Poetry, Translation and Correspondence: A Conversation with Claire Malroux and Marilyn Hacker

Claire Malroux is one of France’s preeminent living poets. Known for blurring the boundaries between past and present and, as she put it to me, between small-h history and big-H History, her work also blurs the line between Francophone and Anglophone influence. Malroux’s 1983 discovery and translation of Emily Dickinson’s work was a turning point in her artistic life. As her translator, the American poet Marilyn Hacker, writes in the introduction to Malroux’s recently released Daybreak: New and Selected Poems (NYRB), Dickinson’s poetry was, for Malroux, both “an encounter with the uncanny’ and ‘the awakening of a personal affinity’.” Like Dickinson, Malroux tends toward fragmented narratives and vivid imagery; often, her poems sound at once melancholy and breathless, as echoes might.

The sound of Malroux’s poetry in English is, of course, Hacker’s work. As a poet, Hacker is renowned for her formal expertise and her capacity to mix and match tones, styles, and references. These are crucial skills in translation, an art that requires its practitioners to take on the aesthetics and interests of the writers they translate. Hacker and Malroux, who have collaborated for decades, are perhaps aided by having complementary preoccupations. Hacker is famously a feminist poet, and while Malroux is less given to overtly centering gender in her work, Hacker notes in her introduction that Malroux’s ability to “quietly [inscribe] both the quotidian details and imaginative/intellectual pursuits of a woman’s life and a woman’s mind into the corpus of French poetry” is itself a major feminist intervention. Hacker is known, too, for her ability to at once use and subvert traditional language—an element of poetic craft that dovetails with Malroux’s abiding interest in adapting and updating Dickinson’s 19^th-century English to suit her own contemporary French work.

Reading Daybreak, which, like all of Hacker’s previous translations of Malroux’s work, is printed bilingually, I was struck by the near-exact correspondence between the originals and the translations: Hacker hews much more closely to Malroux’s writing than many other translators might, yet never produces a stilted or unnatural-sounding line. As a translator, I recognize the difficulty of achieving such correspondence, and know the dedication it requires. In Daybreak, Hacker offers readers a striking, panoramic view of Malroux’s body of work. The collection moves from the speaker’s “childhood’s house” to her old age, while juxtaposing poems about desire and grief, past comfort and future crisis, familial love and the terror of war. Throughout, Malroux meditates on “the infinite geography of memory.”

Over email, I asked Hacker and Malroux how their poet-translator relationship has impacted their individual poetic practices. We discussed the challenges of translation, the techniques involved in writing and translating the poems included in Daybreak, and the collection’s bridging of sorrow and hope. Our conversation, which has been lightly edited for length and clarity, is below.

 

How has translation affected each of your poetry-writing practices? Claire, would you say your poetry is influenced by the English language, and if so, how? And Marilyn, would you say yours has been influenced by French, and, again, if so, how?

Claire Malroux: I have always lived in the company of languages. In my childhood, the language I heard was the “patois,” the Occitan language spoken in South West France. Later, in secondary school I studied Greek, Latin, and English. Much later, I got familiar with the American language. I don’t think I am influenced by the English language as such, but rather by the unconventional poets and novelists I translated. Emily Dickinson created a language which is her own, Wallace Stevens evolved from classical writing to a totally inventive way of developing playful or meditative lines, and Derek Walcott mixed English, American and Caribbean Languages. I must say, though, that Dickinson was a true revelation for me, and that, yes, there is a definite imprint of her style in many poems of mine. The affinities I felt and feel with her go far beyond language.

Marilyn Hacker: I’ve written several poems about working with Claire and about translation. In a sequence called “Paragraphs from a Day-book,” in my book Squares and Courtyards, there is one poem about receiving the manuscript of Soleil de jadis from Claire over lunch one February day. There’s another one about puzzling over how to translate a particular word, “dessous de plat,” which means a hot-plate, but here refers to a special object, in carved wood, with a faience tile, and a music-box inside—then finding and buying one myself at a street fair in Burgundy, and Claire’s childhood memory-scene coming back to me. In Desesperanto, there’s a poem in part about long lunches Claire and I had in cafés, discussing over coffee either my translations of her (or other poets’) poems, or hers in progress of Dickinson, of Derek Walcott, of mine. In Names, there’s a somewhat surreal poem in decasyllabic dizains, in part “inspired” by poems by Marie Etienne I’ve translated. I don’t know if my work is “influenced” by French poetry, though I read a lot of it. I have often found myself writing in response to it.

How did your collaboration begin? When working together on translating a particular poem, what is your process? And how do you decide when a translation is complete?

Hacker: Claire and I met at a conference of French and American poets in Grenoble in 1989. Many of the poets (like Denise Levertov, and Jacques Darras) had work already translated, and since many of the American poets were monoglot, translation was important. Since I had been speaking French, and even translating a bit for some of the participants, during the panels, Claire asked me if I’d attempt a translation of a poem of hers, “Last Truths,” that she wanted to read. I had never translated any poem! I made an attempt, in my hotel room, well before computers. Back in Paris, I continued to work on the poem, with proper dictionaries, and finally had a decent version to give to Claire—and an excuse to continue our new friendship, and this adventure.

It’s odd that, although we are both bilingual, and both poets who translate, we’ve never worked together on a translation. I do a draft of a translation, or two—asking Claire if there are specific questions about a usage or ambiguity where a dictionary and thesaurus can’t help. Sometimes these questions led to a long discussion over lunch or tea; and so did the first drafts. Claire translated some poems of mine, and we worked in much the same way. When Claire is satisfied, I usually think the translation is done, though I might think of some improvements (to my eye) myself. This is a fortunate situation—I’m more on my own with a poet who isn’t fluent in English.

“Beauty comes from Spain” contains a moment that made me think very much of my own translation practice: “Beauty speaks another language / so she has no conversation with the one / who accompanies her across the town square.” Is this poem, in certain ways, about translation? Marilyn, can you describe the particular challenges of accompanying Claire’s poetry, so to speak, across the square from French to English?

Malroux: I did not really have translation in mind in “Beauty comes from Spain,” but in a way, the poem implies the same shattering feeling that comes when one is overwhelmed by the presence of an object of love or admiration and cannot speak. Poetry strives to produce that same effect, but it doesn’t happen often.

Hacker: The undercurrents are a challenge. Claire has a fine classical education, which I lack, and a knowledge of Latin and Greek underpinnings of the French language, as well as of that poetry in its original languages, that I only know in translation. But there’s also all of French literature—of which I’m happily not ignorant, but it isn’t in my imaginative bloodstream the way it is in Claire’s, or the way English and American poetry are in mine. There might be an echo of Racine, Valéry, Max Jacob or Mallarmé, that I miss, or a reference to Pascal, Montaigne, or Proust (I’m all right on Montaigne and Proust). It isn’t something Claire usually spells out. There is a constant interplay in Claire’s work of lived experience and literary echo, like a shadow on the wall, something swiftly glimpsed in a mirror, and it’s a challenge, one that has enlarged my own poetic practice, I hope.

I do not speak French, but, because I speak Spanish, can read it somewhat—enough, at least, to notice that these translations often correspond quite closely to the originals. I can tell, for instance, that often a given line contains the same words in English or French, even if their order is slightly changed or a few prepositions have been swapped or lost. Is that type of correspondence a priority for the two of you, or does it come naturally? And, Marilyn, when you do move a word from one line to another (for instance, in “The child prepares herself to cross the bridge,” “les chauves-souris / amorcent leur vol zigzagant” becomes “bats begin/ their zigzagging flight”), what goes into that decision?

Hacker: I don’t think there is any reason to go in search of vocabulary far removed from the original when there are cognate words in English—always being scrupulous in avoiding “false friends,” words that sound as if they might be similar in meaning, but aren’t. But I also think that a natural English word order is to be preserved, if there is nothing intentionally strange about the French syntax.

Malroux: I share Marilyn’s opinion to some extent, provided that the order does not go against the musical effect I try to imprint on my narrative. At times, the strategy of correspondence works like a bridge. We let some words blur, or lose a little of their significance, in order to ensure an enhanced quality, like the wordlessness of music.

Daybreak is a strikingly visual collection, and one in which, as Marilyn writes in the introduction, “the ‘I’… is more often an ‘eye.’” Claire, how do you achieve that observer’s detachment? Do you ever find yourself struggling against a more personal “consciousness / of appearances,” to borrow a phrase from “Stretched out on a bench?”

Malroux: Observation plays a great part in my work. I suffer a certain kind of split personality. I am not entirely in what I do or feel. A part of me watches the other part, in the same way a spectator of a movie feels that he is himself, sitting perfectly still in a dark room, but at the same time he is moving and acting on the screen, like in Woody Allen’s film Stardust Memories.

I was very moved by the immediacy of “What do we know about the somber hours,” which, to me, beautifully evoked the grief-filled memory of the Holocaust without lingering within it. How did you go about building that immediacy, Claire, and do you see a new necessity for it as World War II gets farther away? And Marilyn, how do you translate a poem rooted in French history for a non-French audience?

Hacker: Oh, I think that’s one of the aspects that is most approachable and interesting to a non-French audience! But it’s not only World War II and its aftermath, but an interest in narration—and, yes, in history—increasingly present on the part of poetry readers in English.

Malroux: I am proud that you’d compare my modest evocation of a limited scene in a French provincial town to the vastness of the Holocaust, which extended an unlimited shadow on the whole of Europe, and even in other continents. A family history may reach a climax just like big-H history, if it is told with discretion and sincerity. This story is only eighty years old, and is still very present in the collective memory. It won’t last forever—it will soon be just a trace—but it will never entirely disappear.

Claire, I’d love to hear about your transition from no titles—a choice I’m guessing came in part from your relationship with Emily Dickinson’s work? —to titles. What caused the shift, and what advantages have you found in each strategy?

Malroux: I practically never think of a title when I write a poem, because a poem is not an isolated thing. It is part of a series, a kind of tapestry that you’ll have to weave day after day, like Penelope, until the end—or the great Return to the beginning.

I felt a certain grief while reading several of the poems in Daybreak, perhaps most notably “The Shadow at Cabourg,” with its descriptions of “lost pine trees” and “a blacker and blacker sky,” and “A Ballad for a Queen and a Nun,” which ends by lamenting our species’ capacity for “violence, uprooting, abduction.” Am I right to sense sorrow for our species here?

Malroux: Yes, the tonality of the poems in Daybreak is rather sad, or, I’d say, melancholic. The poems from Soleil de jadis, which Marilyn translated as A Long-Gone Sun, are perfect examples. Even if war succeeds the happiness of childhood, I hope and am sure that there will be happiness again, since life always renews itself. We are all part of an endless history—as long as there are living creatures, that is.

“Prehistoric” characterizes memory as a “battlefield nurse [who] can barely / Triage the rarest ones.” Is poetry ever a form of memory-triage for either of you?

Hacker: “Triage” implies a conscious choice being made—but if it’s the poet’s unconscious making the choices, indeed, yes. Claire is not fond of “fixed forms,” and in fact very few contemporary French poets are (Jacques Roubaud, Guy Goffette, Marie Etienne, and in a way, Valérie Rouzeau). In English, I am—and one perhaps paradoxical-sounding reason is that the self-imposed necessity of writing in a meter, with only a limited amount of deviation possible, or seeking a rhyme or near-rhyme, often brings the unconscious into play: the memory one wasn’t aware was lurking, the odd fact, dream-image or association. 

Malroux: I am happy to see that you end this interview by quoting a poem first printed in Suspens, which I published in 2001. It seems to me interesting to speculate on memory on the threshold of the third millennium. Rather than answer in prose, though, I prefer to leave the last word to poetry. I shall quote a large extract of the poem “Préhistoire,” also from Suspens [ed. note: in French—read the translation by Marilyn Hacker here]:

Un moutonnement venu d'un point infini
Roches grottes stridences d'argiles sous l'orage
Amalgames de goémons et de mousses brunâtres
Chaque marée pousse ses antennes de chair
Le poulpe persévérant se déploie, les crêtes
S'effondrent, tout cède au sable qui boit
En silence la sueur rouge acide et froide
Les enfants lancés à l'assaut sur la vague
Comment tourneraient-ils la tête
Vers ceux qui les ont portés jusque-là
Pour les porter à leur tour au-delà
Parmi la foule ils sont passés en riant
Ou pleurant sans laisser de mot de passe
Ils sont passés il court et court le furet
À peine si la mémoire ambulancière
Identifie les plus singuliers
Dont la chaleur remue en haut du cratère
Pourtant ils donnent à notre trajectoire
Sa rêveuse épaisseur : la chaîne entière
S'enroule dans la moindre de nos cellules
Et le temps d'une vie le temps s'annule