Chitra Ganesh, How to Assemble a Flying Car (detail), 2018, linocut on tan BFK Rives. Courtesy of the artist & Durham Press.
Near Belchatev
Translated from the French by Bradford Gray Telford
An image soothing
as in a poem by Hölderlin
the one mirrored in a lake
as Trakl and his sister
_ _who met and kissed in that mirror
you and I will meet up on a road
you bearing the lute of our fathers
_ _and someone will offer us food
and someone else will open a book
and cut out black letters for each one of the lost
and we will, together, devour each tiny black letter
straight ahead our destination:
_ _a field, golden-yellow, engulfs the small
Polish church
on the road where, at twilight, your father was born.
A producer for France-Culture, poet and essayist Geneviève Huttin is the author of L’histoire de ma voix (2004); Paris, litanie des cafés (1991), and Seigneur! (1981). In America her work has most recently appeared in Lyric Review and Poetry. (5/2005)
Bradford Gray Telford, educated at Princeton and Columbia, has published poems, translations, and essays in many journals, with new work forthcoming in American Literary Review, Diner, and Eclipse. He is currently translating Geneviève Huttin’s The Story of My Voice and is poetry editor of Gulf Coast. (5/2005)
A producer for France-Culture, poet, and essayist, Geneviève Huttin is the author of L’histoire de ma voix (2004), Paris, litanie des cafés (1991), and Seigneur! (1981). In America her work has most recently appeared in Lyric Review, Poetry, and_ AGNI Online. _(updated 11/2017)
Bradford Gray Telford, educated at Princeton and Columbia, has published poems, translations, and essays in many journals, with new work forthcoming in American Literary Review, Diner, and Eclipse. He is currently translating Geneviève Huttin’s The Story of My Voice and is poetry editor of Gulf Coast. (updated 5/2005)
AGNI has published the following translations:
Near Belchatev by Geneviève Huttin