Beatrice Douvre (1967-1994) was a comet that passed the sky of French Literature. At the time of her death, she had published only a few poems, beginning in 1991, in various literary reviews, but some three hundred poems were found among her papers, as well as a remarkable diary, Journal de Belfort (Éditions de la Coopérative, 2019).
During her last years, Douvre met, and was encouraged by, several important French poets, including Gabrielle Althen, Philippe Jaccottet (who wrote the preface to her posthumous Oeuvre poétique, which gathers all her poems), Yves Bonnefoy, and Jean-Yves Masson.
Masson, like Althen, played a key role in publishing Douvre’s work and calling critical attention to it. With Douvre’s family’s and her publishers’ permission, John Taylor is undertaking the translation of both her journal and her collected poems. We share with you today, two of Douvre’s translated poems from the collection, ‘Prisms’.
1989
Cloud
Its deflagration
Dapples
Uncertain rains
On our towns
Purple in the distance
And dormant
*
Church stone noise
Those watery doors
A dream
Stirred the wind
The day looked out on the sea
*
The form
Constrains the image
Ramifies
Absence
*
Embrace the slow locus
Lamp
Among lamps
That others have not seen
A man crying out
In a clear forest
Foliage amplified
Our scattered
Presences
Unified by something remote
*
The recurrent birds
Brighten
Deduction
They sing
A path towards things
Nearby stones
Joined hands
*
By the bird’s blue chirping
We hear streams
Light on this land
The stone
The diamonds are sleeping
Also Read: What I Was Not and Other Poems
Wind in the Body
Neither wind to pursue our strangers’ bodies
The air migrated into its palm
We were divided
In the evening
A single lamp
Was burning
The dazzling night
And towards our mature houses
Nor perhaps a face
The only future
Nor a body
*
The foreign woman’s voice
We were not of the same path
O passerby
Remain with us still
A little close to this fire
An andiron every day
*
Waves, their silver
Naked
The call
Near a port
Barefoot
Within the cold stone
A body cries out
The embrasure
Over the sleeping seas
*
The night so it illumines you
You linger
But for nothing
Already the meadows are dark
And the glimmer
In the distance
That your gaze
Perhaps
Damages
*
The truth
Of a night keeps watch
Over your sleep that was shining
Like a shoulder
*
We were lost
And then would grow up
Near a shelterless day
Peace
Little by little moving off
Frost passing through O joy
And facing the wind
Words like an abyss
In which birds circle
*
Fire that dares
That finishes off
This little heap of wood wet
From the storm and sets free
*
Lamp
Its poverty
From being so vivid
*
Sometimes the decomposition
The fright
We lived in the wind
That saves and finalizes
*
The conviction
Face
Or voice
Accent
The summit
leads to slopes
The division
*
Muse
About that summer that was ours
With children’s noises
When all we had
Were debris on paths
White birds near the sea
*
Where the shores slope down
A rowboat drying out
Above this our homes
The baying nights
*
I deduced the light
From your effacement
The light was reread
At the door that opens
*
My house divided
The threshold and the journey
I was
She who leaves
Without ceasing to die
*
Winds
Over this land
Where childhood rustles
Winds
Sometimes gusting
But the earth would abide
From what had been
*
Precipice of the footstep
Postponing the warm
Ardent stone
Ascend
In acts of naming
Embracing and dying
*
So much grass ablaze
So many sources
When your cry is clearest
Summer evenings
On your presence
Which beckons and refuses
Your halt will be safe
If the shadow turns the tree
Into the future appeasement
*
(from Oeuvre poétique, Montélimar, France: Éditions Voix d’encre, 2000)
Translated from the French by John Taylor
Image Courtesy: Author
John Taylor (b. 1952) is an American writer, poet, critic, and translator who has long lived in France. As a translator from three languages (French, Italian, and Modern Greek), he has brought the work of several European poets into English for the first time. His most recent translations include books by Pascal Quignard, Philippe Jaccottet, Jean Frémon, Charline Lambert, Franca Mancinelli, Veroniki Dalakoura, and Elias Petropoulos. His own volumes of poetry and poetic prose include Remembrance of Water & Twenty-Five Trees, a “double book” co-authored with the Swiss poet Pierre Chappuis, A Notebook of Clouds & A Notebook of Ridges, and What Comes from the Night.
