{"id":431482,"date":"2020-05-08T09:14:49","date_gmt":"2020-05-08T13:14:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/?p=431482"},"modified":"2020-05-08T09:17:52","modified_gmt":"2020-05-08T13:17:52","slug":"the-next-loves-by-stephane-bouquet-why-this-book-should-win","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/2020\/05\/08\/the-next-loves-by-stephane-bouquet-why-this-book-should-win\/","title":{"rendered":"“The Next Loves” by St\u00e9phane Bouquet [Why This Book Should Win]"},"content":{"rendered":"

Check in daily for new Why This Book Should Win<\/a> posts covering all thirty-five titles longlisted for the 2020 Best Translated Book Awards<\/a>.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

Laura Marris<\/strong>\u00a0is a writer and translator from the French. Recent projects include Paol Keineg\u2019s\u00a0<\/em>Triste Tristan\u00a0(co-translated with Rosmarie Waldrop for Burning Deck Press) and\u00a0<\/em>In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, a comic-book version of Proust\u2019s classic. Her translation of Louis Guilloux\u2019s\u00a0<\/em>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’\u00a0<\/em>The Plague.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

The Next Loves<\/em><\/strong><\/a> by St\u00e9phane Bouquet, translated from the French by Lindsay Turner (Nightboat Books)<\/strong><\/p>\n

There\u2019s an old idiom in French that goes straight to the heart of this book. Le d\u00e9sir o\u00f9 je suis<\/em> means the desire I am feeling<\/em>, or more literally, the desire where I am<\/em>, the desire inhabiting me<\/em>. In Lindsay Turner\u2019s exceptional translation, St\u00e9phane Bouquet\u2019s 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\u2014the half-life of desire that permeates the interior world of this book. Take, for example, the brutal hopefulness of this chance meeting:<\/p>\n

In the metro I look up from reading and<\/p>\n

oh\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 he\u2019s holding flowers they\u2019re not for me<\/p>\n

and a pastry-box<\/p>\n

it\u2019s not for me\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 one more time where a face is dangerous<\/p>\n

hopeful landing<\/p>\n

i.e. tomorrow hasn\u2019t yet deserted us\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 the proof is, you\u2019re<\/p>\n

there\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 beginner at the edge<\/p>\n

of human acts<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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\u2014instead they create a momentum of nuance and association, rocketing forward:<\/p>\n

blond elf Peter Pan superhero<\/p>\n

of service<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

so thin his skin lay<\/p>\n

directly<\/p>\n

on his bones the 2 yogurts<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

 <\/p>\n

aren\u2019t the cheapest<\/p>\n

ones, are they equivalent<\/p>\n

to the light that falls sometimes<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

 <\/p>\n

adding districts<\/p>\n

to the brightness<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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\u2019t 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 \u201cLight of the Fig,\u201d which is a love poem as well as a memorial for victims of homophobic violence, Bouquet writes:<\/p>\n

If I weren\u2019t so tired I could invent<\/p>\n

for us<\/p>\n

an electric lavender for automatic honey, greenhouses<\/p>\n

for butterflies, thickets<\/p>\n

teeming with caterpillars, a burgeoning anonymous happiness.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And later, in that same poem:<\/p>\n

\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0I find<\/p>\n

in my inbox the photo of a soldier who\u2019s sweeping<\/p>\n

the alleys<\/p>\n

of a military cemetery after a volcanic eruption. A friend<\/p>\n

has remembered<\/p>\n

that more than anything I like putting the days in order, endlessly<\/p>\n

counting the rhythm of things,<\/p>\n

which is to say that everything needs to be evacuated immediately<\/p>\n

from death<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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\u2014they constantly accommodate this teeming of pleasure and pain, but they refuse to take survival for granted. Bouquet\u2019s 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, \u201cbecause we must steal constantly\/ from absence.\u201d<\/p>\n

There\u2019s an honesty to this admission\u2014that 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 \u201cThe Covers,\u201d a dazzling lyric essay, the speaker has just slept with a man who has Ovid\u2019s Metamorphoses<\/em> in his library. \u201cTo what degree and under what conditions,\u201d he asks, \u201ccan the verb to speak <\/em>be substituted for the verb to touch<\/em>?\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

The fact that Turner\u2019s 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<\/em> 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\u2019s edge\u2014someday I\u2019ll make it mine<\/em>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Check in daily for new Why This Book Should Win posts covering all thirty-five titles longlisted for the 2020 Best Translated Book Awards.\u00a0 Laura Marris\u00a0is a writer and translator from the French. Recent projects include Paol Keineg\u2019s\u00a0Triste Tristan\u00a0(co-translated with Rosmarie Waldrop for Burning Deck Press) and\u00a0In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, a comic-book […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":292,"featured_media":423572,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[67476],"tags":[51796,70752,70732,50146,70742,37876],"class_list":["post-431482","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-best-translated-book-awards","tag-anatomy-of-a-night","tag-lindsay-turner","tag-next-loves","tag-nightboat-books","tag-stephane-bouquet","tag-why-this-book-should-win"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/431482","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/292"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=431482"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/431482\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":431522,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/431482\/revisions\/431522"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/423572"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=431482"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=431482"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=431482"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}