Hédi Kaddour at Whitney Humanities Center, Yale
More from YUP’s translated poets: Next Wednesday, October 27, the French poet Hédi Kaddour will be at Yale’s Whitney Humanities Center to read from his book, Treason, translated by Marilyn Hacker and published earlier this spring.
Kaddour is an acclaimed poet and novelist in France, winner of the Prix du Premier Roman and the Goncourt du Premier Roman for his first published novel, Waltenberg. He first rose to prominence as a poet, and his work combines sensuality with erudition and wit, and questions the structures of syntax itself. His poetry often dialogues with classical forms, the sonnet in particular, though using the fourteen-line poem in a way that might remind Americans of Robert Lowell’s History in its collage of public and private events, and its urban portraits. Treason is the first full volume of Kaddour’s poetry to appear in English, and Hacker’s translation beautifully recreates the fascination and consternation of Kaddour’s internal and external spaces.
Here are two poems from Hacker’s translation: “The Question” and “The Answer.”
The Question
Do you work for the dough or to
Get laid, the nurse is asked by
A woman who’s brought in by the police,
Seized by a rage that is no longer
Entirely hers. She shouts, The hens
On top always end up shitting
On the ones below, and goes off toward
The rickety bed, where her precious
Innocence will have its hymen
Mended once more. You never
Want to save anything, she adds,
But what’s already lost.
Television,
Writes the intern on her chart,
Seems to have stopped interesting her.
The Answer
Each forward movement of the clouds leadens
The cupola covering the great men
A bit more. Then it explodes again
In all its blue-gray sheen as it receives
The sun. A woman in a bright-
Colored mini-skirt has stretched herself out
On a metal chair. Her hand
Is planted firmly on her neighbor’s thigh.
A boy observing them makes fun,
With brusque gestures, of imitation
Conjugal Sundays; as if it were
A play by Marivaux, a female friend
Briskly replies, Sometimes people pretend
To be pretending, and it’s true.
Copyright © 2010 by Marilyn Hacker.