Things That Fall

By Denise Desautels

In French, Tombeau de Lou. At its origin, the death of the childhood friend, the chosen sister, swept away by a sudden cancer. She was fifty-three. Like the poet. The one who remains, the survivor, the inconsolable woman. That's the anecdote. Afterwards -- if an afterwards is possible, the urgency presses, the need to find words for the pain and questions that death raises, strewn at random in revolt, in violence, in memory, in mourning and in dread. To translate the hasty metamorphosis of the ever-so-living into the ever-so-dead. To give meaning, albeit fragile, albeit mortal, to the meaningless. To relate this little story of intimate suffering -- all in all, banal -- to the great history of international proportions. In this literary tomb of eleven songs, the need to attempt a utopian reconciliation: embrace all at once the immensity of the emptiness, the chaos, our fragile humanity, and our ardent desire for resistance.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Guernica
• Release date: Mar 31, 2013
• ISBN: 9781550713749

Book preview

THINGS THAT FALL

DENISE DESAUTELS

Original title: Tombeau de Lou.

TRANSLATED FROM THE FRENCH BY ALISA BELANGER

GUERNICA; Essential Translations Series 2

TORONTO – BUFFALO – LANCASTER (U.K.) 2013

Contents

Introduction

You might say a toy

The shifting of the shadow

The absolute strangeness of the facts

One another

Against whom, against what?

Ultimate sweet talk, ultimate softness

A tale of beauty

Suddenly their Medusa gaze

Like a painting by Margrite

Face to face, small and great

The sound of my anger

A century later

About the author and translator

Praise

Introduction

In French, Tombeau de Lou. At its origin, the death of the childhood friend, the chosen sister, swept away by a sud- den cancer. She was fifty-three years old. Like the poet. The one who remains, the survivor, the inconsolable woman. That’s the anecdote. Afterwards – if an after- wards is possible, the urgency presses, the need to find words for the pain and questions that death raises, strewn at random in revolt, in violence, in memory, in mourning and in dread. To translate the hasty metamor- phosis of the ever-so-living into the ever-so-dead.To give meaning, albeit fragile, albeit mortal, to the meaningless. To relate this little story of intimate suffering – all in all, banal – to the great history of international proportions. In this literary tomb of eleven songs, the need to attempt a utopian reconciliation: embrace all at once the immen- sity of the emptiness, the chaos, our fragile humanity, and our ardent desire for resistance.

Literally, a tomb for Lou. This genre offers a resting place in the form of poetry. In Études françaises, Catherine Mavrikakis explains that, thanks to Denise Desautels, the book-tomb is no longer just a monument, another stone in the cemetery of literary time. It is the tearing apart of the present. For Tombeau de Lou, initially printed by Éditions du Noroît with photographs by Alain Laframboise, Desautels won the Canadian Writers’ Society Prize in 2001, having already won the First Prize for Poetry from CBC Canada for excerpts of its unpublished text under the title My Sisyphus. Jean Chatard from Le Mensuel littéraire et poétique in Bruxelles describes its style asintenseandspell-binding.

Released in a Catalan translation under the title Tomba de Lou in June 2011 at the Jardins de Samarcanda (Cafè Central / Eumo Editorial) in Barcelona, this work is likewise described by the poet, translator, and editor Antoni Clapés as an exceptional, troubling and lumi- nous text.Tristan Malavoy-Racine from Voir newspaper in Montreal adds that it involvesless a folding back onto the self and its pain than a universal testament to what makes us prize life and friendship.Those who have lost a loved one to cancer or another terminal illness, watch- ing as death moved into a hospital room, may find here a kindred voice, and, perhaps, a touch of solace.

Alisa Belanger

You might say a toy, a spinning top, its tip, usually meant to keep it in balance, replaced perhaps by a saucer. A metallic cone, standing on a saucer, that turns, wobbles, but doesn’t fall. Stare at the toy, though, it transforms more and more. The more you stare at the toy, however, the more it transforms. Now the cone has a few feathers, then some others, and soon a full ivory plumage that shivers, hence a body, and a head, and a beak, and a strange bright red, quite unusual, on its head and its beak, which opens and closes without