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| “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 Emmanuel Hocquard
Translated from the French by Cole SwensenEmmanuel 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. For three days only, Elegies is available at 25% off along with three other translated volumes of French poetry: 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 |
