[à mi-vie ouverte sur l‘étendue]
Buy Issue for $25 at JHUP- [à mi-vie ouverte sur l‘étendue]*
à mi-vie ouverte sur l‘étenduetoute cette eau ramassée sur ses plisla vie flambe comme rienet mes actes dans la mer puisésà l‘instant d’écrireles îles me hèlentécriture de chaux dont on peint les berceauxl’immense dalle de la mer monte en moiprobablement non loin des cayesoù voguent les amersmon sang est du voyageseulmûrissant ma famineet lisant l’Ecclésiaste [End Page 10]
- [in mid-life open upon the expanse]
in mid-life open upon the expanseall this water heaped on its foldslife flames like crazyand my acts scooped from the seaat the instant when I am writingthe islands call mewriting with the lime used for painting cradlesthe immense sea slab rises within meprobably not far from shrineswhere the seamarks sailmy blood also travelsaloneripening my hungerand reading Ecclesiastes [End Page 11]
Joël Des Rosiers, born in Haiti, is a poet and psychiatrist in Quebec, where he has lived since he was ten years old. His books of poems include Métropolis Opéra, Tribu (finalist of the Prix du Gouverneur general), Savanes (winner of Prix d’excellence de Laval), Vétiver, Caïques, and Gaïac. Winner of the Grand Prix of Montreal Book and the Grand Prix of International Poetry Festival, Vétiver has been translated into English by Hug Haelton and published in 2005 by Signature Editions in Winnipeg, and won the Governor General’s Award. In 2011, his literary publications garnered for him the Prix Athamase-David, Quebec’s most prestigious literary prize. His Théories Caraïbes, Poétique du déracinement, a critical monograph, was revised in 2009 and awarded the Prix de la Société des écrivains canadiens.
Carrol F. Coates, Professor Emeritus of French, Comparative Literature, and Linguistics at Binghamton University (SUNY), has published a number of translations of Caribbean and African literature, including General Sun, My Brother (Jacques Stephen Alexis) and Waiting for the Vote of the Wild Animals (Ahmadou Kourouma), both published in the series CARAF Books (University of Virginia Press), of which he is the former series editor. He teaches courses in nineteenth century French poetry, La Fontaine’s Fables, Haitian and African literature in French, and advanced grammar and stylistic analysis, and is currently researching the structuration of sound patterns and versification in the Russian fables of Ivan Andreyevich Krylov.
Joël Des Rosiers, born in Haiti, is a poet and psychiatrist in Quebec, where he has lived since he was ten years old. His books of poems include Métropolis Opéra, Tribu (finalist of the Prix du Gouverneur general), Savanes (winner of Prix d’excellence de Laval), Vétiver, Caïques, and Gaïac. Winner of the Grand Prix of Montreal Book and the Grand Prix of International Poetry Festival, Vétiver has been translated into English by Hug Haelton and published in 2005 by Signature Editions in Winnipeg, and won the Governor General’s Award. In 2011, his literary publications garnered for him the Prix Athamase-David, Quebec’s most prestigious literary prize. His Théories Caraïbes, Poétique du déracinement, a critical monograph, was revised in 2009 and awarded the Prix de la Société des écrivains canadiens.
Footnotes
* From Caïques, poèmes (Montréal: Triptyque, 2007). Translation and excerpt published here by permission of the author and publisher.
