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Alain Bosquet, Stances perdues – Lost Quatrains
Translated from the French by Roger Little
Poetry Europe Series No. 6. Dublin: The Dedalus Press, 1999.

“Lost” could mean, sadly, things that were left too long. A note tells us that before he died in 1998 Bosquet had retained forty-one self-reflective quatrains out of about two hundred that he had collected from the margins of his other manuscripts. It may be that he failed to find the best way of relating them to each other, that for him there were still details to improve. The text itself refers to his sense of defeat, as he felt time running out, and the very attempt to make a choice of marginalia may reflect a certain helplessness. There is also one fragment of a poetic autobiography, in the form of an imaginary questionnaire that he answers with the flippancy such formalities may, in real life, deserve. In the context of the works he published, the interest of this one is, then, marginal. Yet in it Bosquet both affirms and illustrates his qualities. In the questionnaire, for example, he suggests that his besetting sin, or chronic illness, is la luxure du verbe. The quatrains illustrate what this meant. They are the product of his incessant quest for innocent-looking but double-edged formulations, for the finality of a rhyme, balanced by the open-endedness of a surprise. The surprise stems often from his addiction to words and things. He strives for concision, and there is also effusiveness in the naming of sundry objects, plants, animals, in his Chekhovian appetite for life. His best friends, he says, are the sort of things you find in the toolshed: boxes with nails in, watering-cans, jamjars, keys; at the same time, what pleasure to name a toucan! An internationalist, one of those writers who have chosen the French language, whilst helping to make frontiers irrelevant, he deserves the many translators who have responded to his appeal, amongst whom, where English is concerned, Roger Little stands out, along with Beckett. Little is surely the one, if willing, to take on the task of editing an English version of the collected poems, Je ne suis pas un poète d’eau douce.

In the present instance, Little does show a few signs of haste. He provides only one rhyme, sometimes just an assonance, per quatrain, where Bosquet has two – but this usually works in English. There are moments, however, when we need to consult the original: “set off trembling with anxiety” is not as clear as “partir, l’angoisse au coeur, à l’aventure”. And though the poet may score goals that the translator misses, there appear to be some that Little aims at, even if Bosquet did not. A hint of “luxation” (dislocation) in “la luxure du verbe” is an example. Little renders this as “a dislocated lust for words”, though any dislocation is an effect, not a characteristic, of the lust. At this point in his text, the concluding questionnaire, Bosquet fills in entries as an interrogator might fill in an official form, “for the record”, in the third person. Little does not appear to see this. Under “Sports?” for example, he translates the entry as “I play . . .”, whereas “Plays at being nobody” might give the right tone. This could help with the claim the poet makes under“Patrimoine?”, a question which helps Bosquet to consider the cultural baggage, given his forbears, that he brought with him. To this question, the answer is a paradox: “an equator of his own invention”, or, as Little has it, “of its own invention”. Bosquet refers, surely, to an aspiration he had, and which was indeed part of his heritage, to “invent” what his life taught him was already in place, a base-line for a world order giving idiosyncrasy and autonomy their due. In that task, Little is his ally. The quatrains are nearly always both faithful renderings and new poems that speak, surely, to readers who have no French. A single page provides a sample:

After the body’s betrayal, the soul remains:
constricted breath resembling a kiss.
Exist or die, enjoying praise or blame?
I am a centipede: come tread on this.

*
Shout it out loud: I’d style in every pore,
words in my soul and writing everywhere,
in my blood and lungs. So what if death
discharges flabby forms of corruption here!