Evan Hero

L’ombre gémit

L'ombre s'avance dans le reflet qui fuit

gémit

transparente et fine

à peine en appui

adossée au temps

Comment concevoir l'ombre de la nuit ?

L'ombre ne sait où sont les ponts

cherche son double et le souffle

répète un cri gris et dru

L'ombre attend le hublot

La lune

frappe

sur ma tête

-Roselyne Sibille

The Shadow’s Cry

The shadow creeps forward in the escaped reflection

a cry

transparent and delicate

barely supported

turned away from time.

How does one conceive of the night’s shadow?

It does not know

how to get to the double it searches for

the breath

it expels another cry gray and thick like fog

The shadow waits the round opening

The moon

whacks me

on my head

-Translated from French by Evan Hero

The Moaning Shadow

The shadow slides about

within its darkness,

its lost reflection

was once its own

—moan—

so thin

so delicate

as if it is

supported

only by

a

pin,

alone,

ignoring

even the

passing

of time

How can one

conceptualize

the shadow

of the night?

The shadow

searches for the bridge

to the

land of its double,

looks

for its owner;

it may be only

an invisible breath

The shadow groans again

a muddy, thick, gray

groan

it waits but

the round moon above

objects

the shadow

takes a

blow

to

the

head.

-Translated from French by Evan Hero

Translator’s statement

I translated the French poem “L’ombre gémit” by Roselyne Sibille. She was born in 1953 in Salon-de-Provence, France, studied geography, and gives writing and listening workshops all over the world. She writes about life and humanity, and humans’ connection with nature, and her poems are often described to have a musical quality. Some of her other works include Lumière froissée, Par la porte du silence, Versants, and Tournoiements. The poem I chose is one of many from her book “L’Ombre-Monde” published in France in 2014. I perceived the poem as the following: a shadow is trying to escape from itself and its loneliness. It’s lost and is not even a shadow of something. It’s just there, disconnected and frightened, and wants to find its double to feel complete. The poem’s tone to me is eerie, mysterious, and full of panic. It also has lots of enjambment, which refers to the continuation of a sentence beyond the end of a line. There are also some interesting layout choices of the words on the page, like big gaps between words and lines. It doesn’t have much of a rhyme scheme or rhythm.

My dad speaks French, and he helped me create two different translations, each focusing on a different aspect or element of the original poem. In the first translation, I focused on matching the tone of the original. I translated the French title “L’ombre gémit” to “The shadow’s cry”. The word “gémit” could also mean “moan” or “groan” but I thought “cry” more accurately reflected panic. Throughout the poem, I chose words like “creep”, “delicate”, “expel”, and “whack” to reflect the tone the best I could, as well as some shaky, uncertain enjambment. I found this translation to be pretty straight-forward, as I had already worked with my dad to make a direct translation of the poem with multiple possible translations of almost every word. From this, I chose the option that I thought best resembled an eerie, mysterious, or panicky tone.

The second translation was quite a bit more difficult: the original poem didn’t have much of a rhythm, rhyme scheme, or any other aspect that I could reflect in a translation. So, I decided to go out on a big limb and create my own enjambment that was drastically different from the enjambment in the original poem. I made the text swirl and wave around on the page to make the shape of the poem resemble the shape and movement of the shadow it was describing, and I made sure the tone reflected this shape. I changed a lot of the words and metaphors compared to my first translation, such as saying “The shadow slides about” instead of “The shadow creeps forward” to show this different tone. I also introduced some figurative language—“as if it is / supported / only by / a / pin”—and made the poem shape get very narrow, as if the poem itself is balancing on a pin. I also tried to add immense detail and imagery and make it have more complete sentences to make the poem flow better and tell a story. For example, in my first translation, I said “turned away from time”, but in this one I said “alone, ignoring even the passing of time.” Instead of simply saying “the breath”, I wrote “it may be only / an invisible breath.” Instead of saying “The shadow waits — the round opening — / The moon / whacks me / on my head,” which sounds like an erratic series of thoughts or observations, I thought the “round opening” (originally “le hublot” in French) could be referring to the moon, as the poem takes place at night, and I changed it to “it waits — but / the round moon above / objects / the shadow / takes a / blow / to / the / head.” I intentionally made the poem’s shape get very narrow at the bottom to simulate a departure, like a cloud of smoke getting sucked through a small hole in the ground. I’m ultimately very proud of what I did with it.

This process was very fun, especially since I’ve heard my dad speak French so much and I’ve only started learning French this school year. I have already had some translation experience since I’m already fluent in Spanish and have been speaking it since I was born. I believe that there are bound to be some beautiful elements of the poem that get lost in translation. In every language, words have multiple different possible translations for another language, and there will never be a word in a language that always means another word. There are many words, especially in Spanish, that have a very specific emotion and simply have no single English word that can translate it properly (especially with nuanced idioms and figurative language in poetry). In my translations, for example, “the escaped reflection” sounds super clunky to me in English, but “le reflet qui fuit” has none of that awkwardness. When it says “La lune frappe sur ma tête” in the original poem, the French verb “frapper” does mean “to hit” or “to strike.” But the sound of the harsh consonants in the verb “frapper” really represent the meaning of the word in an onomatopoetic way that no single English word can properly mimic. Although I still prefer the sound of the poem in French over any possible English translation, I think it’s beautiful that, through poetry translation, people who don’t speak a certain language (in this case, French) can understand what the original poem said. As said in “A Manifesto for Ultratranslation”:

“At the most basic level, the message of translation: there is something being said elsewhere that is of crucial importance for us here (in this language) to hear. It is worth great effort to listen to that ‘something elsewhere.’”

I also made a blackout poem out of an interview with my dad about our family’s history of speaking French and living in New Orleans. I have been to New Orleans many times to visit family, and my dad has talked about our ancestry before, but I had never seriously sat down with him to talk about it for as long as we did. I really enjoyed learning more about where my family come from, as well as New Orleans and its French and Spanish history. At first, I was stuck starting my blackout poem because the interview was two pages long and a lot of interesting information. So I decided to look for patterns in what my dad was talking about, and organizing his ideas into groups to see what stuck out to me the most. I eventually chose to make my blackout poem about the culture in New Orleans, its French influence, and what it meant to my dad’s family. In the interview, my dad also mentioned a bit about our family’s history in Sweden, but that was only a small section, and I didn’t want to include it in the blackout poem because it wasn’t the topic I wanted it to focus on. I boxed the phrases I wanted to include with a sharpie, I added some nice designs in empty spaces, and finally colored in the rest of the pages. I’m very happy with how it turned out!

Bibliography

Antena. "A Manifesto for Ultratranslation." The Capilano Review 3.23 (2014): 125-131.

Sibille, Roselyne. “L'ombre Gémit.” Ombre Monde: Poésie, Les Éd. Moires, Gradignan, 2014, https://www.asymptotejournal.com/poetry/roselyne-sibille-shadowworld/french/.

“Roselyne Sibille.” Poetry at Sangam, GONECASE, http://poetry.sangamhouse.org/2014/08/roselyne-sibille/.

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Evan Hero is 15 years old and is in 10th grade at Meridian Academy in Boston, Massachusetts. He enjoys learning about math, science, and history, learning new languages, playing violin, and playing Minecraft. He also enjoys writing about himself in third person, as he is doing right now.