Grisélidis Réal
trans. by Cory Stockwell
Canticle of Imprisonment
Solitude lives between four naked walls
Day and night are one
Time leaks out like sand
And crystallizes in gardens of memory
The living images of my lost joy
I slip away on the wings of a dream
But the bars rise up against my hands
Their shadows project to infinity
On my life on my body on my face
And block the road
That led to love’s foliage
I’m thirsty and hungry for courage
Here one dies here one cries here one despairs
Here one gives her life for shadows
Here one yells before deaf walls
Here one walks in a tomb
Here strength has no ears and hope has no hands
Memories are heavier than air
Here dreams are the key to deliverance
And woe to the one who wakes before it is time
And falls back into the labyrinth of his consciousness
Pursued by the hard reality of chance
Blessed is the absence of all will
Blessed is complete indifference
Sleep stupor burial
The numbing of all thought
Here reigns forgetting
The slow destruction of the instant
Here the weight of the years is like a single day
Here bodies return softly to the Earth
Faces have a mask of dust
Useless hands and feet crumble
Blood loses its color
The soul agonizes like a butterfly without wings
I called into the void
And only the voice of silence responded:
Death approaches with steps soft as snow
Virtually unknown in the English-speaking world, Grisélidis Réal (1929-2005) was one of the most important Swiss writers of the twentieth century. She spent much of her life working as a sex worker and in 1982 she founded Aspasie, an association that defends the rights of sex workers. “Canticle of Imprisonment” belongs to a series of poems Réal wrote while serving a prison sentence for drug trafficking in Munich in 1963.
Cory Stockwell is a writer and translator. His writing has appeared in the Common, Spartan, Cultural Politics, and elsewhere. Translations include books by Mariette Navarro and Jean-Luc Nancy, and poems by Jean-Christophe Bailly, Juan de Dios García, and Simon Johannin. He lectures in the Department of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature at the University of Minnesota.