Emmanuel Hocquard’s modern and mold-breaking ‘Elegies’

“It is a major event to have Emmanuel Hocquard's masterwork available to a new audience.... The capacious voice of these poems conjures a layered presence where each perception feels far away in time and yet extraordinarily intimate and direct. Cole Swensen's brilliant translation is a tour de force and allows for all the magic to happen.” —Peter Gizzi ELEGIES Emmanuel Hocquard Translated from the French by Cole Swensen Emmanuel Hocquard's Elegies, written over some twenty-five years, lie at the core of his oeuvre, one of the most admired in contemporary French poetry. They sound the depths of the past, finding it ever deeper, and they pose the question: To whom does the past belong? Like air and water, Hocquard suggests, the past is a commons shared by all. His Elegies are full of quotidian detail—the life of the street and the marketplace, overheard conversations, glimpses of private existence—even as they make room for the ancient world from which the form of the elegy descends.  Hocquard has distinguished between two types of elegiac poet—what he calls the classic and the inverse. The classic ruminates on the past; the inverse remakes it. Hocquard is an inverse elegiac poet: Rich with the past, his poems lead us into an ever-expanding present. BUY THE BOOK   For three days only, Elegies is available at 25% off along with three other translated volumes of French poetry: DAYBREAK Claire Malroux BUY THE BOOK CINEPOEMS AND OTHERS Benjamin Fondane BUY THE BOOK SHAPESHIFTER Alice Paalen Rahon BUY THE BOOK   Read two poems from Elegies From “Elegy 1” 1 August 5: Autumn arrived during the night, Most likely with the first glimmers of dawn, That hour when the sky is covered in salt And tumbles down into the insurmountable now On the edges of sleep. Of these brief spaces, largely dreamless, Much older than the early hours of any summer When you’d think all restless pacing would stop And yet it took so many years to locate it Precisely, like the moment that the river becomes really river, Time changed nothing—on the contrary— Just revived the receding waves of initial discord In indifferent veins. But there’s no place here for the merchant To take the measure of his travels, Tailor-trader, hanging around the docks, Once he’s checked a shipment of oil or cloth Here in this port, there in that log —yes, that’s it, the dark one, there within reach, there it is— To the rhythm of huge cranes, their tackle and block. Such an old spectacle still intelligible And yet somehow so new. However, there you have to admit that time has worn nothing out. No, in fact, everything is terribly intact. Who would come back to reminisce? Because it’s here, nowhere else; Now and thus, Neither before nor ever other. For example one morning in September . . . But time is not the question. From “Elegy 3“ 4 a crane also / red / crchcrch crchcrch and on a fence / six feet away a sign / KEEP OUT / CONSTRUCTION SITE As the wind carries(ied) off the rest the insect or something that reached the pointed end (of the leaf) its antennae / red crchcrch crchcrch too / the second crane its boom in front / on the side of the fence (like) black bamboo You are receiving this message because you signed up for email newsletters from NYRB. You can choose the types of mailings you wish to receive: Update preferences   New York Review Books 207 East 32nd Street New York, NY 10016-6305 Not a subscriber? Sign up for our newsletter here. Unsubscribe