Love Is Colder than the Lake

Love Is Colder Than the Lake, the second poetry collection by Liliane Giraudon to be translated from French into English, is a masterful feat of co-translation by Sarah Riggs and Lindsay Turner that highlights the manifold complexities and musicality of Giraudon’s allusive verse. Giraudon’s corpus, as distilled in this collection, is permeable and fungible, deploying a cast of historical characters (Antigone, Brecht, Mallarmé, Marx, Vivian Maier, Lorine Niedecker, Cy Twombly, Faust, Chantal Akerman, Marquis de Sade) to stage a critique and defilement of literariness:

tell you       To read changes everything       We are talking Reality       We are your
       Contemporaries               To read is to live                    It’s a war machine                A
porn star          You are the subject in question           A bird in the hand is worth two
in the bush   Open our books   Sleep in your clothes   Make love standing up   Dig
your graves                     The sun has risen                      The moon stopped in its place

Juxtaposing aphorism and litany with memories, slurs, imperatives, and directives (“Get the hell out,” “find the pure event / of the image,” “she always preferred the margins”), Love Is Colder Than the Lake marshals the Romantics’ pathos (“Reclaiming for the unisex / A simple dahlia”) and the symbolists’ injunction to derange the senses as a means of accessing truth, and adds an incantatory, feminist fury, informed by taboo and dream:

I also dreamed

Whatever Love is its own Allegory                                    Cruelty of evil which is never
banal...                                                                   Cantos or instructions for powdered soup           
                                     The books are cold at heart                  

The titular theme of love and coldness, and the positionality of the writer versus the reader resound in the book’s third section of lyrical prose, “Once and for Not All”:

The lake is contemporary theater that remains forever to be written, which is to say, undone—

And later:

The demarcating line between prose and poetry is continually moving. Something deep and determined in the use of a cold technique […] what is important to me is combination. Thoreau was right. Experience is in the hands and in the head.

Giraudon’s is a metapoetic ecriture told slant, showing the seams of the literary tradition to be a “micrological exploration” and a “film upon another film.” “Not an author,” the author insists. “Not a poet. Rather, an acolyte […] Suppliant.” Giraudon’s lyric supplications delight, and, in their indictment of “the logic of transparency,” offer a theatrical testament to making, and art.