Seizing: Places E-Book

Helene Dorion

• Herausgeber: Arc Publications
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 62

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Beschreibung

Patrick McGuinness was shortlisted for the Popescu Prize for this translation. Together with her fiction, essays and livres d'artistes, Hélène Dorion's poetry constitutes one of modern Québécois literature's foremost achievements. Seizing: Places (Ravir: Les Lieux) was awarded the Prix Mallarmé in 2005, the first time that a Canadian had won this prestigious prize. Comprising five sequences, it is arguably Hélène Dorion's most ambitious work to date. With an Introduction by Carcanet poet and Booker-longlisted novelist Patrick McGuinness. "My feeling is, the poems are grounded, and because of this they hold on to truthfulness in the moment, are in the everyday real and do open the reader (this reader anyway) to an adventure well out of the ordinary, and it says a lot to me about these poems that I want to quote all of them, to say 'listen' to this and to this and this." David Hart, Stride Hélène Dorion was born in 1958 in Québec City, and now lives in Montréal. She is the winner of the Governor General's Award for Poetry, and numerous other prizes, the most recent of which was the Prix Senghor in 2011. Patrick McGuinness is the author of two poetry collections published by Carcanet – Jilted City (2010) and The Canals of Mars (2004) – and the Man Booker Prize-longlisted and Costa-shortlisted novel The Last Hundred Days (Seren, 2011). In 2009 he was made Chevalier des Palmes académiques for services to French culture, and in 2011 Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres. This title is also available from Amazon as an eBook.

Leseprobe

SEIZING : PLACES

Published by Arc Publications

Nanholme Mill, Shaw Wood Road

Todmorden OL14 6DA, UK

www.arcpublications.co.uk Copyright in the poems © Editions de la Différence 2005

Translation copyright © Patrick McGuinness 2012

Introduction copyright © Patrick McGuinness 2012

Copyright in the present edition © Arc Publications 2012 Design by Tony Ward 978 1906570 12 5 (pbk)

978 1906570 17 0 (hbk)

978 1908376 54 1 (ebk) Hélène Dorion’s poems in the original French are reproduced by kind permission of Éditions de la Différence

www.ladifference.fr Cover image by Uzia Ograbek This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to provision of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part, nor of the whole, of this book may take place without the written permission of Arc Publications.

‘Arc Translations’ Series Editor: Jean Boase-Beier

Hélène Dorion

SEIZING : PLACES

RAVIR : LES LIEUX

~

Translated and introduced by

Patrick McGuinness

2012

CONTENTS

Introduction I

Ravir: les villes • Seizing: Cities

II

Ravir: les ombres • Seizing: Shadows

III

Ravir: les miroirs • Seizing: Mirrors

IV

Ravir: les fenêtres • Seizing: Windows

V

Ravir: les visages • Seizing: Faces

INTRODUCTION

Hélène Dorion was born in 1958 in Quebec City, and now lives in Montreal. She studied philosophy at Laval University (Quebec), and published her first collection of poems, L’Intervalle prolongé, in 1983. Since then her prolific œuvre – poetry, fiction, essays, and livres d’artistes – has constituted one of modern Quebecois literature’s major achievements. She is the winner of the Governor General’s Award for Poetry, the Prix Mallarmé, the Prix Wallonie-Bruxelles, the Prix Alain-Grandbois, and numerous other Canadian and international prizes. When Ravir: les lieux appeared in 2005, Dorion became the first Canadian to receive the Prix Mallarmé, while her 2008 collection of poems, Le Hublot des heures, won the Prix Charles-Vildrac – another first for a Quebecois writer. In 2011, Dorion won the European Prix Léopold-Senghor.

Dorion has accomplished a great deal in a relatively short time, not just as a writer but as an editor: she was editor for one of the major poetry publishing houses in Quebec, Le Noroît, between 1991 and 2000, sits on the boards of various literary magazines and prize juries, and has produced important critical work on Quebecois and French-language poetry, including an edition of the modernist Quebecois poet, Saint-Denis Garneau. In 2002, the poet and critic Pierre Nepveu published a selection of her poetry, entitled D’Argile et de souffle, and in 2006 a collected poems appeared from Editions de l’Hexagone entitled Mondes fragiles, choses frêles.

Though Dorion’s poetry has evolved, it has always been limpid and intense, sophisticated in its thinking but elemental in its feel for the world. It is also emphatic about poetry’s role in knowing that world, in putting the world to words not in order to name it, pin it down and categorise it, but because expressing the world is also to experience it. As she writes in her essay “Living in Poetry”, ‘Poetry is as much a state of being as a mode of writing’, and in the same text she describes poetry as a means of ‘crossing’ language. It is a verb that tells us a great deal about Dorion’s approach. Some poets think of themselves as ‘using’ language, others of being ‘used by’ it, and all poets rely on particular verbs, particular metaphors, to figure their relationship with language. In Dorion’s case, to cross language implies a trajectory through it, an immersion in it, but also the possibility of language as obstacle as well as destination. Throughout her poetic œuvre we find a probing, tentative consciousness, as comfortable with the idioms of philosophy as with the language of lyric poetry. It is the way the two work together, keeping each other’s excesses in check – thought enriched by feeling, feeling kept in perspective by thought – that characterises her most penetrating work. This is not poetry that launches itself at its subject, but that feels its way around it. Intensity of expression and attentiveness of vision combine to render a sense of the world distilled, and of a language at its most expansive when it is most stripped down and resistant to rhetorical transports.

Ravir: les lieux, translated here as Seizing: Places, is perhaps her most ambitious work so far, and though Dorion has written plenty since its publication, there is something culminative about this book. It is subtitled “Poèmes”, a plural that refuses totality though not coherence, and is made of five sequences: ‘Ravir: les villes’, ‘Ravir: les ombres’, ‘Ravir: les miroirs’, ‘Ravir: les fenêtres’, and ‘Ravir: les visages’: cities, shadows, mirrors, windows and faces… The verb ravir has so many shades of meaning – to ravish, seize, entrance, plunder, abduct… – that it seems impossible to find a single English verb that would do all the original’s ambiguous – and ambiguating – work. It is related to our word rapture, and posits, too, the poet as raptor, as well as the one rapt and enraptured by the world. In addition to the problems such a multi-faceted word as ravir causes the translator, it is worth signalling the ways in which it works across its many connotations in this book.

First, and perhaps most obviously, the poet is enraptured, ravished, captivated by the world. But her task is to capture it in language, to seize it the way one might ‘seize’ an essence or an image. But language too has its lure, is all too easy to be captivated by. These poetic seizings or ravishings are not merely descriptive or mimetic; they are distillations, intensities of perception, memory, reflection and experience that themselves take hold of language, plunder it, leave it exhausted. This is something Dorion’s poetry does well: though the language is often tentative and probing, it is always ready to rise to the high style; she will use abstractions and is not afraid of words like ‘soul’ and ‘void’, words which, to the anglophone ear, might seem to mean so much that they threaten to end up meaning not enough.

The world enraptures us, but we in turn use it, and use it up. Indeed, the way language plunders the world and the way we plunder the world’s resources are part of a subtly framed correlation in Dorion’s poetry, and one of its most daring propositions: we seek meanings from it, prospecting for symbols and digging for significance from landscapes or skies or urban scenes the way one digs for water or prospects for oil.