Day Has No Equal But Night: Bilingual Edition

3.2/5 ( ratings)

Though the Quebecois Anne Hebert is a distinguished contemporary novelist and poet in French, her work is little-known and hard to get hold of in the U.S. Poulin's substantial selection of her writing, translated with facing original, is thus a real boon to American readers. The selection includes work from Hebert's two major collections of poems, The Tomb of Kings and Miracle of the Word , as well as previously uncollected poems and a curious concluding essay by Poulin about the problems he himself has had as a Quebecois-American. The poetry from The Tomb of Kings , written mostly in short lines, is at once austere, riddling and grand. These are poems of painful solitude aspiring to a condition of ``original silence and poverty,'' and the insistent difficulties they present to a reader demonstrate their commitment to poetry as an ordeal of purification: ``anything easy is a snare.'' By contrast, the work from Miracle of the Word , composed mostly in short prose paragraphs, is expansive--rich in vocabulary, ecstatic and imperative in tone--and reminiscent of Rimbaud and Char. Hebert's writing, like most modern French poetry, is rhetorical in a way that contemporary English and American poetry tend not to be: that can make translation difficult. But we can only be grateful to Poulin for making Hebert available in the original, as well as in his serviceable translation.