Article
A review of Hédi Kaddour’s Treason
April 24, 2012
The book opens a tantalising window onto what may be going on in present-day French poetry. Kaddour belongs to the French tradition of the writer who draws his inspiration from long directionless walks through the city streets. He is a flâneur in the tradition of Baudelaire. There is some literary allusion in these very condensed poems, much of which I will have missed. Initially they felt difficult to grasp, but a second reading made a lot clear. It’s not that they are hermetic; the difficulty lies more in that a lot is going on in a short space, with sudden switches of mood, and fragments of quoted speech. They are concentrates of language, dense enough to fill someone else’s novella or play. You sometimes have to read them a few times to catch up with what they are saying.
But they are worth spending time with. There is plenty of sex in these poems – sex and insult, lyricism, chaos and wit. The hooker who is brought into the night police station asks the nurse examining her whether she does her job for the sex or the money. In another poem a mother is telling her child that she used to be much more polite to her, to which the child replies, “I didn’t know you so well then”. Then there is the girl in the park who mounts her young man, pretending to rape him, while he protests, moaning softly.
Kaddour himself once said that “Roots are for trees”, and these are the poems of a mental drifter, alien to what he observes and invisible, because, unlike Baudelaire, Kaddour absents himself from his own poems. This has the effect of destabilising his Paris scenes, as though they are stage sets to be moved to the wings at any moment, as though Paris with all its wildness might prove a dream. If he identifies with anyone it is with those in society who are always being asked to move on. On the rare occasions when he shows openly where his loyalties lie, there is also the coiled spring of anger as in the poem ‘Spiritual Distress’ in which he lists some atrocities past and recent – “and together they make the proper name of a great / spiritual distress which is certainly not called/ Martin Heidegger . . .”
The pleasure of most of these poems, however, is that you are confronted with a number of conflicting emotions at once. I had to look up the phrase “the jackal’s wedding”, which is the title of one. It occurs strangely in both Hindi and Afrikaans culture and means a sun shower – a situation when it’s raining when the sun is shining. Perhaps this phrase best sums up the mood and ambiguity of these terse, energising poems. Treason by Hédi Kaddour (Yale University Press, 2010) was translated by Marilyn Hacker.
Treason is a selection of poems from three collections by the Paris-based poet Hédi Kaddour (1945), translated by Marilyn Hacker. Hacker, who lives in Paris, is one of the most interesting present-day American poets. Hédi Kaddour, born in Tunis of a Tunisian father and a French-Algerian pied-noir mother, has lived in France since he was eight. French is his mother tongue.
I felt with this book that I was getting two poets for the price of one. Translations like these are a conversation between poets. Hacker didn’t, however, have to adapt her own voice much to tune into Kaddour. While his tone is a harsher, more mocking one, they share the same themes – the street, chance encounters, eroticism. It was enjoyable hopping from left column to right, to see if she had got it right and to find that she’d turned his poems into very readable, accurate English ones.The book opens a tantalising window onto what may be going on in present-day French poetry. Kaddour belongs to the French tradition of the writer who draws his inspiration from long directionless walks through the city streets. He is a flâneur in the tradition of Baudelaire. There is some literary allusion in these very condensed poems, much of which I will have missed. Initially they felt difficult to grasp, but a second reading made a lot clear. It’s not that they are hermetic; the difficulty lies more in that a lot is going on in a short space, with sudden switches of mood, and fragments of quoted speech. They are concentrates of language, dense enough to fill someone else’s novella or play. You sometimes have to read them a few times to catch up with what they are saying.
But they are worth spending time with. There is plenty of sex in these poems – sex and insult, lyricism, chaos and wit. The hooker who is brought into the night police station asks the nurse examining her whether she does her job for the sex or the money. In another poem a mother is telling her child that she used to be much more polite to her, to which the child replies, “I didn’t know you so well then”. Then there is the girl in the park who mounts her young man, pretending to rape him, while he protests, moaning softly.
Kaddour himself once said that “Roots are for trees”, and these are the poems of a mental drifter, alien to what he observes and invisible, because, unlike Baudelaire, Kaddour absents himself from his own poems. This has the effect of destabilising his Paris scenes, as though they are stage sets to be moved to the wings at any moment, as though Paris with all its wildness might prove a dream. If he identifies with anyone it is with those in society who are always being asked to move on. On the rare occasions when he shows openly where his loyalties lie, there is also the coiled spring of anger as in the poem ‘Spiritual Distress’ in which he lists some atrocities past and recent – “and together they make the proper name of a great / spiritual distress which is certainly not called/ Martin Heidegger . . .”
The pleasure of most of these poems, however, is that you are confronted with a number of conflicting emotions at once. I had to look up the phrase “the jackal’s wedding”, which is the title of one. It occurs strangely in both Hindi and Afrikaans culture and means a sun shower – a situation when it’s raining when the sun is shining. Perhaps this phrase best sums up the mood and ambiguity of these terse, energising poems. Treason by Hédi Kaddour (Yale University Press, 2010) was translated by Marilyn Hacker.
© Donald Gardner
Source: Ambit Magazine, Issue 203
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