Translator's Introduction to Grottoes — Web Exclusive
By Marilyn Hacker
A poet who translates poetry does it with a double consciousness: that of serving the work in the other language, and that of examining more closely how she herself creates a poem by fine observation and, as much as possible, re-creation of someone else's poetic process—in order as well, of course, to eventually write more poems. How better to learn how another poet shapes a poem than by attempting to re-shape it yourself in a new vocabulary, grammar, in the context of a different linguistic and prosodic history? And how better to increase one's intimacy with both languages at once? Reading—and living—in the French language as much as I do, translation is also a way of conveying to English readers some of the pleasure I find there.
Claire Malroux is one of those rare poets who is also a translator of genius. It is largely thanks to her that the work of Emily Dickinson has begun to be known, appreciated, and studied in France; and, a surprising juxtaposition, she has also brought the poetry of Derek Walcott into the French language, an enterprise that began before his Nobel Prize. Perhaps it is the translator's openness of imagination to unfamiliar cultures and resonances, the linguistic intelligence at work in making a poem that is faithful at once to the original and to its new language, that has enabled her to create, at the same time, a body of original work— now comprising six published books—of great breadth and intimate integrity. Malroux's most recent published work is, in fact, a book-length essay about the poetry of Dickinson, and her own intimate and fluctuating relationship to those texts (Chambre avec vue sur l'éternité. Gallimard, 2005).
Claire Malroux's own poems both distance and embrace narrative as the poet examines, often through the intenention oflandscape, the texture of memory and of thought itself. Malroux's poems move between an intense but philosophical and abstract interiority and an acute engagement with the material world. The inevitabilities of time and change, the recuperative but potentially treacherous actions of memory, and the way thought is made concrete through the word are themes central to her work. Equally central is the poet's deliberate, sometimes daring work upon syntax itself, as the sentence is meticulously opened out to possibilities instead of contingencies, and played contrapuntally to the rhythm and breath established by the poem's lineation.
Malroux's lapidary earlier work drew on landscape, seascape, and "inscape," was more aphoristic than narrative, and deftly maneuvered around a first-person-singular which it employed minimally and with discretion. Although her work is in the direct line of her French predecessors, from Jean Follain back to Baudelaire, Malroux also has an intimate connection with English language poetry—is there more intimate a connection with a text than translation? Her connection lies not only with Dickinson and Walcott, but also with C.K. Williams, Elizabeth Bishop, and Wallace Stelens. This has led (one may at least posit) to increasing reflection in her work upon the action of the agglomeration of events we call "history" on the interweavings of change, memory and words. "History" (histoire) is a triple-barreled word in French, implying at once the macro-pattern of political and economic change, any sequence of events that occurs in fact or fiction (like one's grandfather's childhood), and the narration that begins "Once upon a time" (Il y avait une fois . . .) in the evening on a parent's knee or at a child's bedside.
This is perhaps most apparent in the 1998 poem-narrative Soleil de jadis (which appeared in English in my translation as A Long-Gone Sun , Sheep Meadow Press, 2000), a book-length sequence which obsenes, through a child's eyes the approach of World War II in southwestern France, and the career of a Resistant father.
In Malroux's new work, longer-lined and often very place-specific in its focus, the strand of History is elaborated in a contemporary context. while manipulating both metaphor and syntax with a deliberately disconcerting and innovative grace. "Grottes" is from her most recent collection, Ni si lointain.
Claire Malroux was awarded the Grand Prix National de la Traduction in 1995, and was named a Chevalier de la Légion d'Honneur in 2000 for the entirety of her work.
Marilyn Hacker is an American poet, critic, and reviewer. Her books of poetry include Going Back to the River, Love, Death, and The Changing of the Seasons, and Presentation Piece, which won the National Book Award. Hacker is an important contemporary lesbian writer and activist. She often employs strict poetic forms in her poetry, as with Love, Death, and the Changing of the Seasons, which is a verse novel in sonnets. She is also recognized as a master of French forms, particularly the villanelle.