WORLD POETRY REVIEW

Translated from French by Heather Green

[from] I snow

Banished

villon’s voices

line

in-

terru 		pted

the lichen

of banishment, smmmmotherrrs mme

The white eddy of exile carried me 

from island to island.

Banished–and so 

dirt clod in mouth. No sound.

Paris was the shore!

But

                                 Never from Abysinnia

not from another rrrooted life 

To remain flanked by white gaps

I only want to leave in language

always to wrest myself away

anew

to the stones of the city

To run myself aground again and go.


i

am in the words,

Not in the sentences

Snowflake

Wind


Lips, still torture 

And the breath that binds them

wavers 

The wind that sweeps me

between the words

beneath my lips

Condemned

to stay 

TEN YEARS!

in these iffy backwaters / of facts and villages / of cultivated nature 

of which

i don’t want to sing

Pastoral death and then

Silent

                                                                                                          Without Africa

---

I walk

                                                                                                    through the snow

into all the anguish

&

I glimpse the streets of the city without snowdrifts

My life without a countryside

near the Place

                             de Grève 



the cat walks there without a curfew

steps muffled, and I smile without gallows, 

cross over, ignoring the Châtelet, 

and follow the tracks of the cat


from the side I can see a place

where it snows less

On one or two meters, 				                    the pavement cleared,

protected by something I can't see,

&

a yellow trace on the fine dusting,

I cross,

stunned by the wind,

My present chapped

I think about my feet, still warm from the wine,

which melt the cold a little

Muffled crunch


                           This is not the snow in books 

---

Between the words of Villon


To speak the words absent from Villon’s poetry, to speak from the interstices between his words.  

To sink into the gap 

To make heard that which remains when we set the poems down. The movement that undulates below the words, or just before the words. This impulse to write that was his own 

To recapture the undulation between the poet's life and his work, that which falls silent between the facts recorded in the numerous biographies and the ballads of the Lais and the Testament. To speak the becoming poem. A striped, white space. A line of energy between the person of Villon and his written work. Don’t re-tell the ballads badly; put down the biographies and the archives. Converse with all that passed through Villon to become his work. Speak his alluvium, that which hasn’t settled in his poems.

Alluvium, not sediment, that’s it, the material!

So, it is the absence of roots, the constant movement, the exile, the absence of land and of nature, if it's not the snow and wind, the revolt and the love—in the game which appears to be the impulse to write—which have drawn a line between his body and his work. A line that becomes voice. A voice that takes. Body. A moving body, in movement

---

Laure Gauthier is the author of a recent novel, Mélusine reloaded (José Corti, 2024), and several essays and books of poetry, including kaspar de pierre (La lettre volée, 2017), je neige (entre les mots de Villon) (LansKine 2019), and les corps caverneux (LansKine 2022). Her texts have been published in English, German, Spanish, Italian and Turkish. She is a lecturer at the University of Reims contemporary performing arts program. Each of her published texts becomes an open site calling for rewritings, multimedia installations, and musical compositions that further illuminate it. 

Heather Green is the author of No Other Rome (Akron Poetry Series, 2021) and the translator of Tristan Tzara’s Noontimes Won (Octopus Books, 2018), Guide to the Heart Rail (Goodmorning Menagerie, 2017), and Speaking Alone (forthcoming). She teaches in the School of Art at George Mason University.

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