All posts tagged: quebec

Dispatches from MES FORETS/MY FORESTS by Hélène Dorion

Poems by HÉLÈNE DORION
Translated from the French by SUSANNA LANG

Poems appear below in both French and English.

 

forest

 

Québec Province, Canada

Les racines
fendent le sol
comme des éclairs

avancent dans leur solitude
et tremblent

pareilles à une vaste cité de bois
les racines
s’accordent à la sève
qui les fouille

observent-elles les nuages
pour apprendre
la langue de l’horizon

Dispatches from MES FORETS/MY FORESTS by Hélène Dorion
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Marie-Andrée Gill: Poems in Translation from SPAWN

Poetry by MARIE-ANDRÉE GILL
Translated from the French by KRISTEN RENEE MILLER

Poems appear in both French and English.

Translator’s Note

to lick the skin of the water / with a tongue I don’t speak

Marie-Andrée Gill’s Spawn is a surprising, colorful, virtuosic collection. Its brief, untitled poems span ’90s-kid nostalgia, the life cycle of fresh-water salmon, a coming of age, and the natural landscape of the Mashteuiatsh reserve, centered on Lake Piekuakami—a site of recreation and commerce, a reminder of conquest and ecological decline, a symbol of the ancient world, of sex, of the cycles of life. These poems are tightly interdependent, and Spawn could truly be read as a single, braided, book-length poem. But I want to focus here on a theme that became especially vital to my project of understanding and translating the book: recovery of language.

Marie-Andrée Gill: Poems in Translation from SPAWN
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