An earlier version of the French poem was published in Feuille in Sept. 2024. The current version is forthcoming in Apulée, May 2025.
Translated from the French by Teresa Villa-Ignacio
Requiem for Léna
(Léna Bernstein, one of the first solo woman aviators, was born in Leipzig in 1906 and died, exhausted and bankrupt, in Biskra on June 5, 1932,
2 bottles of champagne and 3 tubes
of poison at her side)
I’d described you in your death throes at dawn (cursed that June 1932 dawn)
looking to the south legs resting on the sand
your head lightly tipped back for
you drank your champagne from the bottle yes from the bottle
yes champagne that’s what you needed champagne
surely you would have preferred it colder but it was already
a miracle you were able to buy any
we’ll never know at what price nor
whether you’d bribed someone for it
a stone’s throw from that cemetery airfield
from your wild dreams airfield in this oasis in the Tellian
foothills become phantasm and sanatorium for
the pale faces from beyond the Mediterranean
we often reconstruct scenes like this one
Joan of Arc on her pyre (Falconnetti’s is the best, no contest...)
Marie Curie killed by her discoveries and all these women
we never talk about them without their ghosts being there
THE SILENT WOMEN WE NEVER TALK ABOUT
Léna dies while gazing upon the desert her biographers say
which desert? Biskra is not the desert it’s a manufactured decor
a postcard adding romance to tragedy
scenery decor tacked on a method
for applying varnish to embellish
a small-format, Pre-Raphaelite Delacroix painting
because Biskra is a rain-soaked piedmont formed by millennia of silt
that only needed human hands to green the landscape
if it’s not often green it’s because humans are fleeing wars
and wars all wars take place in the first instance
on coveted land Who would fight for worthless land
this is how these deserts are made
we reconstruct it’s still true we reconstruct
we invent we imagine and it’s always wrong
a man breaks away from his caravan
– did his dogs redirect his attention? –
because I can’t stand imagining you
describing you dying alone in your absolute
despair your surrender and solitude
I couldn’t imagine you dying alone for here
in these foothills or anywhere else besides
though far afield the forlorn recognize one another
reply to one another live to see one another
the foothills are sonorous luminous exhilarating
as exhilarating as the sky you loved always
the man leaning over her carries with him the scents
of his home he smells of soot wood cold and the sugary
scent of barley of his house with its rough walls of wool
and rope but he doesn’t smell like animals
no doubt because the women look after them
a few beasts parked a stone’s throw from the tent
a camel, two donkeys, and some goats
an overpopulated desert
she opens her eyes once more and sees the man’s goodwill
a light smile floating on his face his skin tanned and luminous
certainly healthy he’s wearing traditional nomad clothing
tailored for protection and ease of gestures he makes her think
of the Greek or Roman statues from which he surely descends
as surely as she herself descends from the Bernsteins of great Russia
see how miraculously as often in the desert
a living being emerges like a rebuttal of despair
Léna no longer has any desire she expects nothing
this man’s voice holds her She understands not a single
word he says She replies in her own language
sees his perplexity grow he doesn’t understand her any better
so they decide to speak with gestures Are you hungry
she shakes her head no He turns his flat hand around his stomach
and asks sick? sick No she replies what about Thirsty
yes yes she nods her head horribly thirsty
(this man and this woman were destined to meet
they met despite the improbabilities and incompatibilities
despite the skeptics, their paths crossed, they spoke to one another
thus paired assembled perfumed aromas emanated from them
motor oil rancid leather champagne dusty wool
the odor of old wet dog sour milk and hay theirs is the most improbable
of perfumes it’s all theirs no need for a fragrance master to conceive of it to distill it
osmosis takes place and suffices)
WHY THE BOTTLE OF
CHAMPAGNE
who would imagine bringing order to her ideas
in her life glimpsing a semblance of logic in
such a tumultuous existence find some
serenity in taking off with a bottle of champagne
in a knapsack You decide to do it You’ve done it
strange subterfuge to hope the taste of champagne would
mask the poison’s bitterness
neither records nor exploits beckoned you
no they didn’t interest you
you know speed and endurance parade of sorrows
you know they’re always surmountable and vain
No what caught you is the world space
the unattainable elsewheres beyond reach
the hardly imaginable the unrecountable
you wanted to set your sights on the immensity
leave and come back come back and leave indefinitely
come alive again every day every night
WHERE DID THE BOTTLE OF CHAMPAGNE
COME FROM?
THE BOTTLE OF CHAMPAGNE
ONCE MORE
IS NOT MEANT TO OUTSTRIP THE
NIGHT
even before the Yellow Expedition you wanted to imitate the long-term caravanners the trail builders had you only thought of Biskra/Baghdad formerly Baghdad/Biskra your return toward the East toward the Orient toward your orient Saint Petersburg/Leipzig/Clermont-Ferrand Clermont/Leipzig/Leningrad no doubt never said never uttered an East as perilous as that scorching fatal Southern route no doubt you completely radically madly couldn’t care less just as one couldn’t care less about the final guardrails the final reasonable friends the final cautions
THE BOTTLE OF CHAMPAGNE CAN
NOT CELEBRATE SURRENDER
CHAMPAGNE AND GARDENAL
YOU’RE NOT EVEN TWENTY-SIX YEARS OLD
it’s the colonial night and I see you begging for help
from those predators slaughterers proto-Petainists
bigots dreaming of your disappearance
you and your infinite freedom free too free
back to that fucking bottle of champagne
how did you buy it how did you get it
while backed into a corner pursued by a pack of creditors
obviously without a cent to your name A generous merchant Surely not
A Good deed doer All of them long gone So how who what
remains the unbelievable complicity of the officers’ mess
the barman the airfield an accomplice a sack and the deed is done
tepid champagne on the southern slope of the Aurès
your giant wings are gone your wings stinking of motor
oil and kerosene YOUR WINGS carry you no longer
neither speed nor infinite sky nothing more than solid earth its inconsequence
its lowness wingless nailed to the ground like a groveling nobody
no more wings to join Biskra with Baghdad
that wild project will have grounded you
zenith blazing over this impoverished dust
avid gluttonous land
land of splendors
everything is in these three words Why the champagne
oh Léna great Léna we the inconsolable the furious
the lovers the agitators
with our small hands and our limited strength
should we have been there
at the hour of the poison perfumed with kerosene
should we have been there for you
champagne / close up / lights on your face
serenity / anger / rage
that budding welcoming smile
life belongs to you
the man facing you in his place
a hand throughout / no alterity
two beings in the absolute solitude
of the moment
he smelling of soot and dry earth
you blanketed in greasy kerosene
remnants of fragrance and champagne
the last bubbles quenching
your thirst for sky
incommensurable love without words
and without a future
yet a part of the world
the man silently rises
he rejoins his caravan as
he left it
his light steps
strides surfacing at ground level
silence silence silence
desert voices in echoes
they may be virtuous
and repetitive
champagne doesn’t deter the Reaper
champagne doesn’t send her away
it’s her open road
the most ephemeral whisper
and this lion-sized heart beating
beating beating and this heart gently
going toward the sand the earth and stops beating
let’s not leave the ground
its shadow its dust
champagne bottle empty henceforth
lying at your side mission accomplished
August 2024
After Text
Perhaps there’s no after-text, perhaps what’s written here is the very body of the text, even if it appears to be scaffolding (necessary to all forms of construction, which we dismantle once the work is finished, sometimes making sure to leave no traces). After text? Inner text? To be seen.
1)
St. Petersburg, Paris, Aulnat, Biskra, Fez, Casablanca
Or how one character can reveal another, make him knowable, bring him into everyone’s memory, that is, give him life.
While researching the connection between Lena Bernstein and Aulnat, I ran across the city map. I found the street bearing her name. But close by, a small street bore an unexpected name: Touria Chaoui? Who was she? A local official? A community activist? An athlete? After some research, I was astounded to learn she was a woman aviator. She received her pilot’s license in the 1950s in Morocco, at the age of 16, then 5 years later she was assassinated. Her murder was never solved.
Two neighboring flashes of brilliance on the asphalt adjoining the runways.
2)
The Magic of Names.
A fatal encounter. Léna Bernstein and Leonard Bernstein. Léna met Lenny. Russia’s never far away. No reason they couldn’t meet. Such a beautiful couple. Magicians of scope and immoderation. This is the sound of the West Side Story overture. The immense wave of strings and brass as the lyricism of conquest, all conquests – those Apocalypse Now choppers like a soundtrack. Harmonies lights fires and epics. Lenny incarnates Icarus. Léna contents herself with a South-South line. South Side Story. Straight on into the sun.
Hocine Tandjaoui was born in Biskra, Algeria, in 1949. A poet and novelist, he was involved from an early age in journalism and cultural activism. After touring France with the Théâtre de la Mer company, he settled there in 1972 and has since dedicated his time to literature, reading, and writing. His latest publications are the novel Ainsi que tous les hommes (Naples/Tunis/Skopje), published by Éditions 108 in Paris in 2020, and the proem Clamor/Clameur, published in a bilingual edition by Litmus in 2021.
Teresa Villa-Ignacio is a literary translator and scholar whose works include Souffles-Anfas: A Critical Anthology from the Moroccan Journal of Culture and Politics (Stanford University Press, 2016), Hocine Tandjaoui’s Clamor (Litmus, 2021), and Anne-Marie Albiach’s The Mezzanine: The Last Account of Catarina Quia (forthcoming from Litmus, 2026). The recipient of an NEA Literary Translation Fellows Award and an Albertine Translation Fund Grant, she is Associate Professor of French Translation at Kent State University.
World Poetry Review 