{"id":524,"date":"2009-10-07T14:54:53","date_gmt":"2009-10-07T13:54:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mcrrview.web.its.manchester.ac.uk\/blog\/?p=524"},"modified":"2016-01-23T21:28:05","modified_gmt":"2016-01-23T20:28:05","slug":"valerie-rouzeau-pas-revoir-cold-spring-in-winter-trans-susan-wicks-arc-publications","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=524","title":{"rendered":"Valerie Rouzeau \u201cPas revoir – Cold Spring in Winter\u201c trans. Susan Wicks; Arc Publications"},"content":{"rendered":"

Pas revoir, Valerie Rouzeau\u2019s brilliant sequence of poems on the death of her father, is challenging in many ways and on many levels. The linguistic demands posed by its verbal dislocations and fragmentations, its allusiveness, and multiple lexical ambiguities would have put it completely out of reach of my French if I\u2019d attempted to read it without the support of Susan Wicks\u2019 translation. With her support, I\u2019ve been able to appreciate beauties in the original which she has not been able to render into English – which is, after all, the point of a parallel text translation. For example, the poems of Pas revoir are set out as prose, but it\u2019s striking how often their internal rhymes act as a kind of punctuation, unobtrusively shaping <\/span>their sentences into rhythmic phrases so that they seem to contain within themselves elusive suggestions of poetic form, making a strong impact as you read but dissolving as you look at them closely. These intimations of form suggest emphases of meaning. In the poem beginning \u201cCe n\u2019est toujours pas toi ce cadavre\u201d the rhyming of the repeated \u201ctoi\u201d against \u201ccomme \u00e7a\u201d and \u201csi courtois\u201d cruelly underlines the contrast between the person that the father was and the mere thing that he has been unmade into by death:<\/p>\n

Ce n\u2019est toujours pas toi ce cadavre
\ncomme si toi tu aurais tenu en place
\ncomme \u00e7a comme si tu ne savais plus
\ndire bonjour toi si courtois.<\/p>\n

Wicks is alert to this strategy and elsewhere she has created similar effects herself, though rhyming different words and so creating her own different emphases. Clearly there are delicacies of meaning that elude translation. In that last stanza, Wicks can capture the poignant understatement of \u201ccomme si\u201d (\u201cas if\u201d) but not the multiple suggestions of \u201ctu ne savais plus\u201d, which she translates as \u201ccouldn\u2019t bring yourself to\u201d, which is fine, but leaves out \u201ccould no longer\u201d and \u201cno longer knew how to\u201d. To my mind this last meaning is particularly touching because in echoing the baby talk by which Rouzeau so frequently conveys the depth of loss brought by her father\u2019s death, it makes us imagine her as a child pitying and understanding another child\u2019s incapacity, and this evokes the tenderness of her feelings for her father.<\/span><\/p>\n

If there are inevitably losses in translation, there are equally gains, reflecting the translator\u2019s own creativity. Wicks translates \u201cCe n\u2019est toujours pas toi ce cadavre\u201d as \u201cIt\u2019s still not you this corpse\u201d. In the spirit of Rouzeau\u2019s method of writing, in which omission of punctuation within the sentence \/ stanza units creates multiple overlapping syntactical relationships, that reads both as a single unpunctuated phrase (\u201ceven now this corpse is not you\u201d) and as a pausing one: \u201cIt\u2019s still, not you, this corpse\u201d. This gives a double meaning to \u201cstill\u201d which has no direct equivalent in the French but which distils the essential meaning of the whole poem: that death has robbed the father of all the movement and social warmth he had in life. This seems typical of the way in which close collaboration between the two poets in the development of this translation has allowed Wicks to breathe the life of English into a French poem while remaining true to its author\u2019s intentions.<\/span><\/p>\n

The linguistic dislocations with which the sequence begins suggest Rouzeau\u2019s shock, emotional splintering, inability to absorb or accept what has happened. Frequent lapses into baby talk convincingly convey what a blow to her developed sense of self this is. As the sequence draws to an end, the language clarifies and simplifies, beautifully embodying the writer\u2019s painful acceptance of death, her recovered sense of her own self and life, and her recovered ability to interact with and enjoy the world around her. <\/span>This sequence is equally important for its rich human truth and for its verbal and formal originality, and it is so both in Rouzeau\u2019s original French and in Susan Wicks\u2019 fine translation.<\/span><\/p>\n

 
\nEdmund Prestwich<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Pas revoir, Valerie Rouzeau\u2019s brilliant sequence of poems on the death of her father, is challenging in many ways and on many levels. The linguistic demands posed by its verbal dislocations and fragmentations, its allusiveness, and multiple lexical ambiguities would have put it completely out of reach of my French if I\u2019d attempted to read […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":45,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":[]},"categories":[13],"tags":[34,78,245,271],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"yoast_head":"\nValerie Rouzeau \u201cPas revoir - Cold Spring in Winter\u201c trans. 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