About the translator: Dawn Cornelio teaches French language, literature and translation at the University of Guelph. Her research focuses on the practice of translation, the liberation of the image of the subservient translator, and French extreme-contemporary novel and poetry: essentially, but not limited to, production by women writers.
Creature
This man that I imagine in my ink is made of crumbled words. His flesh remembers a lost language. He states a sentence in motion and silence is scarred over.
He exists enough to suffer, not enough to complain. He lives lightly, without fatigue, irrigated by incertitude, and cannot tolerate like us his weight in blood.
It’s a beginning that doesn’t tarnish though it goes on. God is of little importance to him, but he weighs the sky as he walks.
His only obligation is to set the table for improbable guests.
Like a tree cluttered with birds, with all his might he remains silent and carries his voice in his arms.
He is only afraid of lying. Of giving in to certain melodious illusions. Of looking at himself in the mirror too much. Of not being attentive enough to the place where words detach from what they say.
Like a river climbing back to its source, he becomes thinner. Within him, knowledge and oblivion have mixed their waters.
He especially loves what he doesn’t know, what resists and drives him to despair. Patience is his only virtue.
Night especially is his domain. Its freshness makes him want to sing. In it, he learns to depart.
He must be depicted, sitting in the shadows at a child’s bedside, or standing on a boat, at night, in the middle of a lake.
Undoubtedly God gets his taste for absence from him.
First, he was lost, from so many illusions. He destroyed himself. Now from a distance he resembles Lazarus because he rose from his own cadaver.
Henceforth day is motionless in his hands.
He walks on a wire in his soul.
Jean-Michel Maulpoix
Fragmentation
More concerned with poetry’s borders than its center… Small stones in a line surround a deflowered garden. They keep love from scattering.
Lessening our language and ourselves together. Saying little, but saying it precisely. Digging out the sky with perfectly straight silence. A beautiful hieroglyphic.
The fragment’s seismographic writing: it records the beating of precariousness.
It’s the word of a man who dreams of poems.
It’s a beginning of love: it gives us the sign to exist.
“Only the fringe of knowledge is moving.”
Center of a poem to be. Seed of the future tree. Heartbreaking contraction of hope.
There is no other possible song than the poem’s roots or its budding, no song before which all poetry is breathless.
Destined in essence to remain incomplete, the fragment announces an absent work and a lost form. It therefore allows the exact and suitable expression of the absolute.
The world’s miniature and its epigraph.
Like a prolonged hesitation between poem and prose, the song of a flute in the evening.
The fragment is a language of beauty for death. Its word stops short, it doesn’t affirm life but prowls around its outskirts, like a brand new ghost in the shadow of the living it loved.
Neither failure nor minor form of literature. Rather its lucidity. The fragment can tell time by history’s dial, it knows how little innocence and hope it has left. It says that everything must be resumed, restarted and recognized.
Poetry’s sad, sad surroundings: the ink and paper’s rips, rough drafts, sketches, all sorts of beginnings, the soul’s debris and bits of aborted flesh.
Only the poem that assures the world’s gravity nests resolutely.
Neither an art nor a thought, but another language, perpetually seeking its identity, and that parodies what it has lost.
“It is in the form of the fragment that the unfinished is still the most bearable.”
I write the fracture rather than the fragment. The pen has become a scissor and pays attention only to language’s perimeter and its declines.
It is less a matter of naming things than the invisible thread allowing us to perceive them and leading to the snow-filled trench where the word lands and suffocates.
In olden pharmacy, they called “the five precious fragments” splinters of sapphires, garnets, hyacinths, emeralds, and carnelians, they were said to have cordial virtues.
The fragment’s vocation is to reconcile the beautiful and the simple, wonder and thought.
Jean-Michel Maulpoix
Utopia
Poetry is completely divided between the desire for the country that does not exist and the need for common ground: between elsewhere and cliché, its two contradictory genies.
The language of the poem is as irreparably the language of the tribe as the language of purest meaning. Its matchmaking vocation makes it the voice of a utopia.
Utopian body of the poem: vertical, hierarchical and solitary. It is its own space, hell’s motionless sky.
Utopia less eludes earthly localization than metaphysical shelter. In the first place it frees itself from the religion of its time and builds up the walls of a church that is “uncertain of its God”: the blue chimney of the poem blustering in the middle of the sky.
The phantom city, the waterless city, the kingdomless people: a shared concern in utopia and in poetry to paradoxically clear out the world to allow the birth of true absent life.
Just as utopia is the madness necessary to the preservation of social health, so poetry is an illness of the word that is a condition of its survival.
In the same leap, utopia and poetry skip history .
I would happily replace the poem with the utopia of the fragment, fragile piece of word around which the traces of the lyrical fracture must be sought.
Utopia of the fragment: “Like a small work of art, a fragment must be completely detached from the surrounding world and closed in upon itself like a hedgehog.” (The Atheneum, Fragment 206).
Its very subject is a utopia: lost, exhausted and faint, it scatters its powers.
Wandering word, compelled to never find its resting place, the fragment exists without hearth or home: the poem’s memory devours it.
It neither develops nor culminates. Unfinished, it is writing that is suspended between prose and verse.
The fragment is a crystalline stone. A spark from the metaphysical table fractured by frost, that the poem’s transparent torrents bring down in our valleys.
This ruin of language evokes ancient monuments of words.
Uncultivated language: patches of text not quite tilled, sentences not quite inked, too brief, slowly covered over with water by the time that passes.
It is nothing, it is everything. Its voice, its ear and its echo. Like a shell, it locks within itself the entire murmur of the sea. Alone it talks about infinity. The absolute is its ridiculous intimacy.
Utopian writing: beyond genres, preoccupied with its own breaks and incandescence, meditating and savoring the language it consumes.
Jean-Michel Maulpoix