Daybreak

Description

A bilingual collection of poetry, from elegies to poem memoirs, by a revered French master. For over four decades Claire Malroux has forged a unique path in contemporary French poetry, informed by the French tradition, poets such as Yves Bonnefoy and Mallarme, and more unusually, by the Anglophone tradition, especially Emily Dickinson, Elizabeth Bishop, and Derek Walcott. A preeminent translator of English poetry into French, Malroux claims as a signal event in her literary life her discovery in 1983 of Dickinson's poetry, which she describes as "an encounter with the uncanny" and the awakening of a "personal affinity." Malroux is one of those rare poets whose work is informed by day-to-day intimacy with a second language in its greatest variations and subtleties. Her poems move between an intense but philosophical and abstract interiority and an acute engagement with the material world. In almost every poem there is a characteristic and unsettling amalgam of past and present that collapses distance and incarnates through metaphor. This bilingual selection by the award-winning poet and translator Marilyn Hacker presents Malroux's oeuvre from her early lyric poems, to an excerpt from A Long-Gone Sun--a poem-memoir of life in southern France before and during World War II--to new and uncollected poems from two sequences of elegies written after the death of her life partner, the writer Pierre Sylvain.

Claire Malroux was born in Albi, France, in 1935. She is the author of a dozen collections of poems, including Ni si lointain (2004) and La Femme sans paroles (2006); and also two hybrids, Chambre avec vue sur l'eternite (2005), which traces the encounter of two poets - Emily Dickinson and Claire Malroux; and Traces, sillons (2009), takes the form of a journal of the poet's process. She is a notable translator of Anglophone poets, notably Henri Cole, Derek Walcott, Wallace Stevens, and, in particular, Emily Dickinson. Three books are available in bilingual editions with Marilyn Hacker's translation- Edge (1996), A Long-Gone Sun, and Birds and Bison. Marilyn Hacker is the author of fourteen books of poems, including Blazons (2019), A Stranger's Mirror (2015) and Names (2010), and an essay collection, Unauthorized Voices (2010). Her seventeen translations of other French and Francophone poets include Venus Khoury-Ghata's A Handful of Blue Earth (2017) and Rachida Madani's Tales of a Severed Head (2012). She lives in Paris.

"Here's one of the finest poets now writing in France in the magnificent new translation of Marilyn Hacker. Claire Malroux is a name every devoted reader of poetry will want to know. She reminds us that lyric poetry can speak of our lives in the way that nothing else can." -Charles Simic "The personal and universal cataclysms in Claire Malroux's poetry-a maelstrom of love, torment and sweetness-are viewed as though through the calm lens of a dream. All is surging, hushed, violently human. Marilyn Hacker's gifted translation captures the tone flawlessly." -John Ashbery "Here is the journey of a soul toward its truth. A refusal of despair, a clash with an absence, a trembling before the multiple: these are Claire Malroux's greatnesses. 'You must persevere,' she says to us, for beyond the disorder and conflict, at the threshold of language, is the meaning of our existence. 'You must persevere.'" -Henri Cole "Like Dickinson, Malroux tends toward fragmented narratives and vivid imagery; often, her poems sound at once melancholy and breathless, as echoes might.... In Daybreak, Hacker offers readers a striking, panoramic view of Malroux's body of work." - Lily Meyer, Poetry Foundation