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Christophe Marc Wall-Romana
"Translation of a poetry book by the French poet James Sacré"
Sponsor: Ann Smock, Associate Professor of French

• Project Description
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Christophe will translate for publication a volume of poetry, titled Viens dit quelqu'un, by the French poet James Sacré. Sacré is one of the most accomplished French poets writing today, the winner of France's most prestigious poetry prize (Prix Apollinaire, 1988) and highest cultural distinction (Chevalier dans l'ordre des Arts et des Lettres, 1987). Translated into Swedish and Spanish, Sacré's work is still largely unknown in the English-speaking world, despite the fact that the poet has lived in the United States for the last twenty years, where he currently teaches as Smith College. A published poet in his own right, as well as the author of two article-length critical studies of Sacré's poetry, Christophe is ideally suited to undertaking the first book-length English translation of the poet's work.

Note: The following passages are excerpted from a longer work-in-progress by Christophe Wall-Romana: A Translator's Thotbook .

Before even

James Sacré sent me the book. When I received it I found out that it was in the same collection as another book of his which I really love, La poésie, comment dire? (Poetry, How Shall I put It ?). Their covers are the same: made of thick paper, with a flap in a dark rosey beige, streaked with printed white diamond patterns. The ink is Prussian blue for Viens, dit quelqu'un, and dark grey-green for La poésie, comment dire? The pages are creamy, and the type, as far as I can tell, is some version of Garamond. I find the cover--for both books--not only beautiful but most suitable to them. Did I think the cover beautiful when I bought La poésie, comment dire? in a large bookstore in Paris? I didn't pick the book at random: a good friend of a good friend had recommended Sacré's work to me.

I remember being pissed at the price-tag affixed with some eternal glue on the cover. I removed it, but the spot is still visible--four years of fibery, collectable dust. It now looks like a rectangular slice of fossil with, curling in its center, the darker outline of a fern shoot.

This book, Viens, dit quelqu'un, has no tag. After I received it, I didn't start reading it for the longest time. Why, I don't know. I had recently written a paper on Sacré's work, and perhaps I didn't know whether his work would prove vampiric--the kind that slowly sips into one's own writing and contaminates it inconspicuously. Perhaps three or four months went by. It isn't especially rare that I have to wait for a book, often after I have it: waiting for the moment to come for a meaningful meeting with the book, after some invisible preparation work--a meeting that might never occur; that may be a total disappointment, an 'interesting' read.

I pored several times over Viens. I leafed through it; I sampled it; I gauged it; I extracted everything possible without actually reading it. For instance, I discovered it was made of twenty-four parts Sacré called "Cadences." Each Cadence contains large prose sections at the beginning with small verse sections toward the end. Sometimes that verse is very regular, with equal stanzas and end-rimes, and usually it is placed after free verse non-rimed sections. Thus, each cadence is somewhat "ordered," according to the same axis where prose begins and verse ends. (I should add here that 'prose' and 'verse' are purely descriptive categories presenting, for Sacré, no hierarchical measure of poetry.)

For a seminar on the translation of poetry taught by Alfred Arteaga, I decided to choose a few excerpts from this book I hadn't yet read. I presented two of them to the class, prefacing my translation drafts with a few comments on the book. Sacré was born and raised on a farm. He teaches at Smith College. The book was written during and after a trip to Morocco. But I hadn't read it yet.