Poet Beyond Borders

Not unlike other French poets translated by Marilyn Hacker and previously reviewed in these pages (Venus Khoury-Ghata and Guy Goffette, 30.2), Emmanuel Moses is a "citizen of two countries" and poet of margins and passages. He was born in French Morocco in 1959, a student in Israel, now living in Paris, a translator and editor, fluent in four languages, author of novels, short stories, and poems, he is a remarkable figure of the modern cosmopolitan "poète sans frontières," as Marilyn Hacker states in her useful introduction to this beautiful translation.

Here is a poet beyond borders, but not without roots: his spirit moves from one geographical culture to another, from one past historical period to the present. The poems of He and I were culled from three different titles, two of which were published in 2006, 2009, and the final one is scheduled for 2010. The book is here organized in five sections. The first one, with the mirror title evoking both the writer and his double (who might also be his translator), brings us to reflect on the writing process. Recalling "Old Conversations," places (with the subtle irony of the messages written by tourists in the poem ending with the notice that "Tirelessly, distance plays / its melancholy minuet"), a question about "Ugliness" as a possible inspiration in a girl's travel journal, it ends on a wistful "Golden Age," which mood evokes Stéphane Mallarmé: "Memories of lace are rustling everywhere / and the swan's dawn cry / freezes forever."

The second section introduces the reader to Mr. Nobody, an emblematic figure in Moses's work, who first appeared in 2003. Discovering him in Marilyn Hacker's translation makes me consider that this character, besides its being an echo of Henri Michaux's Monsieur Plume, in Un Certain Plume (1930), is still more a kin—a twin—to a very American urban and poetical figure—whose "saga"—Tony's World—has just been published by Barry Wallenstein. Both are modern, pensive, self-deprecating, and lonely characters, traveling, frequenting bars, motels, and hotel rooms—nowhere places in a way. This is a recurrent theme throughout the whole work for these who are as well Nobody as Everybody, as surely as they are a paper double of the poet, listening or talking to voices ("Mr. Nobody Speaks To His Voice"), fumbling for a notebook ("Mr. Nobody Joins The Broken Hearts' Club") in an empty unlit room where the waiters have left "just one ceiling lamp lit above his head / which shines on his glass his pen his hands with their bitten nails." Mr. Nobody's self-irony, brought forward by very simple words, which treat of petty human problems (the tragic-comical "heroe's" tuna allergy for one) is characteristic of the author's style. Moses makes of this falsely neutral writing on small items of life the basis of the highest poetical language, reminding us of the metaphysical poets such as George Herbert, the poet's choice for an epigraph. This inspiration is visible in rare and precious images such as this pictorial "eye-blue stained glass where a dove / spreads an enigma's wings / between two discreet roses!"

Few images, but of a luminous effect (the efficient "how blonde the light is today / around him") bloom in fluid open forms where verses and narrative prose passages, lyric and conversational "terre à terre" considerations, dialogues or fragments, alternate. This construction weaves overlapping thoughts and memories which make the reader travel through ages (incarnating soldiers of various battles in "Riverbend Passage"—victim or executioner, as in "And I Killed Them All") or exploring lives, places, and "beings":

I—we—clouds..................I was magical metamorphosedthe restless child.

The whole selection, ending with two sections entitled "Etudes and Elegies" and "The Music That Set Him On This Road," illustrates the richness and versatility of Emmanuel Moses's work. It also underlines the strong autobiographical line of this inspiration: the memory of his father (an authority in Jewish tradition and philosophy, who studied...