Day Has No Equal But Night: Bilingual Edition
"There is a persistent grandeur in Anne Hébert's writing that is startling in our time and in the current literary context in English. Both the tradition and iconoclasm in the work of this French poet of North America invite us to listen to something beyond our own conventions."—W.S. Merwin
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\ Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly\ Though the Quebecois Anne Hebert is a distinguished contemporary novelist and poet in French, her work is little-known and hard to get hold of in the U.S. Poulin's substantial selection of her writing, translated with facing original, is thus a real boon to American readers. The selection includes work from Hebert's two major collections of poems, The Tomb of Kings (1952) and Miracle of the Word (1960), as well as previously uncollected poems and a curious concluding essay by Poulin about the problems he himself has had as a Quebecois-American. The poetry from The Tomb of Kings , written mostly in short lines, is at once austere, riddling and grand. These are poems of painful solitude aspiring to a condition of ``original silence and poverty,'' and the insistent difficulties they present to a reader demonstrate their commitment to poetry as an ordeal of purification: ``anything easy is a snare.'' By contrast, the work from Miracle of the Word , composed mostly in short prose paragraphs, is expansive--rich in vocabulary, ecstatic and imperative in tone--and reminiscent of Rimbaud and Char. Hebert's writing, like most modern French poetry, is rhetorical in a way that contemporary English and American poetry tend not to be: that can make translation difficult. But we can only be grateful to Poulin for making Hebert available in the original, as well as in his serviceable translation. (Apr.)\ \ \ \ \ Library JournalHebert, a major figure in French Canadian literature, has produced a number of books of poetry as well as fiction. Poulin, translator of this collection and an American of French Canadian descent, has previously rendered Hebert's poetry into English in Selected Poems (BOA, 1987). Poetry is fragile; translators must find a way to bring the fluidity of the original into the translation. At this task Poulin fails much of the time. In an effort, perhaps, to be literal, he offers us clunky and cumbersome strings of words (``The poem hoisted to the top of the head'' replaces ``Le poeme au sommet de la tete hisse''), losing the melody of the original. Sometimes these translations miss the mark entirely. In a poem he translates as ``The Blank Page,'' ``Lisse neigeuse a perte de vue'' becomes ``Lithe woman swimming out of sight,'' although ``neigeuse'' refers to snow, not to swimming or water. Hebert is a wonderful poet who should be represented in most international poetry collections. She deserves a more careful, harmonious translation.-- Judy Clarence, California State Univ. Lib., Hayward\ \
