What do you think?
Rate this book
Beyond Elsewhere
Beyond Elsewhere is a hauntingly beautiful long narrative poem, a dance that at once touches on the universal and uniquely personal. With his debut collection, Gabriel Arnou-Laujeac establishes himself as one of French poetry's most innovative new voices. His writing is lyrical, masterful, exquisite, an opening into the elusive, affirming the absolute necessity of listening to the world. Beyond Elsewhere is a symphonic poem with boundless language, where past and present meet.
"A dazzling hymn to the currents of desire that shape each individual life... Do not miss the chance to take this exhilarating journey." —Christopher Merrill
"This incandescent metonym of light is, writ small, a marriage of eastern and western wisdoms—a bildungsroman describing the arc of a young man's journey from innocence, through passion and despair, to the great clarity of spiritual understanding. Arnou-Laujeac's intensely visual account, clothed in lyrical image and visionary flame, in Cardona's transcendent translation, easily carries us along in his brightly burning chariot in quest of the Divine."—Sidney Wade
"Beyond Elsewhere defies definition, hovering in that physical space somewhere above us, just beyond reach, but visible in a breathless lyrical cloud. Arnou-Laujeac's poems are psychotropic—a beautiful new voice in poetry."—Victoria Chang
"Hélène Cardona's new translation confirms again her exquisite powers and imagination in turning Arnou-Laujeac's amazing work into an English classic."
—Willis Barnstone, The Poetics of Translation
* Winner of a Hemingway Grant: Beyond Elsewhere was awarded a Hemingway Grant by the French Ministry of Culture, The Institut Français, and the Cultural Services of the French Embassy.
Gabriel Arnou-Laujeac is one of French poetry's most innovative new voices.
Hélène Cardona is an award-winning poet, literary translator, and actor.
"A dazzling hymn to the currents of desire that shape each individual life... Do not miss the chance to take this exhilarating journey." —Christopher Merrill
"This incandescent metonym of light is, writ small, a marriage of eastern and western wisdoms—a bildungsroman describing the arc of a young man's journey from innocence, through passion and despair, to the great clarity of spiritual understanding. Arnou-Laujeac's intensely visual account, clothed in lyrical image and visionary flame, in Cardona's transcendent translation, easily carries us along in his brightly burning chariot in quest of the Divine."—Sidney Wade
"Beyond Elsewhere defies definition, hovering in that physical space somewhere above us, just beyond reach, but visible in a breathless lyrical cloud. Arnou-Laujeac's poems are psychotropic—a beautiful new voice in poetry."—Victoria Chang
"Hélène Cardona's new translation confirms again her exquisite powers and imagination in turning Arnou-Laujeac's amazing work into an English classic."
—Willis Barnstone, The Poetics of Translation
* Winner of a Hemingway Grant: Beyond Elsewhere was awarded a Hemingway Grant by the French Ministry of Culture, The Institut Français, and the Cultural Services of the French Embassy.
Gabriel Arnou-Laujeac is one of French poetry's most innovative new voices.
Hélène Cardona is an award-winning poet, literary translator, and actor.
88 pages, Paperback
First published May 10, 2016
2 people are currently reading
139 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews
February 6, 2017
ADVANCE PRAISE:
"This is the absolute dawn," Gabriel Arnou-Laujeac declares in the final pages of Beyond Elsewhere, a dazzling hymn to the currents of desire that shape each individual life. This is a testament to the ways in which love lights an invisible path to the morning when "Everything here is an Elsewhere." Do not miss the chance to take this exhilarating journey.
—Christopher Merrill, author of Necessities
"Hélène Cardona’s new translation confirms again her exquisite powers and imagination in turning Arnou-Laujeac’s amazing work into an English classic. She X-rays the original, and comes out with an inner picture faithful to beauty and the author’s flowing dexterity. Her singing flare illumines the English version, which is now the original. Discover Hélène's invitation to voyage."
—Willis Barnstone, The Poetics of Translation
"Beyond Elsewhere by French poet Gabriel Arnou-Laujeac, and translated by Hélène Cardona is a wonderfully lyric, mesmerizing poetic meditation on desire, love, the soul, and spirituality. Beyond Elsewhere defies definition, hovering in that physical space somewhere above us, just beyond reach, but visible in a breathless lyrical cloud. As Arnou-Laujeac states: “I now know human passion is exclusive, symbiotic, psychotropic, but that the key is the spell eluding it, the time that tears it to pieces.” Arnou-Laujeac's poems are psychotropic — a beautiful new voice in poetry."
—Victoria Chang, author of The Boss
"This incandescent metonym of light is, writ small, a marriage of eastern and western wisdoms—a Bildungsroman describing the arc of a young man's journey from innocence, through passion and despair, to the great clarity of spiritual understanding. Arnou-Laujeac's intensely visual account, clothed in lyrical image and visionary flame, in Cardona's transcendent translation, easily carries us along in his brightly burning chariot in quest of the Divine."
—Sidney Wade, author of Stroke
"French author Gabriel Arnou-Laujeac’s poetic narrative is just exquisite – enough said." —Andrew Singer, Trafika Europe
"This is the absolute dawn," Gabriel Arnou-Laujeac declares in the final pages of Beyond Elsewhere, a dazzling hymn to the currents of desire that shape each individual life. This is a testament to the ways in which love lights an invisible path to the morning when "Everything here is an Elsewhere." Do not miss the chance to take this exhilarating journey.
—Christopher Merrill, author of Necessities
"Hélène Cardona’s new translation confirms again her exquisite powers and imagination in turning Arnou-Laujeac’s amazing work into an English classic. She X-rays the original, and comes out with an inner picture faithful to beauty and the author’s flowing dexterity. Her singing flare illumines the English version, which is now the original. Discover Hélène's invitation to voyage."
—Willis Barnstone, The Poetics of Translation
"Beyond Elsewhere by French poet Gabriel Arnou-Laujeac, and translated by Hélène Cardona is a wonderfully lyric, mesmerizing poetic meditation on desire, love, the soul, and spirituality. Beyond Elsewhere defies definition, hovering in that physical space somewhere above us, just beyond reach, but visible in a breathless lyrical cloud. As Arnou-Laujeac states: “I now know human passion is exclusive, symbiotic, psychotropic, but that the key is the spell eluding it, the time that tears it to pieces.” Arnou-Laujeac's poems are psychotropic — a beautiful new voice in poetry."
—Victoria Chang, author of The Boss
"This incandescent metonym of light is, writ small, a marriage of eastern and western wisdoms—a Bildungsroman describing the arc of a young man's journey from innocence, through passion and despair, to the great clarity of spiritual understanding. Arnou-Laujeac's intensely visual account, clothed in lyrical image and visionary flame, in Cardona's transcendent translation, easily carries us along in his brightly burning chariot in quest of the Divine."
—Sidney Wade, author of Stroke
"French author Gabriel Arnou-Laujeac’s poetic narrative is just exquisite – enough said." —Andrew Singer, Trafika Europe
October 4, 2016
BEYOND ELSEWHERE by French poet Gabriel Arnou–Laujeac, translated by Hélène Cardona, creates a new mythopoetic language of transformation. The story told moves the reader across a lyrical landscape that marks the passage of one person’s journey through human desire, passionate love, awakening, and spiritual transformation.
The lover and the beloved are one, becoming one flesh, nearly one mind. They are wedded to one another in a mystical sense. Twin souls, who embrace each other willingly and begin to touch on a mystery, which lies just beyond their earthly sense, where something more is revealed and unveiled.
“The light is here, with her.
She reveals herself to my gaze naturally, the way spring unveils the blueness of sky or the gold of your skin. She slowly removes makeup, masks and ornaments, and gives me a vision of herself bewitched, of herself bewitching: she adores me and I unlock her.
Sprung raw from a virginal flame, passion takes us whole under its animal breath; the sun sparks impale our bodies galloping in a crash of oceans.”
This is poetic myth making in the truest sense, and in discovering what wisdom we can within life as it unfolds before us. If we will listen carefully, breathing in and out with each verse, becoming more aware and embrace an abundant life, unafraid of our own humanity. Especially when we are lost within desire, and come to know that the search for the beloved is a quest for the soul held softly within eternity.
The poem asks us to stand “beyond the borders of nothingness” and to embrace, the infinite possibilities of “becoming and non-becoming, within everything and outside of everything,” resting in the openness of creation.
“I remember a Kingdom that is neither here nor elsewhere, but which offers its love right here to those by emptiness abandoned. I remember the All Other. It was me.”
The poet’s words through translation become an invocation to the heavens and of the spirit. They transport us to the edge of what we know, beseeching us endlessly, to see the unseen and invisible reality that surrounds us every day. In an exquisite tongue, the poet invites us to partake of all that is and has been, beyond ordinary time and vision.
He speaks to us:
“Come
I hold the keys to another world: a solar dynasty triumphing
over the arbitrary as well as over dust.
Beyond this day-by-day too narrow…
Come
I’ll take you where the wind-people exile themselves…
I take you: to Yourself.”
In the final stanzas, the poem gives us an invocation of the spirit; an innovative set of prayers, which invokes a divine memory we may celebrate as a remembrance of spirit and truth. And as sacramental liturgy, where we recall who we are within creation and beyond, this realm of many different perceptions, worlds without end.
I invoke the new dawn nestling in the aurora…
I invoke the fiery opening between Heaven and Earth…
I invoke the music of the spheres…
The poetic journey resolves to its essence, its whole, and the gestalt in this narrative poem’s final stanzas. They speak of truth, of memory and pathways, and finally of silence. Become a fellow Traveller with us, take the journey and discover these words in your own worthy time. See, what you might have forgotten, or what you have learned and remembered within your life. Let your soul reminisce, in other words, in these words.
Ron Starbuck
Publisher ~ Saint Julian Press
February 22, 2017
To read Gabriel Arnou-Laujeac’s ‘Beyond Elsewhere’ is to enter an odyssey, a spiritual quest that transcends into the visionary. It is an illuminating epiphany that not only unravels the fervour and subsequent disenchantment of a first love but it is also a journey to perceive universal enlightenment, love, emotional and spiritual rejuvenation. “I remain the faithful shadow of an omnipresent light forever wandering...”
Hélène Cardona’s translation is breathtaking, one that captivates the very heart and essence of this profound and distinguished publication.
Hélène Cardona’s translation is breathtaking, one that captivates the very heart and essence of this profound and distinguished publication.
March 14, 2017
“I WANDER IN THE DESERT OF THE WORLD”: GABRIEL ARNOU–LAUJEAC’S PROSE-POETRY ON EXILE AND THE SEARCH FOR FULFILLMENT (Tulika I. Bahadur, On Art and Aesthetics)
----
(Read full review with illustrations on https://onartandaesthetics.com/2017/0...)
----
Writing is an expansion of consciousness, maintains poet, translator and actress Hélène Cardona – whose bi-lingual book of poetry Life in Suspension/La Vie Suspendue (2016, Salmon Poetry) I reviewed on February 12,2017.
If the event of putting pen to paper to create something new opens our minds, then the act of translation, Cardona further points out, turns us into alchemists and magicians. In her introduction to Beyond Elsewhere (2016, White Pine Press) – the English version of a slim volume called Plus loin qu’ailleurs (2013, Éditions du Cygne) by French poet Gabriel Arnou-Laujeac (Blog, Facebook) – Cardona quotes the Canadian writer Anne Michaels and observes that translation “is a kind of transubstantiation”. The figure of the translator serves as an intermediary, a technician, a negotiator who spells an enchantment between languages and produces texts that span cultural differences, overcome geographical and temporal barriers.
The translator is an intermediary, a technician, magician and alchemist working between languages to create inspired texts spanning cultural differences, geographic distances, and time.
In Arnou-Laujeac’s Beyond Elsewhere – through Hélène Cardona’s interpretative efforts – we find a lyrical narrative that is soaked in a saddening sense of loss, of exile and set alight by a persistent, gloriously hopeful search for the ineffable, the absolute. One of French poetry’s most innovative new voices, Arnou-Laujeac is a graduate of Science Po who has studied human rights and philosophies both Western and Eastern.
His book opens with an elegiac note, with the imagery of shadowy temples. The wheel of history is being diverted mechanically by controlling, anonymous hands in cold rooms of power. The four winds have been emptied of their God, a certain “specter of absence” has covered every atom of the universe. In this dark and suffocating era of machines and self-interest, in this century without an open sky and fixed anchor, the poet begins to harbor Dreams of Elsewhere. Dreams of Beyond Elsewhere. He aspires to acquire a space, a state of transcendence.
Refuge and relief appear in the shape and form of a mad first love – the poet is able to “ward off” the rusty society, the ugly automated world of naked, lusterless matter. He writes of his encounter with the object of his desire:
She reveals herself to my gaze naturally, the way spring unveils the blueness of sky or the gold of your skin. She slowly removes makeup, masks and ornaments, and gives me a vision of herself bewitched, of herself bewitching: she adores me and I unlock her. Sprung raw from a virginal flame, passion takes us whole under its animal breath: the sun sparks impale our bodies galloping in a crash of oceans.
For a while, the lovers reign in a world where the beloved becomes everything – “the only face of what is faceless”. They are drunk, intoxicated in a “shoreless elsewhere”. Meeting and mating, for them, is a liturgical affair. They are wild swans who access a magical plenitude in “the holy of holies of their intertwined bodies.”
Soon however, there is a conflict, a drifting apart. An earthquake of disenchantment. The passion is profaned to vestiges. He has lost her, he has lost paradise. He is alone, inconsolable. Lost. Painfully, he reveals:
I shun the heights of love, haunted by the memory of a vertiginous fall.
The whole world becomes a wasteland, a desert where the poet is cursed to wander, pointlessly drinking false mirage water. As he does this, he mentions a cryptic verse by a famous writer:
Gradually I understand. I gradually accept. I recall in my flesh Samuel Beckett’s lines, in the somber and lucid heart of absence: they come different and the same / with each it is different and the same / with each the absence of love is different / with each the absence of love is the same.
“They” could be people, “they” could be places – with whom and in which the poet continues to feel directionless and unappreciated.
Desiccated and distressed, he is tempted to embrace nihilism, to adopt the doctrine of the absurd, to surrender and declare that the universe is not inherently meaningful. But the poet goes on, refuses to give up. He continues to seek the unknown, something more, something else:
I resist its [the absurd’s] misleading vertigo, its lying mirrors, its sick beauty. Through centuries of ancient glory to come, I am immune to the hissing snakebite of death nestled deep in the human soul. I stand beyond the borders of nothingness, outstretched toward the inaccessible.
He fills his mind with memories of an unreachable yet conveniently close Kingdom overflowing with offerings of love. He sees this world with new and clearer eyes. The poet begins to recognise the value of himself (“Me”) and the value of that which is not-him (“All Other”). He is struck and stunned by the grace and variety of nature. He finds himself entranced again, by a mysterious woman – who is that grace and variety personified:
She is the rumor that rumbles at the bottom of the seashell stranded on the beach. Her beauty derives from elsewhere. She is the sun’s song, the moon’s sighs, an endless dream springing from the depths of another dream with a woman’s bust and eagle wings: her, then me in her; her, then light.
In the middle of this aesthetically-charged spiritual experience, the tumult of the world recedes for the poet. Natural time, he is certain, is a ring on the finger of a gorgeous supernatural Eternity.
He is captivated by the azure sea, by the fiery aurora. He finds a realm beyond the visible one.
He ends his lyrical narrative with an invocation of the “original lovers” – Heaven and Earth, who touch and merge at the horizon. He thinks of the black night, the scintillating expanse of the skies – the celestial assimilations, “the great luminaries contemplating each other”. And beyond the cover of the constellations, he knows, the invisible Seer of all things remains, who cannot be captured in images. This Seer is the First Cause – God – the Being who also happens to be pure and inexhaustible being-ness, orchestrating and holding the cosmos together.
And so – drawing from the adventure of his own spiritual journey – the poet presents to other lost and stateless souls a beautiful and genuine promise of return, of release. Stylistically spontaneous and thematically deep, Beyond Elsewhere is a challenging read. Arnou-Laujeac effortlessly distills whole schools of knowledge in short verses and phrases – from ancient Biblical to modern existential. The book may look fragmentary and abrupt in a first and quick reading but it will disclose itself as a delightful psalm, an enlightening talisman when engaged with again and again. It deserves to be.
----
(Read full review with illustrations on https://onartandaesthetics.com/2017/0...)
----
Writing is an expansion of consciousness, maintains poet, translator and actress Hélène Cardona – whose bi-lingual book of poetry Life in Suspension/La Vie Suspendue (2016, Salmon Poetry) I reviewed on February 12,2017.
If the event of putting pen to paper to create something new opens our minds, then the act of translation, Cardona further points out, turns us into alchemists and magicians. In her introduction to Beyond Elsewhere (2016, White Pine Press) – the English version of a slim volume called Plus loin qu’ailleurs (2013, Éditions du Cygne) by French poet Gabriel Arnou-Laujeac (Blog, Facebook) – Cardona quotes the Canadian writer Anne Michaels and observes that translation “is a kind of transubstantiation”. The figure of the translator serves as an intermediary, a technician, a negotiator who spells an enchantment between languages and produces texts that span cultural differences, overcome geographical and temporal barriers.
The translator is an intermediary, a technician, magician and alchemist working between languages to create inspired texts spanning cultural differences, geographic distances, and time.
In Arnou-Laujeac’s Beyond Elsewhere – through Hélène Cardona’s interpretative efforts – we find a lyrical narrative that is soaked in a saddening sense of loss, of exile and set alight by a persistent, gloriously hopeful search for the ineffable, the absolute. One of French poetry’s most innovative new voices, Arnou-Laujeac is a graduate of Science Po who has studied human rights and philosophies both Western and Eastern.
His book opens with an elegiac note, with the imagery of shadowy temples. The wheel of history is being diverted mechanically by controlling, anonymous hands in cold rooms of power. The four winds have been emptied of their God, a certain “specter of absence” has covered every atom of the universe. In this dark and suffocating era of machines and self-interest, in this century without an open sky and fixed anchor, the poet begins to harbor Dreams of Elsewhere. Dreams of Beyond Elsewhere. He aspires to acquire a space, a state of transcendence.
Refuge and relief appear in the shape and form of a mad first love – the poet is able to “ward off” the rusty society, the ugly automated world of naked, lusterless matter. He writes of his encounter with the object of his desire:
She reveals herself to my gaze naturally, the way spring unveils the blueness of sky or the gold of your skin. She slowly removes makeup, masks and ornaments, and gives me a vision of herself bewitched, of herself bewitching: she adores me and I unlock her. Sprung raw from a virginal flame, passion takes us whole under its animal breath: the sun sparks impale our bodies galloping in a crash of oceans.
For a while, the lovers reign in a world where the beloved becomes everything – “the only face of what is faceless”. They are drunk, intoxicated in a “shoreless elsewhere”. Meeting and mating, for them, is a liturgical affair. They are wild swans who access a magical plenitude in “the holy of holies of their intertwined bodies.”
Soon however, there is a conflict, a drifting apart. An earthquake of disenchantment. The passion is profaned to vestiges. He has lost her, he has lost paradise. He is alone, inconsolable. Lost. Painfully, he reveals:
I shun the heights of love, haunted by the memory of a vertiginous fall.
The whole world becomes a wasteland, a desert where the poet is cursed to wander, pointlessly drinking false mirage water. As he does this, he mentions a cryptic verse by a famous writer:
Gradually I understand. I gradually accept. I recall in my flesh Samuel Beckett’s lines, in the somber and lucid heart of absence: they come different and the same / with each it is different and the same / with each the absence of love is different / with each the absence of love is the same.
“They” could be people, “they” could be places – with whom and in which the poet continues to feel directionless and unappreciated.
Desiccated and distressed, he is tempted to embrace nihilism, to adopt the doctrine of the absurd, to surrender and declare that the universe is not inherently meaningful. But the poet goes on, refuses to give up. He continues to seek the unknown, something more, something else:
I resist its [the absurd’s] misleading vertigo, its lying mirrors, its sick beauty. Through centuries of ancient glory to come, I am immune to the hissing snakebite of death nestled deep in the human soul. I stand beyond the borders of nothingness, outstretched toward the inaccessible.
He fills his mind with memories of an unreachable yet conveniently close Kingdom overflowing with offerings of love. He sees this world with new and clearer eyes. The poet begins to recognise the value of himself (“Me”) and the value of that which is not-him (“All Other”). He is struck and stunned by the grace and variety of nature. He finds himself entranced again, by a mysterious woman – who is that grace and variety personified:
She is the rumor that rumbles at the bottom of the seashell stranded on the beach. Her beauty derives from elsewhere. She is the sun’s song, the moon’s sighs, an endless dream springing from the depths of another dream with a woman’s bust and eagle wings: her, then me in her; her, then light.
In the middle of this aesthetically-charged spiritual experience, the tumult of the world recedes for the poet. Natural time, he is certain, is a ring on the finger of a gorgeous supernatural Eternity.
He is captivated by the azure sea, by the fiery aurora. He finds a realm beyond the visible one.
He ends his lyrical narrative with an invocation of the “original lovers” – Heaven and Earth, who touch and merge at the horizon. He thinks of the black night, the scintillating expanse of the skies – the celestial assimilations, “the great luminaries contemplating each other”. And beyond the cover of the constellations, he knows, the invisible Seer of all things remains, who cannot be captured in images. This Seer is the First Cause – God – the Being who also happens to be pure and inexhaustible being-ness, orchestrating and holding the cosmos together.
And so – drawing from the adventure of his own spiritual journey – the poet presents to other lost and stateless souls a beautiful and genuine promise of return, of release. Stylistically spontaneous and thematically deep, Beyond Elsewhere is a challenging read. Arnou-Laujeac effortlessly distills whole schools of knowledge in short verses and phrases – from ancient Biblical to modern existential. The book may look fragmentary and abrupt in a first and quick reading but it will disclose itself as a delightful psalm, an enlightening talisman when engaged with again and again. It deserves to be.
September 3, 2016
Beautiful dream like poetry which takes one on a journey to calming still waters. Perfectly translated by Helene Cardona giving the text the life it deserves x
September 5, 2016
Exceptionally well written. A stunning book.
Read
May 23, 2017This book was featured in the Nota Benes section of the May 2017 issue of World Literature Today Magazine.
https://www.worldliteraturetoday.org/...
https://www.worldliteraturetoday.org/...
February 7, 2017
I know how hard translating poetry could be. This translation is deep and pertinent.
Page after page, this book brings us in an inspiring journey. I read these poems and I forgot it was a translation. This is a great quality for a translator. Thank you for offering this book in English.
Page after page, this book brings us in an inspiring journey. I read these poems and I forgot it was a translation. This is a great quality for a translator. Thank you for offering this book in English.
January 17, 2017
Helene Cardona's rendering of Arnou-Laujeac powerful lyricism invests the original with a new light, intensifying the pleasure of reading his poetry, as we discover along the way different ways of expressing the same images and emotions.
September 8, 2016
I can only imagine the depth of the original French version as the the translation is….mesmerizing
January 26, 2017
An exceptional book length prose poem....
May 13, 2017
Yet more wonderful work from Helene Cardona. She can't help but be her exquisitely poetic self as a translator as well!!
September 14, 2016
Awesome! Thanks a lot dear and gentle Gabriel Arnou-Laujeac, author in the translation by Helene Cardona, for sharing the concept and the beauty with the whole world! The best for you and yours! AlwAys!
September 3, 2016
All i can say is just WOW! so extremely impressive :-)
Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews