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by Albane Gellé

le chant des bêtes les cris des hommes

sous un bout de ciel rose que les nuages

ont épargné ce soir une cigarette a suffi à

me faire marcher de travers dehors je

songe au verbe suffire je me demande s’il

finira par s’user si je l’utilise trop je me

demande si tout s’use et quelle force il

faut déployer pour aller contre et si c’est

à cause de ça que les hommes crient

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by Albane Gellé

the singing of animals the shouts of men

under a tip of pink sky the clouds

spared this evening a cigarette sufficed to

set me walking the wrong way outside I

thought of the verb to suffice I ask if it

will end by wearing itself out if I use it too much I

ask if everything wears out and what force

must be deployed to go against and if it’s

because of this that men shout

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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