Emerald Wounds: Selected Poems

Joyce Mansour was raised in Cairo, and moved to Paris in 1953, at the age of 20, having switched from writing in English to French before the move. She was championed by André Breton, and her work was enthusiastically received by other Surrealists, though her books are mostly out of print, even in France. The new volume in English, Emerald Wounds: Selected Poems of Joyce Mansour, is a labor of love: Emilie Moorhouse translated poems she and Garret Caples collected from 10 volumes of Mansour’s work; some of the original books were certainly difficult to track down.

An evident feature of Mansour’s style is the contrast between the almost-bare structure of her lines and the macabre images contained within them:

I stole the yellow bird
That lives in the devil’s sex
He will teach me how to seduce
Men, stags, double-winged angels,
He will remove my thirst, my clothes, my illusions,

The lucidity of her poetic syntax is deceptive; the poems read as if they might lend themselves to translation quite easily, which is to say, a faithful translation seems within reach. All credit to Moorhouse whose English version mirrors the French so perfectly that I wish she’d taken a few liberties. Mansour’s poems can often be imagined as phenomena narrated by an unfazed reporter—no matter how odd the incident, the structure of the lines signals a kind of mysterious detachment:

I see
The hillside in bloom that is your belly
On the pillow
Of the beach
Winter
When it’s raining
The vast belly button
Sucks sobs
And bleeds

The repeated use of this technique works in French, whereas it produces a tonal monotony in English. While a translator’s infidelity is often thought of as a breach, fidelity rarely guarantees direct access to the source text, or a compelling poem in translation. In some cases, as in Mansour’s, the promiscuous, subversive spirit of a book seems to demand betrayal: “May my breasts provoke you / I want your rage / I want to see your eyes thicken / Your cheeks turn white as they sink.”