At Three Percent, Why Stéphane Bouquet's The Next Loves  Should Win a Best Translated Book Award

The Best Translated Book Awards founder Three Percent is publishing arguments in favor of each book shortlisted for the 2020 awards, announced yesterday at The Millions. One "Why This Book Should Win" that stands out is judge Laura Marris on The Next Loves by Stéphane Bouquet, translated by poet Lindsay Turner (Nightboat). An excerpt from Marris's take:

…Bouquet’s formal innovations capture the way these poems hold their breath from one moment to the next, like someone driving past a graveyard on a sunny day. The lines dramatize the leap between the silences, the gaps, and their reclamation, “because we must steal constantly/ from absence.”

There’s an honesty to this admission—that this poet is not speaking just to cover an absence but writing into it, to discover its origins, to try to get closer. As a translator of Robert Creeley, James Schuyler, and Peter Gizzi into French, Bouquet is hyperaware of how physical experience might be translated into the poem, and how intimacy might be not only communicated but also created through this work. In “The Covers,” a dazzling lyric essay, the speaker has just slept with a man who has Ovid’s Metamorphoses in his library. “To what degree and under what conditions,” he asks, “can the verb to speak be substituted for the verb to touch?” This transformation is one of precarious hope and loneliness, and the text that carries it deserves to be read in all its rhapsodic and difficult tenderness.

The fact that Turner’s translation communicates all the fierce intricacy of this voice into English is a gift that brings the book full circle, back into dialogue with the poets its author has been translating. It is fitting that a book about connection, intimacy, and closeness has traveled and transgressed the boundaries of its original language.…

The full list also includes Time, by Etel Adnan, translated from the French by Sarah Riggs; Camouflage by Lupe Gómez, translated from the Galician by Erín Moure; and three more. The winners will receive $10,000, split evenly between the winning authors and translators. Awards are announced on May 27. For now, read more about Bouquet's poems at Three Percent.