Demarcations

by Jean Follain, Kurt Heinzelman

Poetry. Bilingual Edition. Translated from the French by Kurt Heinzelman. DEMARCATIONS ( Territoires ) is a book obsessed with the implications for history of post-war worlds, the ones that become newly "demarcated," whether out of victory or defeat. Although DEMARCATIONS was originally published in 1953 in the wake of the Second World War, the lucid yet subtle poems often look back to the rural and largely unautomated world of Follain's turn-of-the-century childhood. This was published in the middle of Follain's career, at the height of his poetic powers and was generally proclaimed by French critics to be his most masterful collection.

163 pages, Hardcover

First published September 28, 2011

Reviews

[David Curry · Rating 3 out of 5]

Kurt Heinzelman’s DEMARCATIONS is the second collection of translations from the French poet Jean Follain to come to my attention this year. (It’s been around since 2011.) The book provides an opportunity for comparison with what another translator has done with Follain and clarifies the elusiveness and possible treacherousness of translation. With Heinzelman’s rendering of Follain’s book title TERRITOIRES as DEMARCATIONS, we get right off an indication that this translator is not averse to stretching.

Heinzelman translates Follain’s poem “L’Ètendue” as “The Big Picture”:

Scintillant
as a wild beast’s pelt
a man’s shot silk
top hat sits
unmoving
atop his head
a woman
clings to his arm
all around them
coal faces slag
heaps people
the depleted landscape
of their lives
while a boy learns
algebra and geometry
in a room of his own
that is quite white.

Christopher Middleton translated the same poem as “The Great Expanse”:

Shimmering like the skin
of a wild animal
the tall silk hat
of a man
rests on his head,
a woman ever on his arm
round them the coalfields
and heaps of sand
fill the bloodless expanse
of the landscape their life
but a schoolboy is studying
algebra and geometry
in a room with no character
and entirely white



For the record, there is such a thing as shot silk, but I don’t see how Heinzelman got there from Follain's simple “chapeau de soie.”

I would argue that “I admire Follain and would like to make what he gave us available in English” is a better starting point for a translator than “I want to put my stamp on this.”

[Michael Farrell · Rating 5 out of 5]

includes intro by translator. i dont think the poetry's diction (in translation at least) is as restrained as he thinks. clearly a great poet (of the short poem).

[Cooper Renner · Rating 3 out of 5]

Soft-spoken and elegant, Follain's poems (this is the translation of a complete 1953 volume) are vignettes of life in France in the early 20th century. Rarely openly emotional, they approximate miniature paintings in words.