Paris Québec
Edited by Claudine Bertrand
Translated by Stephen Scobie & Marie Vautier
Ekstasis Editions
124 pages
$21.95


A couple of years ago, at the annual international poetry festival in Trois Rivières, Gaston Bellemare and I were enjoying dinner and a heavy-bodied red wine as we pondered the differences between English and French poetry in Quebec. Bellemare, the savvy festival founder but also a poet himself, seemed to think it had something to do with levels of abstraction. His argument was that, in general, French verse tends to be open in its love-affair with the soul and with things ethereal, while much of English poetry, coyly hinting at the above and beyond, remains fiercely embedded in the concrete, narrative, palpable experience of life. At the time, I wasn’t sure whether he was right or not in this, but his observation, nonetheless, came back to haunt me this week as I read through Paris Quebec, a translated anthology of contemporary Québécois poets interfacing with the seductive City of Light.

What struck me was how many poems in this book are the unfortunate casualties of their “cross-over” into the other language and onto a different plane of abstraction, partly because of earnest attempts by prize-winning poet Stephen Scobie and Québécois scholar Marie Vautier to remain faithful to the original texts without mangling them. And this becomes problematic and rather disappointing for the English-speaking reader who has been promised on the book jacket “an eye-opening introduction to the forms and concerns of current Québécois poetry.”

The problem goes beyond the well-documented difficulties of translating poetry. It lies, rather, in the near-impossible task of trying to wed two world-views, two interpretations of human experience, two levels of abstraction in a way that the resulting poem not lose any of the music or magic of the original. The packaging of abstraction that may well be beautiful dans la langue de Molière often comes across in English as hackneyed and clichéd, even banal, as in these lines from “Vertigo Garden” by poet and feminist Claudine Bertrand, editor of the anthology:

When the horizon
will empty itself of traces
why not allow me
to touch the fringes
of your soul on fire...

The same is true of Cécile Cloutier’s “Paris thinks” and Bruno Roy’s “In Paris Where We All Belong”:

this city is a place to lay down
my North American soul
and change my way of seeing

under its great indivisible sky
which makes us dream of eternity
I undertake the journey
to the heart of all things clear

Although the book speaks to the “many moods” of Paris, as explained by translator Marie Vautier in her introduction, the problem is that there are too many poems in here that read like a shopping list of favourite tourist attractions. Perhaps the biggest disappointment was Nicole Brossard’s underworked “The Palm Trees of the Luxembourg,” which comes across more like a string of fleeting notes lifted verbatim from her travel log— something churned-out to fulfil an obligation— than a shaped piece of verse.

Thankfully, there are a handful of authors whose work escapes this fate relatively unscathed—among them, the prose poems of Pierre Ouellet and Denise Desautels, and the more pointed, down-to-earth poems of Jean-Paul Daoust. Here is a taste of Daoust’s “Crescendo”:

In the restaurant L’Arbuci I lift my slice of Mont Blanc
As if I were holding your finger
I prick out the blood of words
I have put on my loveliest finery
Silk velvet and diamonds
And my eyes in their outrageous makeup
Proclaim their shining solitude...

For readers willing to overlook some of the jarring rhythms or awkward turns-of-phrase, Paris Quebec is still a valuable record of an overlapping conversation between poets, each, in their own way, struggling to come to grips with their ambivalent relationship to that city.

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Carolyn Marie Souaid is a Montreal poet.