to share that poetry as a collective immersive experience. 

NNC: I want to jump in to say that, in many ways, Solio can be considered yet another collaboration – a living partnership between the author and the translator. Translating Char presented constraints in that regard, as I could not consult directly with him about word choice, punctuation, or nuance, among other elements. I still felt an ethical responsibility to translate the poems in a way that would honor his intent, despite his absence; I had to rely on reading all I could about him and looking at previously translated texts – especially translations by Mary Ann Caws, a Char scholar who had the opportunity to live next door to him while he was still alive. With Samira, I had the good fortune of working with an author whose generosity of spirit helped make my translations more accurate, while maintaining their subtlety, as she was always willing to answer my questions.  She, too, is a translator, in addition to being an author, so she truly understands the role of the translator, with its particular joys and challenges. In spite of her sometimes hectic travel schedule – especially recent invitations to present and discuss her new books – she made herself available to me. 

Another interesting phenomenon of our collaboration is that I noticed Solio filter into my reading life. As part of a jury for a translation prize, I read The Blue House: Collected Works of Tomas Tranströmer, translated by Patty Crane (which ultimately won the prize). In Tranströmer’s “The Gallery,” Asian masks figure prominently, morphing into “faces/ pushing through oblivion’s white walls/ to breathe, to ask for something.” These lines immediately called to mind Samira’s image of “faces” in the opening text of Traces. Samira’s faces turn into crowds: “It’s so sad – or so something, I can’t think of the word,/ there’s no exact word – to not greet a passing face with/ dignity, be it a crazed crowd, even crowds need to be/ honored, face after face, one after the other, especially/ crowds…”

TT: Do you have any closing thoughts you’d like to share with your readers of the world?

SN: Thank you for opening a window to my work and Solio! May you be rooted in movement. 

NNC: Yes, thank you so much for these insightful questions and helping readers better appreciate Solio.

Abigail Ardelle Zammit’s third collection, Leaves Borrowed from Human Flesh, is forthcoming with Etruscan Press (Wilkes University).  Abigail is a Maltese writer, educator and editor whose poetry and reviews have appeared in international journals and anthologies including Black Iris, Matter, Tupelo Quarterly, Boulevard, Gutter, Modern Poetry in Translation, Mslexia, Poetry International, Ink, Sweat and Tears, High Window, The Ekphrastic Review, Smokestack Lightning (Smokestack, 2021) and The Montreal Poetry Prize Anthology 2022 (Véhicule Press, 2023).  Abigail’s other poetry collections are Voices from the Land of Trees (UK: Smokestack, 2007), and Portrait of a Woman with Sea Urchin (London: SPM, 2015).  She has co-authored two bilingual pamphlets (Half Spine, Half Wild Flower – Nofsi Spina, Nofsi Fjur Selvaġġ) and written A Seamus Heaney guidebook for high-school students.  Her most recent manuscripts have been shortlisted for the 2023 Sunken Garden Poetry Chapbook Prize and the 2024 Snowbound Chapbook Award.  

Samira Negrouche was born in Algiers where she lives. Author of several poetry collections, she is a poet, an essayist, a translator and also a doctor who has privileged her literary craft over the practice of medicine. Prone to multidisciplinary projects, she has frequently collaborated with visual artists, musicians and choreographers. Recent collaborations include performances Quai 2I1 with violinist Marianne Piketty and theorbist Bruno Helstroffer and J’habite en mouvement with choreographer Fatou Cissé and saxophone player Lionel Martin. Her books include À l’ombre de Grenade (Éditions Marty, 2003), Le Jazz des oliviers (Éditions Le Tell, 2010), Stations ( Éditions Chèvre-feuille étoilée, 2023)  and J’habite en movement, her selected works 2001-2021 ( Éditions Barzakh, 2023). The Olive-Trees’ Jazz and Other poems, translated by Marilyn Hacker and published by Pleiades Press in 2020 was shortlisted for The Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry and The National Translation Award in Poetry. Solio, her newest work to appear in English has been translated by Nancy Naomi Carlson and published in May 2024 by Seagull Books. 

Nancy Naomi Carlson is a poet, translator, and essayist.  Her translation of Khal Torabully’s Cargo Hold of Stars: Coolitude (Seagull Books, 2021) was the winner of the 2022 Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize (from Oxford University) and was shortlisted for the Sarah Maguire Translation Prize. Author of fifteen titles (ten translated), her second poetry collection, as well as her co-translation of Wendy Guerra, were noted in the New York Times. A recipient of two translation grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and decorated by the French government with the Academic Palms, Carlson has earned two doctoral degrees and is the Translations Editor for On the Seawall. Her work has appeared in American Poetry Review, The Georgia Review, Paris Review, Poem-a-Day, Poetry, and The Writer’s Chronicle.

Tiffany Troy is the author of Dominus (BlazeVOX [books]). She is Managing Editor at Tupelo Quarterly, Associate Editor of Tupelo Press, Book Review Co-Editor at The Los Angeles Review, Assistant Poetry Editor at Asymptote, and Co-Editor of Matter.

20 November 2024