beverley bie brahic's Blog
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Jun.25.2010
A friend told me about Zong! by the Caribbean-African-Canadian writer M. NourbeSe Philip, and I've been reading it, off and on, for the past month or so. "Looking at it" might be closer to the truth. The book is constructed on the Mallarméan principle of fragmentation, in an extreme...
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Jun.20.2010
At three years old, she is already completely human. Her excitement about her body, her fascination with language. She stands naked in her bath, in her soft slippery soapy warm skin one can’t not want to touch, and she says “Why?” “Why does Kiba have to die?” “Do I have to die?” “I don’t want to...
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Jun.14.2010
I'm reading Seidel's Ooga-Booga, and thinking of buy the Complete (insofar as he's not dead, only partially complete. Maybe I should wait.). It tickles my cynical side immensely: "In New York City "kneeling" buses kneel for the disabled. / My camel kneels. We fly into the desert...
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Jun.13.2010
Hot here. Hot and no fog, which means the temperature doesn't drop at the end of the day as the fog rolls in over the the coastal hills. We pulled the square small turquoise (50's kitchen turquoise) fan out of the cupboard--first time we've needed it in this apartment. Set up the ironing board...
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Jun.05.2010
My first house was my grandparents' house and I lived there, on a bank of the Saskatchewan River, for three years. But I don't remember; only what's in the photo albums. My grandparents moved to Victoria, B.C., bought a half acre of virgin forest on the edge of the Pacific, or an arm of it,...
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May.31.2010
I thought some more about Hecht, hiking the hills yesterday evening (golden light; a few days of dry weather and everything turns brown--brown I love--here). Besides the over-lushness of his lines, and a tendency to sensationalize subjects better treated more sparely (as in Zbigniew Herbert) in my...
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May.30.2010
I've been reading Anthony Hecht or, more exactly, I've been reading a lecture Christopher Ricks gave at Bard College on Hecht's borrowings or allusions or whatever you want to call them, from Eliot and others. Hecht is one of the poets who fascinate and repel me equally (Robinson Jeffers is...
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May.15.2010
I'm working, in the brightest, freshest hour of every morning, on translating some Bonnefoy sonnets. I admire them a lot, for their compression and for their humanity, for their despair about art and death. They are not rhymed and they are not strictly metered and many of them are ekphrastic,...
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May.09.2010
Following a small boy, 10-ish I reckon, down a dirt track up in the hills. He's got a creel for fish slung over his shoulder, bumping his back, bump, bump, and whacking the grass with a fishing rod. There's a lake--more of a pond--off to the right, ringed by rushes. His mother cuts his hair with...
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May.01.2010
My husband is starting to iron in the living room. I hear him creak up the ironing board. Take the pile of clean clothes off the dryer. Fill the iron with water. I hear the steam hiss gently, like a gentle house-snake, Ssssss, as he lifts the iron and sets it down. I listen to the soft thumps...
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Apr.26.2010
For a few years I've been doggedly learning italian, with books and classes. On a day-to-day basis the progress seems minute, but this morning, waking up to voices floating by on skateboards, I realize I can now read Petrarch with pleasure. True, some of it is still the pleasure of letting the...
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Apr.24.2010
I am viscerally attached to the idea of Europe. I am attached to its common currency and its cultural diversity. Living in the USA only exacerbates this: Puritanism is doubtless more muted than it was in 1600-and-something, but it's nonetheless alive and well. And self-righteous. So when I hear...
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Apr.22.2010
What else do I want to say about the difficulty of translating this (any) Baudelaire poem? Let's look at the sestet, first in French, then as I've provisionally translated it:
Un éclair...puis la nuit! --Fugitive beauté
Dont le regard m'a fait soudainement renaître,
Ne te verrai-je plus que...
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Apr.20.2010
Julia Kristeva's This Incredible Need to Believe (Columbia University Press), which I translated, is a Finalist for the French-American Foundation Translation Award in the non-fiction category. Kristeva's book is a collection of interviews and articles about the problem of faith and belief in the...
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Apr.19.2010
Here's the first stanza of the translation again, followed by the French original:
TO A PASSERBY
All around me, deafening, the street howled.
Tall, slender, swathed in black, majestic grief,
The woman walked by, her sumptuous hand
Lifting, tossing her flounce and her hemline;
La...
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About beverley
BEVERLEY BIE BRAHIC was born in Canada, and lives in Paris and Stanford, California. A translator and poet, her work has appeared in Field, Literary Imagination, Notre Dame Review, Oxford Poetry, PN Review, Poetry, The Times Literary Supplement, and...