Recumbents
BY Michel Deguy
TRANSLATED FROM THE FRENCH
BY Wilson Baldridge
(Wesleyan University Press, 2005)

Deguy initially published Recumbents in 1985 under the title Gisants : Poèmes. Baldridge explains that the adjective gisant describes “a person lying down,” and notes the unabridged Webster definition of a gisant as “a recumbent sculpture of a deceased person,” while adding that in Deguy’s poetry, the term gisants “refers to lovers lying down,” as well as “spaces or places of abode.” In Recumbents, there are “seven individual poems with a variety of connotations (that) echo the book’s overall title,” which is reflective of the poet’s response to his mother’s death in 1980, and his father’s suicide in 1984. Deguy’s “Convoi” (“Procession”), the poem at the origin of Recumbents, is an elegaic response to “the circumstances of bereavement,” followed by poems that juxtapose eros and thanatos in a unique fusion of lyric vibrancy and philosphic gravity in an attempt to reach a reconciliation of disparate modes. The 1985 edition was the winner of the Mallarmé Academy’s Grand Prize, and The Writer’s Association of France gave Deguy their Grand Prize in 2000 celebrating the publication of Gisants : Poèmes III, also as a tribute to the entirety of Deguy’s work. Baldridge’s translation of Recumbents was named as the 2006 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation choice, and won the MLA Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Translation of a Literary Work in that year. Elisabeth Cardonne-Arlyck stated that “One could not have hoped for a more sure-footed, attentive, and refined rendering of Deguy’s exacting poetry,” while the PEN citation by Joris praised Baldridge’s “accurate ear for the complex music of the French original,” noting his “exquisitely balancing poetic sensibility and philosophical insight,” which has resulted in “everything a poetic translation should be.”

Donnant donnant
(Given/Giving)
BY Michel Deguy
(Gallimard, 1981)

Deguy has published forty volumes in France, and other than Clayton Eshelman’s translation of Given/Giving, his work has been, the jacket notes, “largely inaccesible to English language readers.” To open a path of access in English, a translator must be responsive to the ways, Baldridge asserts in his foreword, “Deguy develops a poetics of the phenomenal structure, a poetics in the interspace betwixt and among positions represented by phenomenology, structuralism, semiotics and deconstruction,” elements not often identified with a poetic sensibility by poets writing in English. To be able to convey the depth of inquiry that is one of the singular characteristics of Deguy’s poetry — what he calls poetic reason (passages on rhetoric) — without losing what Baldridge identifies as the “process of transference, translation or meta-phor, wherein being is borne over into saying,” is a task of sufficient difficulty to make Baldridge’s ambitious endeavor impressive for even attempting the “balancing” that PEN cited, and Cardonne-Arylck’s praise is not misplaced. The essence of Baldridge’s task is encapsulated by Nicolas Boileau’s observation that “Descartes has cut the throat of poetry,” and it is not in any way an underestimation of Baldridge, or his work, to offer some qualification to the claim that it is “everything a poetic translation should be.” I do not mean it as criticism to say that I hear, in French, the voice of a lyric poet sometimes constrained in English by the rudiments of a non-poetic, philosophic mode of discourse. The number of separate works in Recumbents required Baldridge to devote a significant amount of time to the translation, perhaps at some cost to the creation of a poetry in English that resonates with the range of music that twentieth-century American poetry has offered.