The name of Georges Schehadé was entirely unknown to me when Austin Carder sent me his new book of translations of that poet. I learn from Carder’s afterword that Schehadé was born in Egypt, lived most of his life in Lebanon, and wrote in French—or rather, that he was “a poet of the French language.” I like that phrasing very much: This is not only poetry in French but of French . But I’d be curious to know more. How did it happen that he grew up speaking French in a Greek Orthodox family in Alexandria? Evidently the fabric of that once-ethnically and culturally complicated place—the city of Cavafy, of de Chirico—was even more intricate than I realized. The poems presented in this book, drawn from six collections published between 1938 and 1985, are all brief—typically around eight or nine lines, each of which functions more or less as a syntactically and semantically self-contained entity; grammatical relations are not mediated by any punctuation, so that the combined elements float freely in relation to each other like the forms in a Calder mobile. In general, the technique seems to be very much like that of Pierre Reverdy, in which—as Kenneth Rexroth with unforgettable lucidity explained in introducing his Reverdy translations—
the ordinary materials of poetry are broken up, recombined in structures radically different from those we assume to be the result of causal, or of what we have come to accept as logical sequence, and then an abnormally focused attention is invited to their apprehension, they are given an intense significance, closed within the structure of the work of art, and are not negotiable in ordinary contexts of occasion. So isolated and illuminated, they seem to assume an unanalyzable transcendental claim.
To this, Schehadé adds a fervent attachment to memories of childhood, and to a childlike eye on the world, that recalls the poetry of Max Jacob. (Curiously, Carder counts Jacob among Schehadé’s influences but not Reverdy.) His is a poetry in which, for instance, “A seashell doesn’t sound like the ocean / Or the wind blowing / It sounds like the song and tomb of sleep,” and it asks the reader to cultivate a certain equipoise in the face of the unknown: “Smile or cry but don’t be afraid / The shadow stirs / Then turns to luminous night.” It is a lyrical sphere into which few things gain entrance—as Adonis writes in his Introduction, “We do not see streets in Georges Schehadé’s poetry, nor factories…. Nor do we hear politicians or armies”—but those that do enter do so intimately, so that, as Carder says, “damaged experience survives in transfigured form.” Schehadé is fervently, even proudly what used to be called a minor poet, and all the more intensely himself for that. Carder’s way of translating him is admirable. He translates, not the words, but the poem as he hears it, which means that he is willing to be, as some might think, ever so unfaithful to the words (and their lineation), but only in order to be faithful to the poem—understanding that the poetry of English hears things a little differently from the poetry of French, for all their mutual interchange. Take just one example, almost at random:
Quand il fait un peu de lune Sur le lit de ta chambre Rejoins sur une carte L’immensité comme une fille
If I try to do a quick and dirty literal translation of this quatrain, I’ll write,
When there’s a little moonlight On the bed in your room Rejoin (regain? meet up again with?) on a card (map? menu? paper?) The immensity like a girl
—but I’m left wondering: is it the immensity that’s like a girl, or is it “you” being addressed?—the latter must be more likely but there’s a problem in that when the addressee was mentioned two lines above it was only indirectly, through the possessive “your.” Carder translates:
When there’s a sliver of moon On your bed Look for immensity On the map Like a little girl
Carder knows that English, to be vivid, may sometimes need to be more specific than French, so he’s made that little bit of moon into a sliver. But he also knows it can be more tacit, and so he’s suppressed mention of the room where the bed is located—the bed implies the room. He’s made the correct choice of “map” as what’s meant by the inherently vaguer “carte,” an easy choice because the rest of the poem, whose subject turns out to be explicitly “geography,” makes it perfectly clear. But by breaking this quatrain’s last two lines into three, he’s evaded the necessity to attach “Like a little girl” quite explicitly to a referent. The relation among things shifts freely in Schehadé’s geography, “In cities of stone / Where bodies suffer and sing.”
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Georges Schehadé, Poetries, translated by Austin Carder, Introduction by Adonis, is published by The Song Cave, 2021.
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BARRY SCHWABSKY is art critic for The Nation and co-editor of international reviews for Artforum. Along with many books on contemporary art, he’s published three books and several chapbooks of poetry as well as a collection of mainly literary criticism, Heretics of Language (Black Square Editions, 2017). His new book of poetry, A Feeling of And, will be published next year by Black Square.