[FRAME TEXT 1]
Children of this century, avert your gaze.
Lips are no longer on every word. Words climb pell-mell onto the backs of things. And things, wandering in the desert of their own erosion, seek to bribe our bones, the uncertain keepers of a fortified mirage. Foreseeing nothing, the wayward herds of our actions race toward the toxic wells of their own garish reflections.
Children of this century, the landscapes are all pierced through with the holes of our sovereign absence.
“THE NECKLACE OF LIPS…”
I was a crisp winter, clear and naked, a winter of laundered underwear, of very hard candies, of colors carved with a pocketknife. I laughed sometimes, gravel under my knees. The steam jungle continually retraced itself on the windowpanes of expectation. Great panicked encampments on the steppes in the sheets. The voracity of tiny teeth crystallizing forbidden milk. And the half-hearted, unholy hideouts between the cricked necks of laughter. Oh! My rumpled paper dresses. Incestuous swaying of hammocks. The universe was swelling under my floral-print blinders. Childish crawling in a wicker casket that was carried away with the current, while with cannibal self-assurance I crouched down on the violet banks of the horizon.
“…IN THE JAWS OF SILENCE…”
Sheathed in fragility and self-importance, we penetrate
our exterior selves.
At the core of the wind, the roots of the heart.
Famine
Tremors
Manifest
The ground is haughty
The leaves fall in fits
Torrents of shadows snap the air’s spine
And the gates of silence are running for it.
[FRAME TEXT 2]
So?
We must learn to contemplate the fractured horizon of anamorphic memory with more detachment.
Though resistant, the muscles of words are only small heaps of chopped meat, upon which silence’s cats gorge themselves in the night, until the driveling lips of the deferred morning.
Children of this century, which part-for-the-whole could you hope to gain in these arenas, eye-spotted with dubious lighting?
“…AND THE BITE OF SIGNS…”
Exactly halfway through the lunar trapezium, a knot
of dark paths leapt at my throat.
[…]
G THAT OF SOURCES
WITHOUT MOUTHS:
Chessboard distorted by pros and cons
A pit in parallel where no one ever meets
The shrewd ostentation of a ram skin raft
An imitation of the sky in a dressing gown
With articulated feet and hands
To crack open the void
And its ventilated workshops
Foolish but without frenzy
So many orthopedic tricks
Preparing to scale the walls of metaphysics
[FRAME TEXT 3]
I told you:
All art amounts to eternal delay.
“LOST BETWEEN FLESH AND LANGUAGE…”
Backing away from misery
Toward a current of green indecency
Incisive
Raw
Shameless
Budding at the tips
Of our moving branches
Wolves bears eagles are all very well
But you bring me back into the tale
Into the thicket of your movements
No beggar concealing his nerves within
A little peat bag against his skin
No witch faking modesty, head
cocked like a bitter fruit
Ahead of atmospheric evasions
The blinding touch of the elements
The ambivalent changing of poles
The cheerful evaporation of gravity
As armor
The mere blond of ryegrass
Along the fragile walls of the heart
Scarecrow burning for slow-motion excess
[FRAME TEXT 4]
Children of this century, the luminous spasms of the lighthouse
Have fired quite enough on our sidelong nights.
“…THE FUTURE ON REPEAT…”
Within each line of verse, a sneering obsession with the
following:
Meaning creeps
Beneath the seasons, battered
By a great gastropodan battering ram
7TH BLOW
Insidious
Terrible
Ceremonious
We start all over
But this time with spineless finesse
All holds still
While knotting peelings
There are bricks of misery
Stacked up in the vaults of the air
From a transfer of funds to the other
Words seep
Through organ pipes of hydrophilic cotton
We hide away and keep quiet
In the hollow of a loud-speaker
The void rearranges its cravings
With a debauchery of deficient memories
Pregnant by blows from a lightning rod
Sleep’s cisterns put maimed typewriters to bed
We love in small doses
Salivating profusely
The reptilian crawl of freedom
Interests
The little metronome-men
Perched on pebbles of blood
[FRAME TEXT 5]
A sack race, two thousand years long
What an unforgettable show!
[FINAL FRAME TEXT]
Children of this century, the horizon’s contour is just one of your eyelashes, fallen unwittingly upon the speed bump of space. The time for pulling up the nets of perspective is passed. Violence is at a loss before the prism of abolished distances. Our doubles return in torrents, swelling into balls of excess until they hit the center of gravity of the dark. No point in insisting, there are no more shadow-bearing landscapes, only a rising tide of signs that seek to plunge to the depths of our pupils.
Children of this century, transparency has gone underground.
—
Annie Le Brun was born in Rennes in 1942. A poet, essayist, and literary critic, she was a participant in the Surrealist movement until the group disbanded in 1969. Known for her critique of certain moralistic feminisms and her insistence on absolute freedom of expression, Le Brun has published prolifically since 1967. In addition to her seven works of poetry, she has written extensively on Surrealist poetics, Romanticism, and the Marquis de Sade.
Alicen Weida is a PhD student in French at the CUNY Graduate Center in New York, where she is also pursuing certificates in Translation Theory and Women’s & Gender Studies. She has been a Graduate Teaching Fellow and lecturer at Baruch College since 2016. Her research interests include translation studies, twentieth-century and contemporary fiction, magical realism, and the aesthetics of globalization. She is currently working on two translations of as-yet-unpublished works by the French writer Marie NDiaye.