THINGS THAT FALL
Original title: Tombeau de Lou.
GUERNICA; Essential Translations Series 2
TORONTO – BUFFALO – LANCASTER (U.K.) 2013
Contents
Introduction
You might say a toy
The shifting of the shadow
The absolute strangeness of the facts
One another
Against whom, against what?
Ultimate sweet talk, ultimate softness
A tale of beauty
Suddenly their Medusa gaze
Like a painting by Margrite
Face to face, small and great
The sound of my anger
A century later
About the author and translator
Praise
Introduction
In French, Tombeau de Lou. At its origin, the death of the childhood friend, the chosen sister, swept away by a sud- den cancer. She was fifty-three years old. Like the poet. The one who remains, the survivor, the inconsolable woman. That’s the anecdote. Afterwards – if an after- wards is possible, the urgency presses, the need to find words for the pain and questions that death raises, strewn at random in revolt, in violence, in memory, in mourning and in dread. To translate the hasty metamor- phosis of the ever-so-living into the ever-so-dead.To give meaning, albeit fragile, albeit mortal, to the meaningless. To relate this little story of intimate suffering – all in all, banal – to the great history of international proportions. In this literary tomb of eleven songs, the need to attempt a utopian reconciliation: embrace all at once the immen- sity of the emptiness, the chaos, our fragile humanity, and our ardent desire for resistance.
Literally, a tomb for Lou. This genre offers a resting place in the form of poetry. In Études françaises, Catherine Mavrikakis explains that, thanks to Denise Desautels, “the book-tomb is no longer just a monument, another stone in the cemetery of literary time. It is the tearing apart of the present.” For Tombeau de Lou, initially printed by Éditions du Noroît with photographs by Alain Laframboise, Desautels won the Canadian Writers’ Society Prize in 2001, having already won the First Prize for Poetry from CBC Canada for excerpts of its unpublished text under the title My Sisyphus. Jean Chatard from Le Mensuel littéraire et poétique in Bruxelles describes its style as“intense”and“spell-binding.”
Released in a Catalan translation under the title Tomba de Lou in June 2011 at the Jardins de Samarcanda (Cafè Central / Eumo Editorial) in Barcelona, this work is likewise described by the poet, translator, and editor Antoni Clapés as an “exceptional, troubling and lumi- nous text.”Tristan Malavoy-Racine from Voir newspaper in Montreal adds that it involves“less a folding back onto the self and its pain than a universal testament to what makes us prize life and friendship.”Those who have lost a loved one to cancer or another terminal illness, watch- ing as death moved into a hospital room, may find here a kindred voice, and, perhaps, a touch of solace.
Alisa Belanger
You might say a toy, a spinning top, its tip, usually meant to keep it in balance, replaced perhaps by a saucer. A metallic cone, standing on a saucer, that turns, wobbles, but doesn’t fall. Stare at the toy, though, it transforms more and more. The more you stare at the toy, however, the more it transforms. Now the cone has a few feathers, then some others, and soon a full ivory plumage that shivers, hence a body, and a head, and a beak, and a strange bright red, quite unusual, on its head and its beak, which opens and closes without a quack. Yet the metamorphosis ends there.The duck will remain without wings, never will fly, condemned to spin like a top until the end of its days.
The shifting of the shadow
With innocence, death, perfect in all points.You will not have seen it coming; it will have furrowed fast in the deepest recess of your bones. Despite the thick shadow projected on the ochre wall by the cords and blades of the Venetian blinds, the day’s softness continues to filter in, through the slits, as if nothing had happened. The softness passes, it is enough for you, and you stare at it to hold onto it better, it’s become a habit, your gaze inclined towards the softness, like the gaze of a Madonna, your stubborn eye – lid, iris and pupil perfectly drawn – adapted with time to the architecture of the light. Your face scored by the blades of the blinds, you want to believe that you’re sheltered from the haze. Oh!
the real is there, bottomless, without anything volatile about it, a magma of suffering filled with filth, muck, mire, and you wade in it, and you even wallow in it at times, like everyone else. At times, it’s too much for you, you dream of the storm that would rip everything out, and there you go! we start from scratch on a cleansed earth. Death exists, you know all about it, but you play with your hope like a knife. Incisive, at times, your fervor. Death exists, but the future interests you, you’re clinging to it, your gaze seized by unyielding images, you see yourself already welded to the rustle of its intonations and, greedy, hope for a large portion of eternity, a solid century, so as to cling to that tomorrow,
inexhaustible. Time before you, you demand it, because you need to foresee everything, because there never will be enough time for this abundance of gestures and phrases that come to you from who knows where, that you keep count of day after day in order to forestall their desertion. Forms of life or refuges, it matters little. These gestures and these phrases make up your daily fresco, even incorrigible, you stick to them. “Our vibrant humanity,” that’s what you say again and again to whomever wants to listen, as though, single-handedly, you needed to carry it at the end of your outstretched arms. Each morning, neither tears nor cries, only your hand stuck in the air, resistance or a call for negotiation. At stake: our undeniable humanity. At times