Tigers' Gold
J-L Borges
As for us, when we spill our coffee, we say
that we were clumsy and that it brings
good luck, we so much want the looks of others
to be the pit in which our doubts hurl themselves. But
no light! Without blackness, the eye
would have no light. Where are the microphones?
he began, in front of him, his glass, his cane
and the firemen’s siren in the rue de Ecoles. Then,
very quickly: the word moon has been walked over
by Shakespeare. He stumbled over
his own words, but what followed
had battled for a long time on every continent
against the hours when poems are seized
like saucepans, by the ass; Misfortune
he said is more fruitful than victory
and I delete the astonishing. Here:
one afternoon an old blind man’s voice
rose up, he spoke of memory to amnesiac
voyeurs and threw gold pieces in the sea.
Hédi Kaddour was born in Tunisia in 1945, but has lived in France since childhood and considers himself entirely European. He has published three books of poems wth Gallimard: La Fin des vendanges (1989), Jamais une ombre simple (1994) and Passage au Luxembourg (2000), as well as three books with smaller publishers, and a collection of essays on modern French poets, L’Emotion impossible (Le Temps qu’il fait, 1994). He lives in Paris, teaches comparative and French literature, drama and creative writing at L’Ecole Normale Supérieure in Lyon, and writes a quarterly column on theatre for La Nouvelle revue française. Other poems of his, in Marilyn Hacker’s translation, have appeared or will appear in APR, The Paris Review, Poetry, Poetry International, PN Review, Prairie Schooner and Verse.
Marilyn Hacker is the author of nine books, including Presentation Piece (National Book Award, 1975), Winter Numbers (Lambda Literary Award and The Nation’s Lenore Marshall Award , 1995) and the verse novel, Love, Death and the Changing of the Seasons. Her most recent book is Squares and Courtyards (Norton, 2001). Her translation of Claire Malroux’s
Soleil de Jadis (A Long-Gone Sun) was published by the Sheep Meadow Press in 2000, and her translations of the poems of Vénus Khoury-Ghata by Oberlin College Press in 2001. She lives in New York and Paris and is director of the MA programme in creative writing at the City College of New York.
Translated by Marilyn Hacker
Page(s) 72-3
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