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.