(by Marie \u00c9tienne, translated by Marilyn Hacker) <\/p>\n
I found this book challenging\/opaque, but I appreciated the opportunity to try to read the poems in the original French before I looked at Marilyn Hacker’s translations on the facing pages. I bought this on a whim at Dog-Eared Books in San Francisco circa 2012, knowing nothing about it, and somehow hadn’t read it until now (this is a problem I have: buying books but then reading library books instead of the books I’ve bought). Anyway: in her introduction Hacker notes that \u00c9tienne was born in France and lived in Vietnam as a child, when it was part of French Indochina; some of the poems are set there while others are set elsewhere (there are French coastlines, there are desert sands). The text quotes\/alludes to various other texts and writers, though I think the only one I caught without the help of the notes at the end was the slightly modified TS Eliot quote from “Little Gidding” that appears early in this book. I liked certain phrases a lot, like this: “M\u00e9moire lacunaire ou m\u00e9moire absolue, je voyage \u00e0 l’envers pour retrouver la mer.” Or this, from Hacker’s translation: “Little right-angled streets. Behind closed shutters, the shadows of a party.” I also liked the parts of the text that are about writing, that are, as Hacker puts it in her preface, “a philosophical reflection on the direction taken by written texts as they develop.” Such as: “The outside appears but chronology, logic, are lacking.” Or: “To write only notes, comings and goings of the eye, of memory.” Or: “Writing is ridiculous. Whoever writes keeps accounts, of the market, of the month. But not of a life.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
(by Marie \u00c9tienne, translated by Marilyn Hacker) I found this book challenging\/opaque, but I appreciated the opportunity to try to read the poems in the original French before I looked at Marilyn Hacker’s translations on the facing pages. I bought this on a whim at Dog-Eared Books in San Francisco circa 2012, knowing nothing about […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14014","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-poetry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14014","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14014"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14014\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14027,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14014\/revisions\/14027"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14014"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14014"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14014"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}