What I'm Reading #27

Hédi Kaddour is a poet of some renown in France, franco-phile northern Africa, and Germany. Now, thanks to this excellent new translation by Marilyn Hacker (an amazing poet in her own right), he may become better known to the English-speaking world, too! I certainly hope so.

Monsieur Kaddour was born in Tunisia in 1945. He is a poet with both Germanist and Arabist credentials. To quote a review of his poems in this collection, Treason, his "poetry arises from observation, from situations both ordinary and emblematic—of contemporary life, of human stubbornness, human invention, or human cruelty....his sonnet-shaped vignettes often include a line or two of dialogue that turns his observations and each poem itself into a kind of miniature theater piece." I couldn't have said it any better, perhaps this example will wet your palette and encourage you to go out and buy a copy for yourself.

The Doctor

In the circular courtyard, trees
Turn yellow, a madwoman in a straightjacket
Watches them; all at once she starts to speak
As if nothing were out of the ordinary,
And the next day she dies
Of tuberculosis, making excuses
For having been such a bother.
It is not necessary, said the doctor,
To try to calm such patients down completely
They would become too bored. He has ceased
Imagining a classless society
And sometimes sits in front of the municipal
Bandshell to listen to the brass band play
Military marches of the Empire.

The book features his poems in their original French on one side of the page and in Ms. Hacker's English translation on the other. It should be a crime to publish translations of poetry in any other format.