Excerpted from The Island (Shabby Doll House, June 2024)
◆
Translator’s Note
Chania, Crete – October 1st, 2027
True, prior to translating this book, I had heard the name Oscar d’Artois mentioned once or twice in passing. I had even perhaps read the odd poem here and there on the internet at some point in the last decade, if memory serves. Although it’s possible I have him mixed up with some other literary debutant named Oscar who’d been flirting with the burgeoning online literary scene at the time, as it seemed there were infinite numbers constantly sprouting up like so many ephemeral early spring dandelions. It was, however, my impression that, like those flowers, he had blossomed and then vanished as others are wont to do back into the sea of literary anonymity, to go pursue whatever corporate or other life he’d found was his actual calling.
In fact, it is almost certainly due to this that the manuscript initially caught my eye.
While on vacation last October in Chania, on the island of Crete, trying to prolong the rays of the Indian summer for just a tad bit longer (while the struggles of being an independent contractor on the translation market are many – loneliness, chasing after clients, burdensome taxes – there are granted a few perks), I took a digestive stroll after having just enjoyed a delectable halloumi gyro sandwich at Pita Goal, a friendly mom & pop establishment with a wonderful atmosphere (my side order of tzatziki came out of the kitchen decorated like a face: two olives, cucumbers for ears, a red pepper slice for lips… Setting it down on the table the doyenne declared: “Your Tzatziki is monkey!”). I ambled my way down to the scenic old Venetian port and was poking my head into this or that trinket shop, when I came across a bookstore called, simply, Mediterraneo Bookstore. It was clearly aimed at tourists, selling mainly postcards and books about Cretan and ancient Minoan history, but, hoping perhaps to find a few English translations of some young Greek contemporary authors, I decided to pop in.
It was here that I stumbled upon a manuscript, handwritten and in the original French, to my astonishment, placed squarely between copies of Cavafy’s Selected Poems and Borges’s Garden of Forking Paths, both in English translations. The cover read simply: L’Île – Oscar d’Artois. As far as I could tell, there was only one copy there, and it was the only book in French in the entire store. It was either handwritten or typed up in such a way as to seem handwritten (I confess I had accepted the small shot of Raki I had been offered complimentarily by the Pita mistress at the end of my meal, so my perception may not have been the clearest). There were holes in several pages in the back of the manuscript, so it was by no means a brand-new copy. If anything, it was as if it had been placed there as a ruse by some roguish type – and, indeed, when I looked at the back there was no price tag, and when I went up to the register to pay for it the clerk simply looked at me in bemusement. So I bought a few Minotaur postcards and made hastily away with the book before they started asking too many questions.
To my knowledge, any work of d’Artois’s I had previously encountered had been in English. I had not been aware of any translation efforts. Curious, then, I found the town beach, plopped down, and promptly began my perusal. While I found the poem odd at times, it did pique a certain interest in me – enough so anyway that, in a flurry of excitement, I sprang up, ran back to my room for pen and paper (well, electronic tablet), pulled up to my writing desk and, in a sort of fever-pitch, spent the night jotting down a quick translation of the entire book.
While prey to this frenzy, I also found the form the poem takes – verses alternating in a 5/7/5/7/5/7/5 syllabic pattern – to be rather addictive, and noticed I was beginning to think in the form, so much so that I even began playing around with drafting a few quick lines of my own, such as:
« Your tzatziki is monkey! »
the pita pocket
lady says : olives for eyes
cucumber slice ears
i want to tip her the world
or:
licking the dregs of
an empty aioli pot
like a feral cat
or:
desperately trying
to get a double rainbow
pic – storage full though
also it is pouring rain
Unfortunately, back at my hotel the following day, as I was lying on a beach bed, sun-kissed or perhaps slightly sun-burnt and trying to escape the rays under a parasol, having just finished scribbling down the final notes for an English version on my tablet, and rather carelessly I must admit, I lay the original manuscript down in the sand and promptly fell into a well-warranted siesta.
What I had failed to notice was that no more than a dozen feet away was a large anthill and – perhaps due to the small amount of sweet Retsina wine I may have inadvertently spilled on it – by the time I awoke the sun was going down and the manuscript was completely covered in ants. In my panic, I did my best to shoo them away with my beach hat and the assistance of the friendly barman’s broom, but by the time I had managed to make most of them clear off, it was obvious they had done irrevocable damage to the manuscript – that is to say, it had been devoured almost in its entirety by the ants, leaving behind only a few fragmentary scraps of paper, which naturally I hastened to assemble.
I must, however, confess that I fear certain parts of the work may have been forever lost. For the notes for a translation I had jotted down were just that, notes, and I most likely overlooked certain parts – though I have marked out as best I could, via page breaks, the parts where there may be lacunae, as the text that I myself read was wholly uninterrupted, simply one long string of unrelenting text.
This led to several problems, not the least of which is that the occasional fragment would turn up whose placement within the poem I was not quite sure of, such as:
i’m not saying i want to
die but if i did
i guess i wouldn’t mind if
it were down here on
the river’s floodplain where in
between the post-rain
green soil smell & roiling place
sky & river meet
i can feel infinity
And – to be perfectly honest – I am not entirely sure whether he himself wrote those lines or if I did, caught up as I was in the sort of emulative daze I previously mentioned.
In an attempt to resolve these issues, I took to the internet’s search engines, and looked up and tried to contact d’Artois himself, to recover the missing manuscript pieces, clarify their order, and ask a few questions about the meaning behind specific terms. But I was roundly ignored. I have therefore done my best with what I had on hand, in a way I hope is most reflective of the original.
All the other information that I could find about him consisted in a few old poems – no more than you can count on your fingers – published in online literary reviews, many of them now defunct and the links to them broken, and what seemed to be a few chaotic rants and questions on online yoga forums relating to Vedic concepts and the best way to access this or that pose. My various unanswered emails coupled with his seeming lack of an online presence these days led me to question whether d’Artois was even still with us at all.
The problems that arise when attempting to transmute this text into the English language are varied and manifold:
- First and foremost is of course the matter of the form, a sort of broken, ongoing haiku – how is one to translate both form and content? I have done my best.
- Then, there is the not-small problem of the sole extant copy having been devoured by ants. Any perceived fragmentary or chaotic nature to the text should thus perhaps be imputed to Nature herself rather than to an issue of the internal organization within the original poem.
- Then, there is cultural content that simply doesn’t translate: are people aware, for instance, outside of France, that it is possible to ask for a half baguette in any bakery there? Or that the chrysanthemum is a flower that has a strong association with death, and is traditionally reserved for funerals or laying on graves?
- And then, there is the queasiness one cannot help but feel upon reading sudden outbursts of homoerotic yearning coming from a fellow who, by his own admission, is clearly married – still, uncouth as it may seem, one must translate it.
- And there is another discomfort, too, for a die-hard agnostic such as me – that is, the seeming recurring obsession with God, in a way that makes it difficult not to wonder whether d’Artois’s isn’t yet another brain more damaged by organized religion than perhaps even he is aware. But again, one cannot simply up and say this, as it is the role of the translator to vanish behind the varnish of the text.
- There is also a tendency within d’Artois’s writing to veer into a “text message” or “online chat” style of vernacular shorthand common to today’s youth (to which, frankly, he himself barely belongs). Whether he does this out of some pretense at poetic hyper-concision, out of affectation to make himself seem more “of the people,” or simply out of laziness, remains unclear. Annoying though it may seem to some, I have nevertheless endeavored to preserve this stylistic quirk, allowing for creative misspellings now and again (I have not bothered to attempt internal consistency, as d’Artois himself seemingly does not).
- It should also be noted that, in the French, d’Artois occasionally “smudges” his own syllable count, if for instance there is some ambiguity as to whether a word containing two vowels in a row is monosyllabic or duo-syllabic, as well as at other times where pronunciation might differ from the technical written count or between individuals. As a result, I have granted myself the same liberty, making the daunting task of matching the syllabic count of a poem of this length in another language slightly less so. I must beg for the punctilious reader’s indulgence in this matter. Examples of vowel-shortening include words like “poem” or “mania.” Likewise, I have occasionally made words longer than the way one might pronounce them if the written count allows for this, as in “clinically” or “giggling.” There are also words like “power,” “tower,” or “listening,” which should sometimes be read as if they contained the apostrophe used e.g. in early modern English writing to shorten verse: pow’r, tow’r, list’ning, etc. I have omitted the apostrophes themselves for fear of rendering the text illegible to the modern lay reader.
- Penultimately, there is the matter of the point d’Artois is trying to get at. He seems to build his way up from an absolute miasma of chaos & confusion into a sort of messy, inverted cosmogony over the course of the hundred-odd pages the poem runs on for – affirming something like a primacy of the material over the spiritual. But why, one cannot help but wonder, does it take him so long? It takes Valéry about 150 lines to make a similar point in The Graveyard by the Sea. Why does it take d’Artois some 1,500? Is there something else going on here? Are there subtleties I have missed? He never answered my emails, and so perhaps we’ll never know.
- Finally, beyond the mere problem of translating it from the language of one place to that of another, there was what I experienced as a problem of periodicity. Indeed, at the time of d’Artois’s writing – he dates it to the early 2020s – there was an idea floating around that writing mattered only for the living, for those who could read a text when it came out, a demand for an immediacy in literature. This is something he seems to have been aware of, and yet there is clearly also an obsession in his poem with timelessness, with wanting to create something whose relevance might just go beyond the next few weeks or season, the sort of writing one could describe as being concerned with “the universal human condition” – which, as I mentioned, was rather out of favor at the time. To attempt to transpose this sentiment, even now, feels – to use modern parlance – rather cringe, especially without being able to know just how sincere his efforts in this direction were meant. Still, it felt unfair to the poem to completely ignore this aspect, so I have endeavored to render both its “contemporary” flavor and its hungry eye for eternity.
While I found myself unable to reach the poet himself, I did manage, via word of mouth and by inquiring across my various networks, to find another who had translated d’Artois’s works before (among the many nasty twists of his character, one is that d’Artois is a writer who seems to almost invariably not give credit where credit is due to those who humbly reproduce his œuvre into other languages, a practice that is most frowned upon within the industry!). This person spoke to me on the condition of anonymity, as they did not wish to associate their name with that of the elusive poet (and so perhaps it was that they requested not to be credited, after all). In confidence, then, they told me via email that when having an exchange with him, once, and struggling to untangle what one might call the various metaphysical arguments – regarding the body, death, the soul’s existence and separateness or lack thereof, etc. – battling it out within another longer piece of his, that finally, in exasperation or impatience, d’Artois had simply replied: “It’s only a goddamn poem.”
– Christopher Seder
