Category Archives: french

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If the night deposits you at the sea’s high line
Do not offend the sea in you by running ancient gods aground
Only flowers know how to climb eternity
We call you wounded earth O how brief our time
Will be, like the water whose bed cannot be seen
Song of water piled on the water of that sorrowful evening
You are sweet to the one you distance from your night
Like a too-heavy pebble buried on the shores of midnight
I aimed my oars between the islands I named you
Long before you assigned me sanctuary and breath
I named you Ungraspable and All-Fled-Away
Your laughter separated the blue waters from the unknown waters

                                                                       * * *

      I named you wounded Earth, whose rift is ungovernable, and I clothed you in
threnodies uprooted from the recesses of yesterday
      Crushing dust and hurtling down my words to the pens and pushing the mute
gray bulls to the edges
      I dedicated to you a people of the wind where, in your silence you capsize so
that earth, you create me
      When you rise in your color, where there is a crater ever in leaf, visible in the
future

– Edouard Glissant. excerpt from For Mycea

translated by Brent Hayes Edwards

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his right shoulder lower than his left
heavy with rocky snowfalls from such endurance
It’s his motionless breath that fissures our walls in the night when one winter hands
    power over to another
The deaf bluetit’s wing-beats count for nothing
nor the mother’s invectives guilty of having grouted the tiles with her tears

Yet the storm announced festive disorder
erosion polished up by subtle winds
Everything smiled at us
and the mother who wore her tears around her neck like warm-sea pearls
counted them on our fingers that grew with the Persian lilac, the only one to
    sympathize with our sorrows

– Vénus Khoury-Ghata. God, the mother claimed, is behind every tree in the forest

translated by Marilyn Hacker

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No work pulled tight, silent, and monotonous as endlessly sculpted sea – but

outbursts concessions to earth’s effervescence – opening past worry and

torment a stridency of beaches for the heart – bursts always dislocated,

always reiterated, and beyond consummation – not works but the matter

itself where a work makes its way – all bound up in some project about to

cast them away – first cries, naïve murmurs, weary forms – witnesses,

though awkward, of this project – which, as their imperfections must meet

perfectly cohere – here with the power to convince that we must stop at the

uncertain – things that tremble, waver, and ceaselessly become – like a land

in the grip of devastation – sparse.

– Edouard Glissant. from Riveted Blood

translated by Betsy Wing

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