8 micro-poems by Tania Langlais

photo by Giovanni Apruzzese

from Pendant que Perceval tombait (While Perceval was falling)
translated from the Québecois French by Jessica Cuello

no doubt

the heart is a story

maybe a roar

some say : murmur

something whispered

so the waves

begin again

 
le coeur est sans doute

une histoire

au plus un bruit

certains diront : murmure

quelque chose a parlé tout bas

de recommencer les vagues

*

all this happens in a single day

picture the sun

my dead love

a wandering thing

that burned my eyes

 
tout cela se passe en une journée

imagine le soleil

mon amour mort

quelque chose a erré

brûlé mes yeux

*

the house fell mute

after the storm

an elm split in two

and that night

while you were falling

a wolf suckled Rome

to heal the world

la maison s’est tue

après le ciel

deux ormes déchirés

cette nuit-là

pendant que tu tombais

une louve allaitait Rome

pour réparer le monde

*

imagine if it was you

trapped one day

in a freezing river

joined

to another life

holding it

in your hands

before it fled

 
si un jour c’était toi

imagine

un piège peut-etre

une rivière trop froide

où t’épouser

une autre vie

tenue dans les mains

puis échappée

*

since this happens

in a single day

I no longer remember

the dappled sunlight

Percival never returns

to this light

he will never

car cela se passe

en une journée

je l’ai dit je ne sais plus

éclaboussée de soleil

où Perceval ne revient jamais

ne reviendra jamais

*

more fervent than a soldier

dying secretly

for love

I sometimes write books

nothing that matters

and lavender

sickens the cat

mieux qu’un soldat

mort d’amour

dans tos dos

j’écris parfois des livres

rien qui vaille

sauf peut-être la lavande

pour le chat

*

riddles begin

in a broken sky

the roar gallops past

an act of faith

is killing us

les casse-têtes ça commence

par le ciel en morceaux

le bruit qui court

un acte de foi

aura raison de nous

*

in the margins

of the saddest notebook 

I write false words

useless marks

of punctuation

mournful

I begin again

to find the right words

j’écris à l’étroit

le journal me semble insupportable

des impostures des natures mortes

avec une ponctuation inutile

mélancolique

je recommence

à trouver de bons titres

*

Quebecoise poet Tania Langlais’ most recent book, Pendant que Perceval tombait, draws from overlapping sources: literary fiction, literary biography, and a third voice which enters subtly, the voice of the poet. This book-length poem occurs over the course of a single day and encompasses both the day of Woolf’s suicide and the death of the character Percival from Woolf’s novel The Waves. It’s striking in its spareness and structure. I have read nothing else like it. I was fortunate to zoom with Langlais and, while she is a poet reluctant to discuss her work directly, she revealed that the book originated from a grant to explore the character Percival from Virginia Woolf’s The Waves and quickly became a poem obsessed with Woolf—not, she asserts, from a perverse curiosity with her suicide, but from a compassion for the woman that Woolf was, a woman trying to heal.

To enter this book is to enter a state of grief, to negotiate with “la douleur.” During my conversation with Langlais, our conversation turned intimately to the repetitive language of grief. Perceval is composed of a cycle of recursive images; they contain a wavelike rhythm and the insistence of galloping hooves. Like The Waves, multiple narratives are present and so it wasn’t initially clear whether lines referenced Woolf or the character Percival. Langlais says in an March 2021 interview that Pendant que Perceval tombait is a casse-tete (puzzle) and I discovered that the more I trusted myself and took risks, the more the poem opened, much in the way that a riddle reveals itself. The poem rejects a linear progression and the separate poems are almost interchangeable. Their order is not what counts, but the sense of recurrence. I had to take care to translate recurring lines consistently because repetition is deeply attuned to the nature of grief in the poem. Without it the exceptional beauty of the book would be lost.

If translation is the longing to near another, an idea I got from translator Philip Metres, this particular translation is a longing not only to recreate the work of Langlais, but to honor Woolf. A young friend of mine would call this fan-fic, but I believe it speaks to an older love, one from childhood—of writers and their worlds. The fact that in this book these two worlds—fictional and real—intersect without demarcation is poignant too. Often our relationship with a literary work is as real as any relationship, just as any relationship with a writer we have never met can feel intimate and life-changing, a stay against loneliness.

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