Day Has No Equal But Night: Bilingual Edition (New American Translations)

by Anne Hébert, A. Poulin Jr. (Translator)

Though the Quebecois Anne Hebert is a distinguished contemporary novelist and poet in French, her work is little-known and hard to get hold of in the U.S. Poulin's substantial selection of her writing, translated with facing original, is thus a real boon to American readers. The selection includes work from Hebert's two major collections of poems, The Tomb of Kings (1952) and Miracle of the Word (1960), as well as previously uncollected poems and a curious concluding essay by Poulin about the problems he himself has had as a Quebecois-American. The poetry from The Tomb of Kings , written mostly in short lines, is at once austere, riddling and grand. These are poems of painful solitude aspiring to a condition of ``original silence and poverty,'' and the insistent difficulties they present to a reader demonstrate their commitment to poetry as an ordeal of purification: ``anything easy is a snare.'' By contrast, the work from Miracle of the Word , composed mostly in short prose paragraphs, is expansive--rich in vocabulary, ecstatic and imperative in tone--and reminiscent of Rimbaud and Char. Hebert's writing, like most modern French poetry, is rhetorical in a way that contemporary English and American poetry tend not to be: that can make translation difficult. But we can only be grateful to Poulin for making Hebert available in the original, as well as in his serviceable translation.

Genres: Poetry

120 pages, Paperback

First published December 7, 1992

About the author

Anne Hébert was a Canadian author and poet. She won Canada's top literary honor, the Governor General's Award, three times, twice for fiction and once for poetry.

Reviews

[karen · Rating 3 out of 5]

so i emerged from my starch-and-wine thanksgiving coma long enough to read some poetry, just like the pilgrims would have wanted!

this is a book of poems from my beloved "canadians that are hard to get 'round here" series. i've only read fiction from her, not poetry, and at first i was unimpressed. the first poem reminded me of all the self-importance of that limp-dick shelley with his "poets are the unacknowledged legislatures of the world" crap. it's the kind of poem you would read to a remedial writing class to inspire them - to make them see the validity and the power of poetry. in other words: dreck.

just so you understand i am not being needlessly harsh:

To write a poem is to try to make something that's hidden come out into broad daylight. Somewhat like an underground spring that must be seized in the silence of the earth. The poet is a kind of sorcerer, without a divining rod, or any magic wand, who is content with being attentive (to the extreme point of attention) to the farthest meanderings of a brisk spring.

etc etc etc. my cheese-roasted cauliflower revisits me a little bit.

i wasn't impressed until i got to the poem "the end of the world." ah - much better. of course, the left-hand, french page is more mellifluous (and my french improves dramatically according to how much wine i have consumed.) for you frogs: je suis le cri et la blessure, je suis la femme a ton flanc qu'on outrage et qu'on viole. better, oui? the best parts of this book remind me of eliot at his most destructive, or hart crane when he is filled with brutal romance.

pour les autres:

I am the cry and the wound. I am the woman at your side who's outraged and ravished.

The apocalypse chains you to its chariot, horror ties your hands, love, love, who gouged your eyes?

My heart of violent peace, I had given it to you, more naked than my body,

My caresses flow, death and tears are my jewelry,

Under such a black fire, my soul dries up like salt, and your thirst perches on it, lovely wild bird.

.......................................
to find out how it all ends, buy the book!

poetry-tease.

after the initial overly-"poetic" works, it really picks up, and some of the later ones, although they are very short, are pretty and delicate. i don't remember who wrote this poem, and am too sleepy/winey to google right now (this is what mfso is for) but there is this poem called december:

december

i will sleep
in my little cup


that i have always liked, and some of the short poems captured that mood and simple perfection. dunno - naptime!

(okay - it's ron padgett. see how i can rally??)

come to my blog!

[Czarny Pies · Rating 2 out of 5]

Il ne faut pas avoir des attentes trop élevées avec ce recueil des inédits. On y trouve des poèmes maladroits ("Nuit d'été", "Fin du monde") mais aussi de très bons ("Le jour n'a d'égal que la nuit, "La terre originelle.") Dans l'ensemble la lecture est une expérience assez agréab.e qui rappelle à l'esprit "Le tombeau des rois" .

[Tracey · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some nice poems. I liked her early work more than her later poems. There is a lot of religious sentiment in some.