In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • The Key
  • Claire Malroux (bio)
    Translated by Marilyn Hacker (bio)

For a long time, I've been searching for a key to this body of work.

I remember having owned up to my inability when I stated, in the first introduction I wrote to Emily's poems, in the Belin edition of 1989: she alone has the key to this wild display. (Moi seul j'ai la clef de cette parade sauvage: Rimbaud.)

I still endorse the method of reading which I proposed at that time: "If you want to grasp the profound unity of these scattered fragments, with no order to them but the chronological (and some are not even dated), you must place them in the context of a spiritual adventure, unique of its kind, of a hand-to-hand combat with the void, where poetry becomes a weapon, a means of salvation."

But my proposal was still too vague. It sketched out a way, pointed to a door without showing an entry code to open it.

I am still in search of the key, albeit with no illusions. I suspect that there is not a single one, but several, and as many as there are readers. From now on, I am in search of A key, my own, no longer of THE key.

It would be something more like a pass-key, an instrument that would allow me to slip like a burglar into the vast dwelling that is Emily's work, and to move discreetly within it, opening now this door and now that, trusting a bit to chance.

It is rather mad, anyway, to bring locks and keys into a dwelling whose owner has [End Page 8] left it deliberately wide open, without partitions to mark the separation between its various rooms.

It's within time that I look for my own pass-key. I see nothing else that can adjust itself to the building's dimensions, this vast parenthesis of Emily's that was never closed.

To begin with, I'll keep to my plan of moving with the current of almost-gratuitous chance. I'll push open a few familiar doors here and there before venturing further.

Marilyn Hacker
Chambre avec vue sur l'éternité
(France: Éditions Gallimard, 2005. 127-128)
Claire Malroux

Claire Malroux, the most prominent French translator of Emily Dickinson's poetry and correspondence, is also the author of ten books of poems: the most recent, La Femme sans paroles, was published by Le Castor astral in 2006. The many other Anglophone poets she has translated include Derek Walcott, Elizabeth Bishop, and Anne Carson. Three collections of Malroux's poems have been published in English in bilingual editions with Marilyn Hacker's translations: Edge (Wake Forest UP, 1996), A Long-Gone Sun (Sheep Meadow P, 2000) and Birds and Bison (Sheep Meadow P, 2004). Malroux received the Grand Prix National de la Traduction in 1995.

Marilyn Hacker

Marilyn Hacker is the author of eleven books of poems, including Desesperanto (Norton, 2003) and Essays on Departure: New and Selected Poems (Carcanet Pres, U.K., 2006). She has also published six books of translations of work by Claire Malroux and by the Lebanese Francophone poet Vénus Khoury-Ghata. She received an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2004. La Rue palimpseste, a collection of Hacker's poems translated into French by Claire Malroux, received the Prix Max Jacob étranger in 2005. Hacker lives in New York and Paris, and teaches at the City College of New York and the CUNY Graduate Center.

...

pdf

Share