2 Poems from Lointaines by Nicole Brossard Translated by: Sylvain Gallais and Cynthia Hogue

Cities after misfortune 

when silence inundates 

light before and after misfortune

cities with the wind in your hair

because you love to walk over bridges

feeling deeply the torrent’s waters 

rolling through time like your ribcage

then you glimpse returning from afar

Paul Celan and Virginia Woolf

in the wake of their long walk

Villes après le malheur

quand le silence inonde 

la lumière avant et après le malheur

villes avec du vent dans les cheveux 

puisque tu aimes en marchant 

sur les ponts bien sentir l’eau de torrent 

rouler dans le temps comme en la poitrine 

puis tu les aperçois revenant de loin 

Paul Celan et Virginia Woolf

dans leur élan de grande marche 

Cities with a face 

days of presence at point-blank 

to the head, this 

is the disappearance of trees 

of bridges of others passing

among the street fights, the fires

little by little we’ll say

the count of eternity’s   

crossing our faces 

*

yes, I’m used to the idea of the aura 

to the outline of bodies lingering like a trace 

on street corners, under the dog star constellation 

in my mind I’m used to absence 

Villes avec un visage

les jours de présence à bout portant

dans la tête, c’est 

la disparition, des arbres

des pont des autres passant

entre les combats de rue, les incendies

peu à peu on dira

décompte d’éternité

traversant les visages

*

oui, je m’habitue à l’idée de l’aura

à l’écran des corps restés là comme une empreinte

au coin d’une rue, sous la constellation du chien

dans les pensées je m’habitue à l’absence

Permission

Formal permission to publish a bilingual edition with Omnidawn Publishing has been negotiated and finalized with Nicole Brossard and the original French publisher. The permission, which includes publishing individual translations up to book publication, is as follows:

Original French © Copyright Éditions Caractères 2010. Reprinted by permission of Éditions Caractères.  

English Translation © Copyright Sylvain Gallais and Cynthia Hogue 2022. All rights reserved.

Nicole Brossard has been in the vanguard of the dynamic Francophone Canadian feminist and avant-garde writing community for over four decades. She founded the journal La Barre du Jour, was one of the co-founding members of the Union des écrivaines et écrivains québécois, piloted the Quebec dossier for the magazine Opus International, and was a member of the steering committee for the International Writers’ Meeting in 1975 (theme: women and writing).   For her writing, she has twice received the Grand Prix du festival international de poésie, among many other honors. Brossard has published thirty books, including Lointaines (2010), from which the current selection is drawn, and a book on translation, Et me voici soudain en train de refaire le monde. In 2019, she was awarded the Lifetime Recognition Award from The Griffin Trust For Excellence in Poetry.  

Sylvain Gallais is a native French speaker transplanted to the U.S. seventeen years ago.  He is an emeritus professor of Economics at Université Francois Rabelais (Tours, France) and of French in the School of International Letters and Culture at Arizona State University.  His co-authored book in economics is entitled France Encounters Globalization (2003).

Cynthia Hogue most recent collections are Revenance, listed as one of the 2014 “Standout” books by the Academy of American Poets, and In June the Labyrinth (2017).  Her tenth collection, instead, it is dark, will be out from Red Hen Press in 2023. Her translations (both with Sylvain Gallais) include Fortino Sámano (The overflowing of the poem), from the French of Virginie Lalucq and Jean-Luc Nancy, which won the Landon Translation Award from the Academy of American Poets in 2013, and Nicole Brossard’s Distantly (forthcoming 2022). Her honors include two NEA Fellowships and a Witter Bynner Translation Fellowship.  She is the inaugural Marshall Chair in Poetry Emerita Professor of English at Arizona State University.

30 September 2021