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by Albane Gellé

on part avec un sentiment tragique dans le

ventre le coeur tellement serré les ficelles

les noeuds et tout et tout on revient on se

sent vide comme un ballon on chante tout

seul une chanson d’amour on se jetterait

au cou d’un inconnu on sourit aux vaches

on se dit quelle bêtise la tristesse

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by Albane Gellé

you leave with a tragic feeling in the

stomach the heart tightly squeezed the strings

the nests and everything and everything you return you

feel empty like a balloon you sing all

alone a love song you throw yourself

around the neck of a stranger you smile at cows

you say how foolish sadness

translated from French by Darren Jackson

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Albane Gellé was born in 1971 in Guérande (Loire-Atlantique) and lives in Saumur (Maine et Loire) where until 2012 she directed the association “La Maison des Littératures” (formerly “Littérature & Poétiques”), which she created in 2006 with Patric Cahuzac. She has published about 15 books of poetry, with Le Dé Bleu, Inventaire/Invention, and Le Chat qui Tousse, and, recently: Nous valsons (éditions Potentille, 2012) – Si je suis de ce monde (éditions Cheyne, 2012) – Bougé(e) (éditions du Seuil, 2009) - Je, cheval (éditions Jacques Brémond, 2007).

Darren Jackson’s poems have appeared in The Pinch, Smartish Pace, Iron Horse, Cimarron Review, and other journals. A doctoral candidate at the University of Tennessee, he has been a VCCA Fellow in France and Virginia. He has translated Life in the Folds by Henri Michaux, and “The White Globe,” an essay by Bertrand Westphal, which is forthcoming from Northwestern University Press in the The Planetary Turn: Art, Dialogue, and Geoaesthetics in the 21st-Century. He also collaborated with Marilyn Kallet and J. Bradford Anderson on the translation of Chantal Bizzini’s Disaffected.

Circumference

Poetry in Translation

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