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Translated from the French by Rosanna Warren
Published: Thu Jul 1 2010
Diego Isaias Hernández Méndez, Convertiendse en Characoteles / Sorcerers Changing into Their Animal Forms (detail), 2013, oil on canvas. Arte Maya Tz’utujil Collection.
from Le Repos, dans la suite des jours

Translated from the French by Rosanna Warren

 

what remains
what resists
what lives
between lips
between hands

what may be eaten
what may not be eaten

what separates
words
from
what may be eaten

and the finger
makes the glasses sing
when the wine passes
from one
to another

what wars under the tablecloth
what wars under the pillow
what arsons in the candlestick

the bread
has not
risen

the knife keeps watch over the plate

knot the napkin
around the necks
of the dead

last night we ground up
the fish bones

carrot slices
swim in jelly

where is
the book

the book is missing

we lost it in
flight
or exile
burned it

restrain the least gesture
this day make
_                            _ a void

turn down
all invitations
keep the world
between your lips

renounce
the usefulness
_                            _ of words

follow the breath
no word weighs down
don’t name anything

what is to come will come

 

Michaël Glück is a French poet, prose-writer, playwright, and translator. He received the Prix de Créateurs in 1981 for La mémoire écorchée / Abbatoirs La Mouche (Editions Jean-Michel Place). Cette chose-là, ma mère (Editions J. Brémond) received the Prix Antonin Artaud. Glück, who studied philosophy with Emanuel Levinas, has evolved a distinctive Judaic vision within the context of modern French poetry. Le Repos, dans la suite des jours is the seventh volume in a series devoted to the Book of Genesis. (10/2010)

Rosanna Warren teaches comparative literature at Boston University. Her new book of poems, Ghost in a Red Hat, is due out in March 2011. (10/2010)

Michaël Glück is a French poet, prose-writer, playwright, and translator. He received the Prix de Créateurs in 1981 for La mémoire écorchée / Abbatoirs La Mouche (Editions Jean-Michel Place). Cette chose-là, ma mère (Editions J. Brémond) received the Prix Antonin Artaud. Glück, who studied philosophy with Emanuel Levinas, has evolved a distinctive Judaic vision within the context of modern French poetry. (updated 10/2010)

Rosanna Warren is a member of AGNI’s Advisory Board. She is the author of five full-length poetry collections: So forth (2020), Ghost in a Red Hat (2011), Departure (2003), Stained Glass (1993), and Each Leaf Shines Separate (1984), all from W. W. Norton & Co, and one chapbook of poems (Snow Day, Palaemon Press, 1981). Max Jacob: A Life in Art and Letters (2020) and Fables of the Self: Studies in Lyric Poetry (2008), a book of literary criticism, have also appeared from Norton. She edited and contributed to The Art of Translation: Voices from the Field (Northeastern University Press, 1989), and has edited three chapbooks of poetry by prisoners. With Stephen Scully, she translated Euripides’ Suppliant Women for Oxford University Press (1995).  She has won fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, ACLS, The Ingram Merrill Foundation, the Lila Wallace-Readers’ Digest Fund, and the Cullman Center at the New York Public Library, among others.  Stained Glass won the Lamont Poetry Award from the Academy of American Poets. She has also won the Witter Bynner Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Lavan Younger Poets’ Prize from the Academy of American Poets, the Award of Merit in Poetry from The American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the David Ferry and Ellen LaForge Poetry Prize from Suffolk University. She was a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 1999 to 2005. She is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2004–2005 she was president of the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics. In 2009 she was appointed Secretary of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She is Hanna Holborn Gray Distinguished Service Professor Emerita in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. (updated 10/2023)
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