Translations from the French
An exerpt from THE IMPOSSIBLE TEXT (ii)
white as your thighs), the text finally attaining the text and giving it life every instant, giving itself wholly in your flesh, shining on the universe from it (you are lying down, naked on the wet earth, quartered and trans- parent, writing without moving, in your body, the most distant events, the explosion which stirs up your stomach also comes down upon the Antilles and you provoke real earthquakes, merely by spreading your legs apart), coming in waves beating on the sides of the wall, those which men raise in themselves, facing this ocean through which no vessel ploughs, as if the strange noise which sounds sometimes in the distance had the power to set off in the most audacious minds an incredible panic, erecting then a wall in order to no longer hear the call, to no longer see the night open up in the depth of their bodies like a precipice from which one never comes back, the fear, it's the fear which pushes man to speak, to shelter himself in fortresses of words, to hide behind the thick partitions of the verb, fear of losing his |
identity, fear of the void which hollows out his eyes when he sleeps, making them each night more concave, forcing them to see the hollowness of the universe, seeing things from the in- side, (your breasts, I catch myself imagining them in your chest, pushed in up to the hilt like two daggers, the image of an almost unbearable violence : your breasts stand up IN you like mountains which do not cease growing, exploding the last limits which still encircle you), fear of drifting away, an unrecognizable wreck in the middle of reefs, dragged dizzily along towards the whirlpool, the gulf of a text which your body links inexorably to the life which it has in the most intense and most precarious moments, (sometimes a gesture is enough, a gnashing for the everyday to reappear, more sordid than ever), the noise is your own sex in your mouth roaring in the middle of the ocean, moving your thighs like waves assaulting the side of the ship, the |
Translated by Ellen Nations
Page(s) 36
magazine list
- Features
- zines
- 10th Muse
- 14
- Acumen
- Agenda
- Ambit
- Angel Exhaust
- ARTEMISpoetry
- Atlas
- Blithe Spirit
- Borderlines
- Brando's hat
- Brittle Star
- Candelabrum
- Cannon's Mouth, The
- Chroma
- Coffee House, The
- Dream Catcher
- Equinox
- Erbacce
- Fabric
- Fire
- Floating Bear, The
- French Literary Review, The
- Frogmore Papers, The
- Global Tapestry
- Grosseteste Review
- Homeless Diamonds
- Interpreter's House, The
- Iota
- Journal, The
- Lamport Court
- London Magazine, The
- Magma
- Matchbox
- Matter
- Modern Poetry in Translation
- Monkey Kettle
- Moodswing
- Neon Highway
- New Welsh Review
- North, The
- Oasis
- Obsessed with pipework
- Orbis
- Oxford Poetry
- Painted, spoken
- Paper, The
- Pen Pusher Magazine
- Poetry Cornwall
- Poetry London
- Poetry London (1951)
- Poetry Nation
- Poetry Review, The
- Poetry Salzburg Review
- Poetry Scotland
- Poetry Wales
- Private Tutor
- Purple Patch
- Quarto
- Rain Dog
- Reach Poetry
- Review, The
- Rialto, The
- Second Aeon
- Seventh Quarry, The
- Shearsman
- Smiths Knoll
- Smoke
- South
- Staple
- Strange Faeces
- Tabla Book of New Verse, The
- Thumbscrew
- Tolling Elves
- Ugly Tree, The
- Weyfarers
- Wolf, The
- Yellow Crane, The