Laura Marris is a writer and translator from the French. Recent projects include Paol Keineg’s Triste Tristan (co-translated with Rosmarie Waldrop for Burning Deck Press) and In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, a comic-book version of Proust’s classic. Her translation of Louis Guilloux’s Blood Dark(NYRB) was shortlisted for the 2018 Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize. She teaches writing at the University at Buffalo and is currently at work on a new translation of Camus’ The Plague.

by Stéphane Bouquet, translated from the French by Lindsay Turner (Nightboat Books)

There’s an old idiom in French that goes straight to the heart of this book. Le désir où je suis means the desire I am feeling, or more literally, the desire where I am, the desire inhabiting me. In Lindsay Turner’s exceptional translation, Stéphane Bouquet’s voice speaks from the place of that idiom. These poems are both electric and grounded, acknowledging the hope that comes from wanting something, while also admitting the effects of heartbreak—the half-life of desire that permeates the interior world of this book. Take, for example, the brutal hopefulness of this chance meeting:

In the metro I look up from reading and

oh     he’s holding flowers they’re not for me

and a pastry-box

it’s not for me    one more time where a face is dangerous

hopeful landing

i.e. tomorrow hasn’t yet deserted us         the proof is, you’re

there       beginner at the edge

of human acts

This edge relies on the intimacy of cities, of public transportation and human circulation. The metro is a train of thought, ravenous, restless, but always purposefully seeking the next moment of beauty. Everything in this book is close enough to collide, and those collisions refract imagined futures, existing in a kind of hyperreality of potential missed connections. The mind wanders in these poems, but its associations are not random—instead they create a momentum of nuance and association, rocketing forward:

blond elf Peter Pan superhero

of service

so thin his skin lay

directly

on his bones the 2 yogurts

aren’t the cheapest

ones, are they equivalent

to the light that falls sometimes

adding districts

to the brightness

These districts are illuminated by the searching quality of the forms Bouquet creates. Rather than a simple progression of encounters, the idea of sequence here is a way of moving forward, both hopeful and tragic. Each moment this book is an accounting, both for the speaker and for those in his community who, through addiction, violence, and other forms of trauma, didn’t survive to experience it. These poems allow hunger to be a form of collective healing, where the vitality of the moment remembers the dead. In “Light of the Fig,” which is a love poem as well as a memorial for victims of homophobic violence, Bouquet writes:

If I weren’t so tired I could invent

for us

an electric lavender for automatic honey, greenhouses

for butterflies, thickets

teeming with caterpillars, a burgeoning anonymous happiness.

And later, in that same poem:

         I find

in my inbox the photo of a soldier who’s sweeping

the alleys

of a military cemetery after a volcanic eruption. A friend

has remembered

that more than anything I like putting the days in order, endlessly

counting the rhythm of things,

which is to say that everything needs to be evacuated immediately

from death

Rather than eclipsing what has been lost, marking time is a rescue mission, a form of vitality that never forgets it is living in the aftermath. The speaker of these poems is living twice, or one hundred times, through each of the lives he intersects. The spaces of these poems are loaded with all the passing desires and interactions that inhabit them—they constantly accommodate this teeming of pleasure and pain, but they refuse to take survival for granted. Bouquet’s formal innovations capture the way these poems hold their breath from one moment to the next, like someone driving past a graveyard on a sunny day. The lines dramatize the leap between the silences, the gaps, and their reclamation, “because we must steal constantly/ from absence.”

There’s an honesty to this admission—that this poet is not speaking just to cover an absence but writing into it, to discover its origins, to try to get closer. As a translator of Robert Creeley, James Schuyler, and Peter Gizzi into French, Bouquet is hyperaware of how physical experience might be translated into the poem, and how intimacy might be not only communicated but also created through this work. In “The Covers,” a dazzling lyric essay, the speaker has just slept with a man who has Ovid’s Metamorphoses in his library. “To what degree and under what conditions,” he asks, “can the verb to speak be substituted for the verb to touch?” This transformation is one of precarious hope and loneliness, and the text that carries it deserves to be read in all its rhapsodic and difficult tenderness.

The fact that Turner’s translation communicates all the fierce intricacy of this voice into English is a gift that brings the book full circle, back into dialogue with the poets its author has been translating. It is fitting that a book about connection, intimacy, and closeness has traveled and transgressed the boundaries of its original language. The Next Loves reaches out for what is beautiful and risky, attempting the impossible metamorphosis of speech into touch. Or, as Dylan put it, beauty walks a razor’s edge—someday I’ll make it mine.

“At night Amarâq is coated with a darkness as viscous as unmixed colors, neither the fjord nor the mountains, valleys, lakes, or the river exist, there is only a black mass, a void that spreads across the landscape sporadically, pressing what’s left but leaving holes that it fills with abstract elements, moving pictures, waves of light in a sea of light.

At night Amarâq becomes a broad plain that melts the two dimensions into the third, the earth with the sky—suddenly everything is sky.”

Immediately, Anna Kim’s Anatomy of a Night (translated by Bradley Schmidt) draws us in and confines us to a small, five-hour sliver of life in Amarâq Greenland: an impoverished Inuit village that is plagued by a wave of suicides. Over the course of these pages—through deep personal ties and chilling alienation—the topics of poverty, isolation, and suicide swirl around the inhabitants of the town. Is it the poverty and isolation that drives these folks to take their own lives? Is the strained history between Greenland and Denmark a factor? Or is there something more, something deeper and ingrained in Amarâq?

Anatomy of a Night is broken up into one-hour sections, with each section broken down into smaller vignettes. It is in these snippets that we learn about the villagers and their relationships. We are thrown into this insular society without much of an introduction and only over the course of the novel do we see the relationships between people develop and dissolve, and see the emergence of Amarâq as the real binding element. All of these characters are inherently tied to the village in one way or another through generations or a personal calling. Because of the evolving web of stories across the whole of the novel, identifying a key example of this intricate technique is very difficult¹; however, one of the most interesting relationships is between Ole and Magnus, two adolescent boys who resolve to commit tandem suicide:

“They wrap the scarves around the bedposts, tie knots. They sit down on the carpet, close to the post, wrapping one end around each of their throats, and knotting them under their chins. They work synchronously, their movements are coordinated, practiced.”

And farther down the page:

“Magnus sits back down on the floor, scoots over to the bed, takes the scarf, wraps it around the end of the bedpost, and knots it under his chin; light from the street falls on the wall, on the pictures Magnus had cut out of magazines and schoolbooks. He considered them outrageously beautiful photos, until about a year ago, when he stopped collecting them because he could no longer remember why he had started. It’s always the same motif: a sandy beach, the ocean in the background so blue it appeared to merge with the sky, but there was no horizon—the horizon was missing in all of the pictures.”

Even during one of the most intimate moments one person can have with another, there still lingers a sense of loneliness and alienation. Though a little more than halfway through the novel, these passages are like a skeleton key, unlocking a well-guarded secret—or maybe they just deepen the mystery.

At times, especially at the very beginning, the prose is a little difficult to grasp hold of, but what really catches and draws you in is Bradley Schmidt’s masterful rendering of Anna Kim’s text. Schmidt’s deft touch allows the prose to sing with full force; a pleasure to read from the first word to the last. Anna Kim’s gorgeous ebook (YES! Ebooks can be gorgeous), published by the new Berlin based Frisch & Co., is a haunting, thoughtful, beautiful work that sticks with you long after it’s done.

¹ Here is a , illustrating this point.

Jen is a former Ģą˝´«Ă˝ student, and a translator from German. Her first book-length translation, (Open Letter Books), comes out next week.

Here’s the beginning of Jen’s review:

“At night Amarâq is coated with a darkness as viscous as unmixed colors, neither the fjord nor the mountains, valleys, lakes, or the river exist, there is only a black mass, a void that spreads across the landscape sporadically, pressing what’s left but leaving holes that it fills with abstract elements, moving pictures, waves of light in a sea of light.

At night Amarâq becomes a broad plain that melts the two dimensions into the third, the earth with the sky—suddenly everything is sky.”

Immediately, Anna Kim’s Anatomy of a Night (translated by Bradley Schmidt) draws us in and confines us to a small, five-hour sliver of life in Amarâq Greenland: an impoverished Inuit village that is plagued by a wave of suicides. Over the course of these pages—through deep personal ties and chilling alienation—the topics of poverty, isolation, and suicide swirl around the inhabitants of the town. Is it the poverty and isolation that drives these folks to take their own lives? Is the strained history between Greenland and Denmark a factor? Or is there something more, something deeper and ingrained in Amarâq?

Head over here for the rest of the review.