The mountains heave themselves up andquiver in her toes; her feet unfold their leaflikepages, subjugate their summits—but legs are nowings, he said, therefore, alive, she lapsed. Living and lapsing: metabolizing gravity. Forthe earth is grave, as grave as a volcano’s voicethat goes up in smoke. Les montagnes se hissent et frémissent dansses orteils ; ses pieds déplient leurs feuillets,soumettent les cimes – mais les jambes ne sont pointdes ailes, disait-il, alors, vivante, elle faillit. Vivre et faillir : métaboliser la gravité. Car laterre est grave, aussi grave que la voix d’un volcanqui part en fumée.
[The mountains heave themselves up]
Charline Lambert
Translated from the French by John Taylor
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“The mountains heave themselves up” from OF DESIRE AND DECARCERATION: by Charline Lambert.
Published by Diálogos on September, 2024.
English Translation Copyright © 2024 by John Taylor.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Photo:
©Sadie von Paris
©Sadie von Paris
Charline Lambert was born in 1989 in Liège, Belgium. Her first four prizewinning books of poetry, Chanvre et lierre (2016), Sous dialyses (2016), Désincarcération (2017), and Une salve (2020), have been entirely translated by John Taylor in the bilingual volume Of Desire and Decarceration (Diálogos Books). Lambert’s first two books have been reissued in the Espace Nord series, devoted to classics and essential contemporary works of Belgian literature. She has recently published a new collection of poems, Quiconques, as well as Docteur Strange, les mains et l’esprit, a book-length essay devoted to the American comic-book character.
Photo:
©Françoise Daviet-Taylor
©Françoise Daviet-Taylor
John Taylor is an American writer, poet, critic, and translator who has long lived in France. As a translator from three languages (French, Italian, and Modern Greek), he has brought the work of several European poets into English for the first time. His recent translations include books by Pascal Quignard, Philippe Jaccottet, Veroniki Dalakoura, Béatrice Douvre, and Franca Mancinelli. His most recent book of poetry is What Comes from the Night.
Of Desire and Decarceration marks the first appearance in English not only of a selection of the young Belgian poet Charline Lambert’s writing, but indeed of her first four books in their entirety. The motivation for bringing forth this substantial corpus is that the four sequences of verse poems and poetic prose pieces respond to each other, grow out of each other. They are stages in an ongoing quest to grasp the mysteries of desire and gain insight into its innermost relationship, not only with the body, but also with language. Lambert’s intense writing leaves no doubts about its personal implications, but her quest can be generalized. For the poet, coming to terms with desire is a prerequisite for a human being who wishes to come to terms with him- or herself, with a personal “identity” that does not necessarily seem—feel—completely or satisfactorily “incarnated,” embodied. Whence this tetralogy, with its striking quips, koans, cryptic allusions (to crochet and Chinese acupuncture), queries, conjectures, lemmas, experimental results, and insightful observations about desire and “decarceration,” ever with the aim of clarifying our personal existential affairs so that “joy can be placed at the helm.”
“[In Charline Lambert’s poetry], it is ultimately Flesh that is made Word and not Word that is made Flesh. This reversal of the perspective is not without importance: for where the Word made Flesh agonizes, Flesh made Word confounds its mortal condition and aims at a plenitude expressed by the acceptance of desire and the clarity, the light, the sun saving one from ‘the mud of being.’ It is then that what has been confined pours out in a vastitude with ‘joy at the helm.’ [. . .] "Salvo, salvation, saliva: this signifying triptych structures her poetic sequence, which represents, like the sea invoked in it, the place to wash oneself, to sublimate oneself, to become wind, to be freed of burdens, limits, and landmarks, the mental and physical walls that are a part of our carnal and spiritual envelope. This extirpation of the self, through a flow of language in which infinitive verbal forms, repetitions, and key images of confinement (night, blackness, evening, anguish), violently express this effort of a new birth designed to reappropriate ‘this body, this river of fire quirted by the tongue.'”
—Éric Brogniet, author of Radical Machines
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