from Recitatif
Hotel Continental
Solitude is chill and soft on the tongue that names it
And lifts the soul a little in broken light;
That’s when – out of the desertion, the severing – a figure
Rises and beckons in its turn under wallpaper leaves,
In the wardrobe’s creak and the margins of a book
That can’t be read by the distant gaze turned on us.
But there’s no pronounceable name for this pit that divides
The self in two, and makes of every heartbeat
A marked door slamming when eviction’s done.
Here I am with one more stair to go,
Where a chair’s consoling presence waits
And reassurance murmurs from the basin;
Where even solitude withdraws its hand from mine
And leaves me, like that day after you’d gone,
When standing in the rain I saw a circle of time
Impossible to reckon, and inside it
The little park gate clashing iron on iron.
Jacques Réda, born in Lunéville in 1929, is one of France’s leading poets. A former editor of La Nouvelle revue française, he has published several volumes of poetry including Amen, Récitatif, La tourne and Retour au calme (Gallimard 1968, 1970, 1975, 1989) and the prose poems, Les ruines de Paris (Gallimard, 1977, 1993). His most recent collection is La course (Gallimard, 1999). He has also written books on poetry and jazz. In 1997 he was awarded Le Grand Prix de la Poésie by the Académie Française, and in 1999 the Prix Goncourt for poetry.
Jennie Feldman was born in South Africa, graduated from Oxford University, and now lives in Haifa, Israel. A former producer and presenter of radio documentaries, which won three international awards, she is now completing her first full collection of poems, and preparing a volume of translations of poems by Jacques Réda.
poetrymagazines note: revised versions of those translations of Jacques Réda’s poems will appear in a new collection, to be published by Anvil Press in September 2005:
Title: Treading Lightly, Selected Poems 1961-1975, by Jacques Réda,
translated by Jennie Feldman ISBN 0 85646 380 9
A collection Jennie Feldman's own poems is forthcoming from Anvil Press at the same time, Sept. 2005:
Title: The Lost Notebook, by Jennie Feldman ISBN 0 85646 381 7
Translated by Jennie Feldman
Page(s) 152
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