Individual words are often dependent on the taste and instinct of a translator, and are not usually as crucial as the transposition of form. The syntax that Deguy depends on proposes a greater challenge in the second stanza of the poem:

Bottes collants dépecés bain
Le jusant te découvre
Tes bas pèlent ton bas fait l’équilibre
Une autre fois j’ai bu à ton nadir
T’amenant à plus être peut-être

Baldridge writes:

Boots hose shredded bath
The ebb discloses you
Your bottoms peel off your bottom keeps the balance
Another time I drank from your nadir
Maybe brings you to heightened being

The first line is a flash of imagery, although the idea of a “shredded bath” attempts an engagement of fundamentally disparate substances. The strained synecdoche of “The ebb discloses you,” the somewhat bizarre surreality of “bottoms peel off,” the misplaced comicality of drinking “from your nadir” and the perplexity of how this “brings you to a heightened being” make this stanza unsatisfactory in English, more like a literal transcription than a translation of a poem.

Deguy frequently uses a reflexive doubling, so that “être peut-être” can be seen as central to the meaning and feeling of the lines, leading to an aural correspondence, as utter/être. “Collants” can be taken as “tight,” “jusant” suggests an ebbing, but is more directly a low tide, so to bring the stanza somewhat closer to a recognizeable syntax:

Tight boots removed for bathing
Low tide reveals you
Layer after layer, body still balanced,
Realizing again the time I tasted
The utter essence of your being.

Deguy practically never uses any internal punctuation, but the introduction of the comma emphasizes the rhythmic pulses required by the English syntax, which is a small addition compared to the demands of the last two lines of the stanza.

An exploration of two other poems, one tending toward a traditional lyric, and one which is an illustration of Deguy’s “poetic reason” (poems incorporating “passages on rhetoric” in Baldridge’s explanation) provide further possibilities for approaches to Deguy’s work. Amidst the Gisants, Deguy offers atmospheric conjectures which reflect his life in Paris. “Aphrodite collègue,” reminiscent of Charles Baudelaire’s observations in Le Spleen de Paris, is a quick glimpse that leaves a lingering impression:

Moderne anadyomène des VC belle
la botticellienne dans un grand bruit de chasse
s’encadre sur la porte verte rajustant blonde
à l’électricité la tresse l’onde
et d’une manche glabre de pull
tire sur la jupe au niveau de l’iliaque

The fusion of the classical beauty and the contemporary setting sets the mood for the poem, juxtaposing the mythic with the mundane. A literal version of the title would be “Aphrodite Colleague,” with the implication of a pause after the name of the Goddess, with both words having equal stress. “Anadyomene” could be reproduced exactly (Baldridge’s choice), but a slight modernization to Aphroditian is also appropriate. “VC” might be a little too close to slang in English, while “powder room” has a knowing euphemistic quality that captures Deguy’s bemused fascination, while Baldridge’s “great flushing noise” might be more mechanical than Deguy’s description. The strong “blonde/l’onde” rhyme encourages the “wave/sleeve” parallel, while the closing image typically expresses Deguy’s propensity for anatomical terminology, which could be better served with a less clinical reproduction.

Modern Aphroditian of the powder room
beautiful Botticellian in a great surge of sound
she is framed by a green door, shaping
her golden tress in an electric wave,
and with a smooth sweater sleeve
pulls her skirt up to her abdomen