Valerie Rouzeau Pas revoir – Cold Spring in Winter translated by Susan Wicks; Arc Publications
edmund
September 20, 2009
Valerie Rouzeau, World
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Pas revoir, Valerie Rouzeau’s brilliant sequence of poems on the death of her father, is challenging in many ways and on many levels. The linguistic demands posed by its verbal dislocations and fragmentations, its allusiveness, and multiple lexical ambiguities would have put it completely out of reach of my French if I’d attempted to read it without the support of Susan Wicks’ translation. With her support, I’ve been able to appreciate beauties in the original which she has not been able to render into English – which is, after all, the point of a parallel text translation. For example, the … Continue Reading