World Poetry Portfolio, edited by Sudeep Sen in association with ATLAS Magazine
Poet, novelist and essayist, twice Governor General winner for her poetry, Nicole Brossard (b. Montréal, 1943) has published more than thirty books since 1965. Many among those books have been translated into English: Mauve Desert, The Aerial Letter, Picture Theory, Lovhers, Baroque at Dawn, The Blue Books, Installations, Museum of Bone and Water, Yesterday at the Hotel Clarendon and Notebook of roses and civilization (trans. by Erin Moure and Robert Majzels, Shortlisted for the Griffin international poetry prize 2008).
She has cofounded and codirected the avant-garde literary magazine La Barre du Jour (1965-1975), has codirected the film Some American Feminists (1976) and coedited the well acclaimed Anthologie de la poésie des femmes au Québec, first published in 1991 then in 2003. She has also won le Grand Prix de Poésie du Festival international de Trois-Rivières in 1989 and in 1999. In 1991, she was attributed le Prix Athanase-David (the highest literary recognition in Québec). She is a member of l’Académie des lettres du Québec. She won the W.O. Mitchell 2003 Prize and the Canadian Council of Arts Molson Prize in 2006. Her work has influenced a whole generation and has been translated widely into English and Spanish and is also available in German, Italian, Japanese, Slovenian, Romanian, Catalan and others languages. In 2010, she was made an Officer of the Order of Canada.
Her most recent books in English are Fences in Breathing (novel) and Selections : the poetry of Nicole Brossard, University of California Press, Collection: Poets for the Millennium, 2009 and White Piano (translated by Erin Moure and Robert Majzels) 2013. She just received le Prix international de literature francophone Benjamin Fondane 2013. Nicole Brossard writes and lives in Montréal.
From Installations ([Installations])
Installation
every morning I take an interest in life
huge detours and proofs
the tail ends of century at the heart of language
icons, silks, often manuscripts
the odd-numbered body of women
great quakes
visible from afar
I settle into my body’s installation
so as to be able to respond
when a woman gives me a sign
Contemporary
where it hurts in life
by successive strokes
it’s not death
but mobility of light
our gift for aggravating beauty
Shadow
a beautiful subjectivity that doesn’t broach
lucidity
all bodies pronounce shadow
avid for images
and those days we inhabit the same universe
impregnable passions still exist
that leave us dreaming my life
at arm’s length
Translated by Robert Majzels and Erin Mouré
*
From Downstage Vertigo ([Vertige de l’avant-scène])
commotion of metaphors
touch of fiction
if it’s a book it’s a space to last
relay of sense at the tip of our cinders
feverish touch of presence
*
many words take hold of our lives
despite us
the present keeps us in balance
with caresses on the edge of the future
we live our best moments
the strange way the night vanishes so gently
in a mirror
no image to hold onto it
*
there where eternity makes me similar
I place a bit of reality
around the words tears and knees
always an adverb
an imperfect view of tomorrow
the century five o’clock that comes round
syllables flavor of olive and aperitif
life renewed self-portrait
*
the future would be poem would be
eyes of silence and airport
eyes alert to vast and velocity
July would make us fertile
with forgotten laws grazing our cheeks
and flurry of subjects
all these lives useful to life
Translated by Robert Majzels and Erin Mouré
*
From Shadow Soft et Soif
hold on in silence
at dawn the verb to be courses
in the veins, a heavenly body, it flies
as after love or grain of salt
on the tongue early morning, taste of immensity
it draws near
the first dampness
come kiss me
think of the great power of water
that makes a place of us
and if torment if what quickens
your nights of reading and irreality
si la poussière vivre sur tes doigts
lean back on shadow
in a place with blue and emptiness
there will surely be water in your eyes
modernity and fear in your clothes
translated by Guy Bennett
*
from Notebook of Roses and civilization ([Cahiers de roses et de civilization])
whatever the month or wound
the soft color of afternoons
you plunge into
la lingua la lingua and its salty
*
the color of tears at the bottom
of a ravine
heat of summer on the earlobe
it all feeds the senses:
madonnas that stoke the fever
an old translation of Virgil
*
in a time blue and easy
when the light is slow
and ties urgent knots
whith shadow and catastrophe
uou say we need rain
rain and even more night
than the abyss can rein in
or the silence of people of terness
*
Soft Link 2
But there’s outside, the cold the heat the violence doubled over in pain in a real bind at the edge of city and forest, there’s outside and it’s worse each time as there’s traffic of weapons, traders of women and children, white-shirted men who manipulate our genes and cells like so much merchandise. And it seems to me we have to be in the world often and in a flash traverse all the to-and-fro of desire, go from there to long ago or tomorrow like a chamois on a windshield swiping across the back of the universe. But there’s outside and you might say as a result the world’s hard to take despite the December luminosity of tropical breezes. Inside, words let us invent, weave cords strong enough to hang by our wrists and help balance the body. Outside there’s outside with horizons, shortcuts, strange fears reborn in the body and its desire to take flight, but there’s outside like hunting with prey, pellets, kingdoms, identities hidden under clothes; there are cemeteries, discos, security zones, war measures. Outside if we touch the living face of things, the beautiful face all spun with life easily unfurls its roses, its luminous whites that traverse children’s voices, their laughing arms. But there’s outside where the living face of suffering never shows. So you fall asleep on the name of public things, forgetting the darkness that runs easily through life, the blur in the eyes that gathers bones north of the forehead like fruits, toys, words with their angled knees and elbows and the tree nuts that parade in answer or that smash and transform shadow words those that race the pulse and modulate again and again the tremors of beasts and shivers. But there’s outside there’s the duration of wandering. Outside there’s the knowing dawn.
Translated by Robert Majzels and Erin Mouré
*
The Indocile Back of Words
long-time lilac lips
liquor of light and literature
or little lizard of the Lido (n. long sandbar at the mouth of a
bay that shelters a lagoon)
louvered in my lion-lexicon of questions
long-time on lesbian lips
let loose from tears under lapis-lazuli light
I long to lick sweet lobe and loukoum
long-time I leaned into this reading
of lyric lagoon and language long ago
Translated by Robert Majzels and Erin Mouré
*
today I know that the deepest blue structure of the
sea comes close to our cells and untouchable
suffering as life circles around our childhood
three times without ever really touching it
because we are close to reality and matter cannot
fall without warning us, leaving us there, skin
hesitating between philosophies and the dawn,
halfway, forever in torment, in the vast
complication of beauty
translated by Lise Weil
*
once reproduced in language
our reciprocal wounds form
works huge as a yes
as in certain paintings
where the mouths are loops
of memory shaped by sorrow
perfect light
of morning that penetrates
larghetto in the voice
Translated by Robert Majzels and Erin Mouré
*
From Museum of bone and water ([Musée de l’os et de l’eau])
water returns smell of glacier at my wrist
my museum life files past
hear here chest there a harrowing work
in the distance Madrid shines beneath etching of Goya
at the bottom of a page a detail of the Cannibals kills me
in the no-noire of knowledge
water all water I want it glacial
morning or noon in the city I write
my head resting on humankind
and others too in repetition
on the line of the horizon as on the screen
we tear the alphabet from dawn’s arms
hands, heart and muscles in the rain
detached from reality by brilliant procedures
Translated by Robert Majzels and Erin Mouré
*
from White Piano ([Piano blanc])
The inside of Someone
I say the inside of someone not knowing
out of what muscle bone or ligament
if it’s a line of horizon in the brain
or knots of night in the throat
not knowing if it’s tender
or vast word with a name
*
Piano Topology
Every language when we breathe it is
brief as we say my mother to the depths
of return
in each language our violence is intact
we inhale it with its collisions
its t/errors and small print
then in 3steps in a Neues museum
stroke of the bow
an image deflects our attention
in reality reading helps us vanish
the everyday self from words reborn
there where once we left as dust
anonymous in the mystery of breaths
or in a book line skipped typo erased
no language rests in the universal
sooner or later between our lips all languages
all tongues sift darkness
…
Translated by Robert Majzels and Erin Mouré
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