Oeuvres by Nicolas Bouvier. Gallimard, 1420 pp., 29.50€.

Correspondance des routes croisées by Nicolas Bouvier and Thierry Vernet. Edi-tions Zoé, 1660 pages, 39€.

La Voie nomade: œuvres complètes 1952–2007 by Anne Perrier. Éditions L’Escampette, 223 pp., 23€.

Terre battue / Lunaires by José-Flore Tappy. Éditions Empreintes, 151 pp., 9€.

La Poésie en Suisse Romande depuis Blaise Cendrars by Marion Graf and José-Flore Tappy (editors). Seghers, 310 pp., 20€.

Die Lyrik der Romandie: Eine Zweisprachige Anthologie by Philippe Jaccottet (editor), German translations by Elisabeth Edl and Wolfgang Matz. Nagel & Kimche (Carl Hanser Verlag), 265 pp., 21.50€.

Quatre poètes (Pierre Chapuis, Pierre-Alain Tâche, Pierre Voélin, Frédéric Wan-delère) by Florian Rodari (editor). L’Age d’Homme, 224 pp., 9€.

The “exquisite” S14 suburban train from Zürich—as the Swiss writ-er C. A. Cingria (1883–1954) might have said—glides like a dream through shiny metallic industrial areas, then bypasses woody hills east of Lake Zürich, making several stops before reaching the termi-nus, Hinwil. In the meantime dozens of high-school students, chat-ting away in their incomprehensible German dialect, have gotten off, their book-filled backpacks sometimes bumping against the automatic doors. Unsurprisingly in this land of masterly clocks, not only does the train arrive exactly on time in Hinwil, but at this quiet end-station you hop right into the hourly bus No. 875, which forthwith climbs steep

Poetry Today

Translating Swiss Poetry in Looren

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winding streets, once again reaches sparkling green pastures (it has just rained), and finally lets you off in Wernetshausen, a village with a clean, well-lighted grocery shop. From there, after asking directions of a tall bespectacled man (who turns out to be Holger Fock, the German translator of contemporary French novels), you follow a gravel path running alongside and just above a country road. Your two-wheeled suitcase bumps along behind you as you approach a peaceful herd of gray cows. These specific Swiss gray cows, incidentally, are called “brown” in German (and in English, too, as you will learn). This is your first translation exercise. In the distance rises a grandiose array of snow-covered Alpine peaks, including, toward the right, three espe-cially towering ones: the Jungfrau, the Mönch, and the Eiger. Another mountain, the Pilatus, seems equally high, but it is much closer. Fif-teen minutes later you reach a small sign on a post: Looren.

The Looren Übersetzerhaus (or Collège de traducteurs) is a large, ecologically designed farmhouse—the former owners, the publisher Albert Züst and his family, pioneered organic farming in Switzerland over fifty years ago—that has now been refurbished as an interna-tional work and meeting place for translators. The Pro Helvetia Foun-dation has invited seven of us to compare our toil over the poetry and poetic prose of Philippe Jaccottet (b. 1925) and over the poetry and travel writing of Nicolas Bouvier (1929–1998). I’m in the Jac-cottet trio, which comprises his Spanish and Portuguese translators, Rafael-José Diaz and Cristina Isabel de Melo, while Bouvier’s Czech, Iranian, Slovak, and Peruvian translators form a quartet. Actually, we are one friendly French-conversing group who share meals, dictionar-ies from the well-stocked library and, for a few of us, demänovka, a potent bittersweet Slovak herbal liqueur that Zuzana Malinovska has brought along as a gift. We discuss our respective problems all to-gether in a morning and then in an afternoon collective workshop led by Jaccottet’s German co-translator, Elisabeth Edl, and by the Swiss-French critic and translator, Marion Graf.

What do translators talk about when they talk about translation? Semi-colons? Yes. Future anterior verb tenses? Yes. The polysemous French noun “usage” in the title of Bouvier’s travel writing clas-sic, L’Usage du monde (1963), rendered in English as The Way of the World? Yes. The semantic resonance of Jaccottet’s recurrent verb “dérober,” not to mention the unexpected difficulties caused by a word like “espace”? Yes.

Translators thus also talk about implicit philosophical world-views,

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the passing of Time as an inner experience, and about fine shades, not just of meaning, but also of sentiment. And diction? Of course. A high point is reached when we analyze Bouvier’s poem “Hotel,” included in his one poetry volume, Le Dehors et le Dedans (The Outside and The Inside, 1982), which Yamily Yunis is transforming into Peruvian Spanish. At the end, Bouvier depicts a group of Japanese schoolboys rolling some clove cigarettes, “the most pungent in the world.” Then everything quiets down, the boys stand in line, before an immense clamor breaks out and the boys must salute the flag. Bouvier con-cludes: “mégot collé à la lèvre on s’en fout.” With their clove cigarette butts stuck to their lips, do the boys (and the poet) sense that they “couldn’t care less”? “couldn’t give a damn”? “couldn’t give a fuck”? The expression is common in French, though schoolchildren learn—and immediately forget—that they should say something considered to be less vulgar: “On s’en fiche . . .”

Some of Jaccottet’s early- and mid-career writing has appeared in English, but a book-length version of Bouvier’s vivid, good-natured poetry has never been issued. This is a pity, for the travel writer has a sharp eye for detail, much sharper in fact than most French-language poets; and he cheerfully emphasizes the redeeming side of unpleasant experiences. The same poem begins:

Bits of dirty soapscattered nearly everywhereAnd half of a dry turdon the toilet seatAnd this morning on the clean sheetstiny blood stains from the bedbugsbut the mattress was goodand I slept like a king even so . . .

Have we all slept like kings in similar circumstances? Perhaps not. Translators of poetry therefore also talk about the necessity of communing with their foreign poet’s experience, of entering into his sensibility through his words. If the poet is dead, words are all we have, though these may extend beyond a given poem to other books, a journal, or correspondence. The letters that Bouvier exchanged (up to 1964) with his lifelong friend, the artist Thierry Vernet (who accom-panied the writer on his now-famous trip across the Middle East and notably the Iran of Nahid Tabatabai, who is indeed using her knowl-edge of her homeland to render L’Usage du monde into Farsi), have just been published as Correspondance des routes croisées (Corre-

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spondence of Crossed Paths). Hana Zahradnícková, who has already translated L’Usage du monde into Czech, is delighted to open this meticulously annotated volume that will become an essential source for future translators of Bouvier’s plucky, deftly styled travelogue into other languages. Which is not to forget that the letters are themselves candid, touching, delightful, and wise, revealing an exceptionally deep friendship.

In comparison to the human-oriented Bouvier, Jaccottet scruti-nizes nature, questions our relationship to it, and at once marvels at and skeptically examines what sometimes seems to hover, like a lure, just beyond appearances. His poetic prose is often inspired by strolls in the countryside or hikes in the mountains of the comparatively arid Southern Alps of France, specifically in the Drôme, where he lives. Here around Looren the meadows are lush, wet, and verdant, smelling of cow paddies and mud puddles. These rural and climatic differences are inessential to my purposes. Moreover, the foehn from the night before has chased away the chilliness of late autumn. It’s warm in the glaring late-morning sunlight. I keep my wool sweater on, but leave my coat behind in the Translation House and hike, during a two-hour break, along a path that gently rises through cow pastures still glisten-ing with dew. In the distance the Alpine range metamorphoses as I progress, previously unnoticed peaks, cascades, shadowy valleys, and combes—a term favored by the poet and sometimes difficult to render in English—suddenly vying for my attention while what had mattered most to my eyes has faded. Translating Jaccottet’s long, artfully punc-tuated, finely nuanced sentences is also like this.

November is no season for peonies (his prose text about which we have been discussing), nor for the “groundsel, hogweed, chicory” evoked in regard to a situation obliging him to ponder the link between flowers and the death of a friend, and between this same death and the false hopes sometimes tendered by poetic language: mere words as they often are, however beautiful to the ear and aimed at conjuring up Keatsian “things of beauty.” And instead of “meadowlarks sing-ing shrilly up and around the summit of the Lance,” as he phrases it in “Ascending the Steps,” all I see are two milan royaux (red kites) circling high above a field empty to my eyes but not to theirs. But farther on, as I near a stand of leafless beech, I spot a yellowing larch. It is like a tall dim lamp among beige-spotted grayish trunks. In “The Cherry Tree,” one of Jaccottet’s most important poetic prose pieces, he explains:

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I sometimes think that the main reason why I continue to write is, or above all should be, to gather the more or less luminous and convincing fragments of a joy that—so it would be tempting to believe—exploded long ago inside us like an inner star, scat-tering its dust all around. . . . This time it was a cherry tree, not a blossoming cherry tree, which always speaks clearly to us, but rather a fruit-laden one that I glimpsed one June evening on the far side of a vast wheat field.

A translator can stop at the edge of such a wood, gaze at the larch, try to open himself up to inner experiences that parallel those that he has found described so memorably by a foreign poet. Yet all the while he must keep in mind, as Jaccottet himself teaches, that such elation can conceal self-illusion: that what seems substantial insight might ultimately be “nothing but moods; ever less coherent changing moods; nothing but bits, scraps of life, apparent thoughts, fragments rescued from a debacle or worsening it.”

Like Bouvier the poet (if not the travel writer), other important Swiss Francophone poets have remained unknown abroad, and some-times little known even in neighboring France. Two anthologies and one volume devoted to four such poets right this situation. An excel-lent place to start is La Poésie en Suisse Romande, which begins with Blaise Cendrars (1887–1961), who has, albeit, often been rendered into English and who traveled so much that we tend to forget he was Swiss. This comprehensive, excellently postfaced, gathering subse-quently showcases representative samplings of thirty-three more poets and includes, among many other gems, two superb poetic prose pieces by Gustave Roud (1897–1976). The volume ends with a permutation-al long-poem by Valère Novarina (b. 1947). Conceived for the the-ater, this declamatory piece is entitled (with a nod to Wittgenstein), “Whereof One Cannot Speak Is What Must be Said”:

The inside is not inside you.The outside is not inside the outside.You are outside of the inside.The inside is not inside the inside.The other is outside of the otherNothing is inside oneselfYou are inside the insideNothing is outside of the outside. . .

This poem has 111 lines, by the way.Cendrars was instrumental in introducing colloquial speech into

French poetry (with his “Prose du Transsibérien et de la petite Jeanne de France,” dating back to 1913, as the outstanding example); and No-varina remains one of the boldest contemporary experimenters with

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language. Between these two poles, what stands out among several other poets comprised in La Poésie en Suisse Romande and the other two anthologies is much less linguistic experimentation than a finely tuned sensitivity to the impalpable, to mysteries apparently lying be-yond the reach of words.

A case in point is Anne Perrier (b. 1922). Jaccottet’s own selection of her verse (published in his French-German anthology of seventeen Swiss French-language poets, Die Lyrik der Romandie) introduces a poet who blends themes of love, childhood, nature, and spiritual intimation in short, unpunctuated, deceptively simple poems. Rarely has a French-language writer sought out such verbal transparency for subject matter that is avoided or even summarily dismissed by other modern poets because of its potential sentimentality. Yet if Perrier’s sincerity is delicate, it is also firm. The few transitions between lines, often no more than eight in number, give the impression of mingled light-colored strands that nonetheless suggest wholeness, a decipher-able pattern:

In the water of your faceI am the wild watercressDon’t ask me to blossomI don’t know how rosesManage to ripenI am so green deep downIn water slowly covering me

This is from one of her first collections, Le Petit Pré (The Little Meadow, 1960). Her collected verse, gathered in La Voie nomade (The Nomadic Way, 2008), reveals the remarkable unity of her quest, not only thematically but also formally. Here is a poem from 1994:

Soon the last bird will comeTo tap at my windowpaneHow will I hear it without earsHow will I see it without sightFor earthy shapesThough I will know it’s thereFor me alone tapping at the eternalCrystal of the day

More intensely haunted than Perrier yet equally on the lookout for hope-fostering glimmers is José-Flore Tappy (b. 1954). She has arrived by train from Lausanne to read her poems as well as talk about Jaccottet, of whose writing she is a leading scholar. Her stark skeletal poetry often formulates a psychological avowal that implicitly widens

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into a more general ontological perspective. What has stemmed from an urgent inner necessity transcends a specific self. At the end of the reading, we each spontaneously translate one of her poems. I choose the first poem of Terre battue (Beaten Earth, 1995):

Between yesterday and tomorrow I walkon a wobbly plankraised by the light

Down belowthe void the dreadof the deepa fractured worldwhere memory shimmers

a skylightin the black today

That last line—“dans le noir aujourd’hui”—is more difficult than it looks. I first interpret it too freely (and falsely) as “in darkness to-day.” Then I try other solutions: “in black today,” “in dark today,” “in today’s blackness (or darkness),” etc. But the fact of the matter is that a skylight (“lucarne”) is a window in a roof, which Tappy equates to “today,” which she in turn qualifies as “black.” In other words, a skylight in the black roof (that is today). At least for the time being, let me maintain my literal translation. . . . Or perhaps a paraphrase: “a skylight opening / in the roof of black today”? . . . As Paul Valéry remarked of a poem, a translation is never finished, only abandoned.

It is “impossible to inhabit the virgin language, to be the dazzled confessor of the visible.” This additional impossibility involves an-other kind of translation whose unattainable ideal poet-translators can perhaps intuit more precisely than monolingual writers, however fo-cused they may be on such enigmas. The phrase is found in “Sur la mort brève” (“On Brief Death”), a short-prose sequence by Pierre Voé-lin (b. 1949), another poet whose work found its way into my hands in Looren. This poet of alluring, cryptic verse also wanders near woods and fields, as in this poem selected by Jaccottet for his anthology:

Below the bark and the thin leaf of the birchyou take shelter, silence—and I take shelter

And you are equal to the Silesian Angel’s rosebeautiful you are, beautiful in being without whys

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Even the shadows today are favorable

The wheat will surge forth and place the summer on its stemsfor you who doubt and walk pantingtoward your beginning.

Along with Pierre Chappuis (b. 1930), Pierre-Alain Tâche (1940), and Frédéric Wandelère (b. 1949), Voélin is featured in the anthol-ogy Quatre poètes, which offers generous selections from the work of these four poets who deserve attention abroad. Although by no means forming a group, they share affinities, notably skepticism about the justification of writing, a predilection for elliptical or fragmentary forms, a desire to peer through the appearances of the natural world, and an openness to ontological or metaphysical riddles. What strikes me with these and a few other Swiss poets mentioned in this article is their honesty, their absence of irony. Is this because of their experi-ence of mountains? Alpine hikers know that what appears to be com-ing closer—a summit, a waterfall, a combe situated just a little higher up, a bend in the trail—can actually long remain far away. Or ever far away. This sensation of mirage, illusion, suspension, and “being sus-pended” must be taken seriously. It can also be the deepest source. Or as Wandelère puts it in the different context of “So Near yet Moving Away”:

Whether I leave my room,the hill and the woodsembracing me, or remainat my window—or not,aside from this nothing changes

Index cards, tickets, the pompof learning suspendedfor a moment, this hesitationturning into poem.

John Taylor