Translations of Claire Malroux and Guy Goffette: Introduction

Abstract

Pieces by two prominent French poets appear for the first time in English. "The Key" and "The Interior Atlas" by Claire Malroux work through Dickinson's multifarious geographies: familiar and strange, private and worldly. Guy Goffette's "Emily Dickinson" speaks to particular ways in which Dickinson enacted her identity through and against gender norms, and how she continues to trouble them today.

Claire Malroux was born in the Albigeois, in southwestern France, before World War II: the war and the Occupation, the death of her Résistant father and the survival of her family are perhaps the backdrop to all of her work. As a child, she left the south for Paris when her father was elected a deputy in the short-lived socialist Popular Front government of 1936. She completed her education at the prestigious École Normale Supérieure. She has remained in the capitol, where she still lives, for most of her adult life, except for a post-war sojourn in England which led to her engagement with the English language and its poetry (her concentration until then having been in classical languages and in the French canon).

Though she had for years previously worked as a literary translator, and was already the author of two collections of poems, Malroux describes as a signal event in her own literary life her discovery in 1983 of the poetry of Emily Dickinson, which she describes as "an encounter with the uncanny," and the awakening of a "personal affinity." Malroux's ongoing project of translating Dickinson began then, and her own work evolved and developed along with it. Since 1989, she has published a large selection of Dickinson's poems in her translation in one volume for Les Éditions Belin; two substantial collections of the correspondence (with four male correspondents in one volume, four female correspondents in another) with Éditions José Corti; a collection of the poems in quatrain form, including poems drawn from the letters, in Gallimard's pocket series; and, most significantly, an amply prefaced translation of the sewn "fascicle" sequences, in their order and in their entirety, entitled Une Ame en Incandescence, also with José Corti. Claire Malroux is herself the author, now, of ten books of poems—six published since 1998. Three years ago, Claire began writing—at first as sketches, even poem drafts—a book about her "uncanny encounter" with Dickinson, which became Chambre avec vue sur l'éternité, published by Gallimard in 2005, and reviewed in this journal's pages by Alfred Corn (XV.1 2006). Neither a critical study nor a biography, still less a "memoir," it is a perceptive and imaginative recreation of one writer's exploration of another's work, at times a poet's close reading, at times an imagined dialogue between the two. Warmly received by the French critical press, Chambre avec vue brought many readers to the translated poems for the first time, others back to them for further reading. I think it's no exaggeration to say that Dickinson's recognition as a major American poet, as a major poet of the English language, in France (where literary culture is still noticeably resistant to women poets) is due in no small part to Claire Malroux's translation and presentation of her work.

Guy Goffette is a writer of a younger generation, born in the Belgian Lorraine after the war. Homages, examinations and mental dialogues with literary forbears, French and foreign, figure largely in his work, both in his four most recent collections of poems and in his prose studies—not dissimilar in spirit to Claire Malroux's Chambre avec vue—of Verlaine, Bonnard and that most un-French of poets, Auden. Goffette invented the word "dilectures" for his poems about writers—a clever hybrid of "dilection," a literary, Latinate word for a tender or spiritual love, and "lecture"—reading. This poem about Dickinson is one of them.