One of the books we're most excited to be publishing this coming spring is Montreal Before Spring, a book of poems by Quebec francophone poet Robert Melançon translated by Donald McGrath. Melançon's verse is painterly, metaphysical, restrained and elegiac, qualities captured wonderfully in McGrath's translation. In fact, a poem from the forthcoming collection, "Elegy Written in Notre-Dame-de-Grâce Park," just recently won The Malahat Review's first-ever Francophone Poetry Translation Contest. Judge Donald Winkler had this to say:
Donald McGrath has admirably rendered the cadence and tone of Robert Melançon’s limpid elegy. The poem’s muted music with its judicious internal rhyme links the poem not only with its French original, but with a venerable English tradition of elegiac verse.
The Fall 2014 issue of The Malahat Review (issue 188) is unique among Canadian periodicals in that it is exclusively devoted to literature in translation, both from Canada and abroad. In addition to running a thoughtful review of Dance With Snakes by Horacio Castellanos Moya (a violent, absurdist romp we like to say "reads as if William T. Vollmann wrote a script for a film version of Grand Theft Auto directed by Quentin Tarantino) they also ran an appreciative review of Robert Melançon's previous collection For As Far As The Eye Can See, which reviewer Marie Vautier calls "original and allusive" and which offers "a new view on ordinary sights in an unnamed city which can be recognized as Montreal."
In an online interview for The Malahat with stephen e. leckie, McGrath talks about what drew him to the award-winning poem:
I liked the poem’s evocation of dark winter evenings in the city and the emotional darkness in it as well. When the speaker dismisses the dire conclusions he has come to as "hackneyed tropes," it is not to replace them with something more uplifting. He seems rather to have reached such a degree of disillusionment that the only thing left to do is something prosaic, "sensible," namely, return home so as not to catch cold. It’s a dispiriting perception but an emotionally honest one.
McGrath goes on to say that he chose to translate the book "because of its intimiste depictions of personal life and Montreal in their many respective and overlapping moods."
So without further ado, here are three poems from Montreal Before Spring, forthcoming in March 2015.
_________
THE PASSAGE
I sense, close
by and all around, the city
fused
wholly with this darkness,
in this
mass full of unknown things
called
night. The bed is an island
or a
boat. At the open window
a light
breeze stirs, the wind flows
into the
bedroom, outside it flows
through
the leaves like a dry river.
You
sleep, abandoned to the July heat
that the
night does nothing to relieve;
your
breath blends with the murmurs
of a
gloom composed, it seems,
of swells
of silence,
indistinct noises,
whispers
that lurk nearby. Far away,
the sound
of a car engine builds
and
fades. A call is heard,
draws
near and flees, returns
and is
lost in the air it sculpts.
It’s the cry
of the nighthawk
hunting
above the low
buildings. Sleep
rolls you
into that Styx
called
night. I watch you,
I envy
you your peace. I adopt
the
recumbent pose of a tomb effigy.
Soon,
when I too will be asleep,
I hope
I do not dream.
___________________________
VESPERS
Evening
approaches under a drawn
sky like a
bed canopy.
I linger at
day’s end to watch
the world
dissolve in rain.
All I
hear is its obstinate pitter-patter.
It’s as if
the gods were lurking, famished,
nearby,
as if they’d come to stuff
everything
into their nothing bags.
At my
feet, a patch of grass glistens.
You’d think it
alone had escaped
all that
commotion. I pluck a few blades
as a
viaticum, I inhale their chill perfume.
___________________________
A VOICE
HEARD IN A DREAM, UPON AWAKENING
“Your days will pass, one by one,
words in
a breathless sentence strung
together
without punctuation, your actions,
those
thoughts that come at such a cost,
won’t follow
you, but if they do
it will
be as perpetually vain regrets, little
will it
matter, very little, whether you
betray or
remain faithful, because each will
come to
you in turn, everything will
be lost
as if you’d been dreaming, it’s like
a dream,
the disorder of an old man’s life
that
comes back at the end, you’ll descend
into
lower depths you don’t suspect are there,
you’ll be
seized, at times, by an unfathomable joy
before
the expanse that evening will open up
where the
streets run out; impassive, the world
will
continue on its course, flowers
that will
fade in autumn will come, snow
that’ll melt
like snow in the sun, each day
will
bring with it the History you’ll throw out
with the
newspaper, with your boredom, you’ll
have
friendships that you’ll lose, love you’ll see
falling
away from you, that you’ll try
in vain
to hold onto, everything will be
given to
you, everything taken away,
everything
will come, everything pass away
like this
night I’ve pulled you from, now go.”
______________________________
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Robert
Melançon is one of Quebec’s most original poets. He won the Governor General’s
Award for Poetry for his collection Blind Painting
and shared the Governor General’s Award for Translation with Charlotte Melançon
for their French version of A.M. Klein’s The Second Scroll.
A long-time translator of Canadian poet Earle Birney, Melançon has been the
poetry columnist for the Montreal newspaper Le Devoir and
the Radio-Canada program En Toutes Lettres.
In 2013 Biblioasis published his collection For as Far as the Eye Can
See in English. He lives in North Hatley, in Quebec’s Eastern Townships.
ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR
Donald McGrath has published two
poetry collections, most recently The Port Inventory
(Cormorant Books, 2012). His poem “Biarritz” was selected for the Web anthology
of the 2012 Montreal International Poetry Prize. He was awarded the 2014 Malahat Review Poetry Translation Prize for his translation
of Robert Melançon’s “Elegy Written in Notre-Dame-de-Grâce Park.”He lives in
Montreal.
