4

Marie de Quatrebarbes
Translated from the French by Aiden Farrell

It’s a landscape in motion, such that wherever you look, it’s beautiful. So I turn the dialogue up a notch. The candles smoke on their cone, manifestly. My vision fades. I saw rough seas before eyes. I put away my oversized shoes. I slept in my worry. I swam before swimming. I pressed the pulp and I screamed. I thought she had called me.

 

4.

C’est un paysage en mouvement, tel qu’à quelque point où l’on regarde, il est beau. Alors je monte le dialogue d’un cran. Les bougies fument sur leur cône, manifeste-ment. Ma vision se défait. J’ai vu, avant les yeux, des mers agitées. J’ai remisé mes souliers aux grands pieds. J’ai dormi dans mon souci. J’ai nagé avant nager. J’ai pressé la pulpe et j’ai crié. J’ai cru qu’elle m’appelait.

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Marie de Quatrebarbes (b. 1984) lives and works in Paris. She has published several books of poetry, including Voguer (P.O.L., Winner of the Academie Française’s Paul-Verlaine Prize, 2020), Les vivres (P.O.L.), and Vanités (Éric Pesty Éditeur), as well as a novel inspired by the life of Aby Warburg, Aby (P.O.L.). She published La tête et les cornes, a poetry and translation review, republished the complete poems of Michel Couturier (L’ablatif absolu, La tête et les cornes), and edited an anthology dedicated to contemporary poetry by young French women (Madame tout le monde, Le Corridor bleu). Since 2023, she is the co-manager of the French publishing house Éditions Corti.

Aiden Farrell is a poet, translator, editor, and educator. He has published two chapbooks: lilac lilac (Portable Press @ Yo-Yo Labs) and organismalgorithm (Fence), and his poetry and translations have been featured in Amygdala, Denver Quarterly, Spectra Poets, Asphalte Magazine, Wonder, and elsewhere. He is the managing editor of Futurepoem, and co-curates the Unnamed reading series with Ryan Cook. Born in Paris and raised between three continents, Aiden lives in Brooklyn. The Vitals is his debut translation.

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The Vitals
World Poetry Books
  • Featured book

Acclaimed French poet Marie de Quatrebarbes’ debut in English translation is an elegiac long poem in the form of a fragmentary journal that tracks the loss of a loved one.

As if the relic of a long-forgotten history, The Vitals ghosts through five successive months, measuring time through the vacillations of a bereaved consciousness. An estranged voice staggers through glimpses of childhood, domesticity, conversations lost and found, and memories reverberating into language. These elliptical prose vignettes ask questions about family, survival, and of the shared experience of grief and longing. Through a documentary impulse, de Quatrebarbes’ poem persists suspended in the space left by a sudden disappearance.

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