at this point in the book, a brutal silence
the harmonics accented
in his general project to annotate Greek texts
Aristophanes of Byzantium introduced the comma
0000000000000000000000000the colon and the period
maintaining that silence in Poussin
consisted of displacing the point of view
0000000000000000000sometimes it snows on the lake
a long travelling shot, horribly slow
To those who say that Andromache’s position
000or in other words the woman on top
is half the cause of penis fractures
he asks humorlessly if the son of Achilles
had an asymmetrical bruise on his dick
000000000000Euripides didn’t mention it, or Virgil
or any of the others later
The translations will often be wrong0000000000 0But that doesn’t matter
Since “translate” is a made-up word00000000For something that doesn’t exist
Intense désoeuvrement000Together with the most exhausting work00000000Only
androgyny remains000A Fundamental figure00000Reclaiming for the unisex
00A simple dahlia
all the ideas about coming back to life
000000000000add madness to the arbitrary
the bad side of things
a very big map
000000000000000to the bottom of darkness
the destructive character of those who go down there
like the wonton weirdness of others
who mix up wild rose and hawthorn
tender and hysterical at the same time
it’s my party today
what shortens and lets itself be colored
I know now I was acting
000000000000000000I never stopped
as soon as I had to step outdoors
a hand cut off and thrown in the water
Interior map0000Filmed from three quarters behind0000000Some00 movements
on the surface0000the umbels00000Humid in the gardens0000From the morning
The smell of coffee000Under the lilacs00000Where the very dear old whore loiters
That we remember0000The close-ups of faces00000How the two modes of stories
Could not combine000No story ever ends000That’s what the cornflowers say In an
Andersen fairy tale
contemporary is he who takes
0000000000000000full in the face
the bomb for the other for all the others
beam of shadows or on to the next line
000000000000the utterances herald
what a fact of the era
I also dreamed
Whatever Love is it’s own Allegory0000000Cruelty of evil which is never
banal I didn’t know I was writing about this life000000000All day long day
The sun fell prey to experience0000000000Cantos00or00instructions00for
powdered soup000This infinite feast in successive shadows000The subject studied
exhaustively000He’ll rot it’s fatal0000000The books are cold at heart
Their circular machine
accumulated ghosts
0000000000000000buried in mouths
my body is feminine
000000000000000you have no idea
000000000000000about my thoughts
splashes without constellation
0000000000000000a pale copy between us
and history, relief without compiling
clouds accelerate under a low sky
pants hug the fat thighs
0000000000of Fassbinder smoking
he keeps them on
0000000000the whole length of the film
same for the melancholic face of the infected
this lake like what’s written
000with love or without
is it just “poets’ poetry”
000000000the question arises
not to know it
00000000000000not to want to say it
the system had itself created
its own ways of using it
00000000000nevertheless you could go on
to a planned-out section
red, you know, is beautiful
00000000000for schizophrenics
and smelling thyme helps memory
she leans toward me
000000000000000sniffs and asks
but what day is it today
Reproduction000Spontaneous bestial000Was going to be able to be eradicated
No longer one smell000Neither background noise nor insect flight00The naked
jumbled bodies so dazzling00000000000That they seemed dead000Yellow
latex, sign of the liver000The text itself00Had exhausted all its energies
only the children were still capable of sitting down
Liliane Giraudon was born in 1946 and lives in Marseille. Her feminist, prolific, experimental writing is situated between prose and poetry and traverses genres, modes, and media. Most of Giraudon’s work has been published by France’s P.O.L. editions, including Love is Colder Than the Lake (2016, forthcoming in English translation by Sarah Riggs and Lindsay Turner, Nightboat Books, 2023).
Lindsay Turner is the author of the poetry collection Songs & Ballads (Prelude, 2018) and the chapbook Fortnights (Doublecross Press, forthcoming). She’s the translator of several books of contemporary Francophone poetry and philosophy, including work by Stéphane Bouquet, Souleymane Bachir Diagne, Anne Dufourmantelle, Richard Rechtman, and Ryoko Sekiguchi. She is Assistant Professor in the Department of Literary Arts at the University of Denver.
Sarah Riggs is the author of seven books of poetry, most recently Eavesdrop (Chax, 2020) and The Nerve Epistle (Roof Books, fall 2021). She has translated and co-translated six books of contemporary French poetry into English, including most recently Oscarine Bosquet’s Present Participle and Etel Adnan’s Time, which won the International Griffin Poetry Prize and the Best Translated Book Award in 2020. Sarah Riggs lives in Brooklyn, NY.