Stories of the War— Chantal Danjou

Aug 8, 2023 | Poetry | 0 comments

TRANSLATED FROM THE FRENCH BY DOMINIQUE HECQ

Image used for representation

Cry

A body. The intertwined. Another body. Bodies and bodies. Littoral cities all alike. Full of lights. Full of sand. Even through closed shutters. High fever slouching in bedrooms. Powdery paths through landscapes. With eucalyptus forests. With red and white gardens. With exoticisms. Silence but for the cry of swifts.

Blue

Since the love encounter. Since the white lilacs. Since February’s wattle. Always a body. Long as a line. East-West that its crosses. Viewpoint indicator. Its huge back. Its voice in the stone. It sharp shadow. And daylight. Crackling. Throws away its crumpled blue

Streaks

Erasing itself a bit more. Body. Even wanted. Open. Birds on it. Digging their nests. In the eyes’ infinite. And in the mouths’ paroxysm of mouths. Blindness. Black lines. Greek green. Going down. Sienna. Colours like islands. And Islands. One behind the other. Ingenuity then they. Fade

Scenery

Beyond bodies. Beyond pleasure. On the customs officer’s path. Overlooking the sea. It’s there. So many bodies already. One upon each other. Forming a mound decked with sand and schist. Beautiful activated landscape. Trees towering. Squeaking. Seabirds swooping. History that buries. Mass grave that lowers down its buckets. Utopia of forgetting. Of love. The sigh in the embrace. The beach and the pareo. Scenery for silting-up. Wattle of the last season. Branch with blooms. Freezing. And short

Daylight / Shade

Left only. Coniferous trees. Powerful smell. Shoot up above the void. Reflections make the water go up. And these pine cones. Suspended. Dance. Dance. Life. Life. Short gallows. Laconic. Like gun shots. To listen. That sparkle. Fallen fruit. Woody body. Frenzy. Body. Other body. Bodies. A bit of bird. And of shadow. And of couple. And of daylight

Notes

Published with permission here is an excerpt from FORMES, collected poems by Chantal Danjou, translated by Dominique Hecq.

Also, Read I Left My Home & Other Poems By Rahma Nur, Translated From The Italian By Pasquale Verdicchio And Loredana Di Martino And Published In The Antonym:

I Left My Home & Other Poems— Rahma Nur

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About Author

Chantal Danjou

Author of about thirty works (poetry, essay, prose), Chantal Danjou lives and works in the Var district of Provence after a long Parisian sojourn. She gained her doctorate in 1985 from La Sorbonne on the lonely woman in Colette and Katherine Mansfield. She taught in that field for many years, nowadays supervising at University projects specifically focused on the experience of creative reading and writing. She was, too, director of the editorial board of the journal Decision (2020-2022). Since 1989 until 2022, she contributed to the field of contemporary poetry and poetics through the organisation La Roue Traversière [The Transverse Wheel] which she co-founded.

Amongst her more recent publications in poetry are, L’ancêtre sans visage, pictorial facing with Ena Lindenbaur, Ed, Collodion, 2016 for the artist’s book / 2017, for the current edition, La concomitante,Ed. Encres Vives, Colomiers, 2017, L’ombre et l’invisible, with Ena Lindenbaur, Les Cahiers du Museur, coll. A côté, Nice, 2017 and the novels Les Jardins d’Essais, Ed. Orizons, 2017, Journal de la main, Ed. Orizons, 2017, Le souffle du noir, essay about Henri Yéru, Ed. Orizons, 2019, L’Ombre et le ciel Le Ciel et l’ombre, Ed. Orizons, 2021, Chienne de plainte, short stories, Ed. The Menthol House, 2021.

Her website is : http://www.sgdl-auteurs.org/chantal-danjou/index.php/pages/Biographie

About Translator

Dominique Hecq

Dominique Hecq grew up in the French-speaking part of Belgium. She now lives in Melbourne, Australia. Hecq writes across genres and disciplines—and sometimes across tongues. Her creative works include a novel, six collections of short stories and fifteen books and chapbooks of poetry, including After Cage: A Composition in Word and Movement on Time and Silence (Liquid Amber Press, 2022) and, most recently, the prose poetry sequence Songlines (Hedgehog, 2023) and Endgame with no Ending (SurVision, 2023), a winner of the 2022 James Tate Poetry Prize. Among other honours, including the International Best Poets Prize administered by the International Poetry Translation and Research Centre in conjunction with the International Academy of Arts and Letters, Dominique Hecq is the recipient of the inaugural AALIRA Translation Prize.