Nicole Brossard
trans. by Cynthia Hogue and Sylvain Gallais
Two POEMS
Cities with or without war
cities with standing soldiers
always frightening among flames
and monuments, a soldier facing a madman
a madman facing a soldier
with a shot a sharp blow
as if earth were peopled by goats
then quickly cities crossed in ten minutes
like Moose Jaw and Regina
on the plain your finger touching dawn
* * *
cities where you’re always close
to someone standing among the archives
to recapture her mother’s face
in a stroke of memory and horizon
Cities where my face returns
cities with hope in the crosshairs of sobs
do we think that dawn is a word
or have we said by accident tengo sueño
this very morning in a city in America
to smile sap beyond all schedules
I breathe slowly
a life of frescoed words:
women wrapped in the joy of wandering and infinity
Nicole Brossard has been in the vanguard of the Québécois avant-garde writing community for many years. She has twice received the Grand Prix du festival international de poésie, among many other honors. Brossard has published thirty books, including Lointaines (2010), from which the current selection is drawn, and a book on translation, Et me voici soudain en train de refaire le monde (2015). In 2019, she was awarded the Lifetime Recognition Award from The Griffin Trust For Excellence in Poetry.
Cynthia Hogue’s tenth collection of poetry, instead, it is dark, is forthcoming from Red Hen Press in 2023. Her third co-translation is Nicole Brossard’s Distantly (Omnidawn, 2022). Among her honors are two NEA Fellowships, a Fulbright fellowship, and the Witter Bynner Translation Fellowship at the Santa Fe Art Institute. She lives in Tucson.
Sylvain Gallais is a native French speaker who transplanted to the U.S. seventeen years ago. He is an emeritus professor of Economics at Université Francois Rabelais (Tours, France) and of French in the School of International Letters and Culture at Arizona State University. His co-authored book in economics is entitled France Encounters Globalization (Elgar, 2003).