QC

[au deuil de la flore]

au deuil de la flore

il faut rajouter les essences piétinées par le bétail

les nasses qui ne capturent plus d’anguilles

l’éternuement de la terre aride

les antres habités par des fauves squelettiques

-Alain Mabanckou

[in mourning for greenery]

in mourning for greenery

one must give back the variety trampled by livestock

traps who no longer have eels

the cough of the cracked dry earth

the den where skeletal animals hide

-Translated from French by QC

[in mourning for wilderness]

in mourning for wilderness

one would restore the life crushed by cattle’s hooves

traps who no longer feed mouths

the hemorrhaging of dust from the earth

the home where starving animals die

-Translated from French by QC

Translator’s Statement

Alain Mabanckou (1966-) was born in the Republic of the Congo, and is a novelist, poet, and journalist. He currently works at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) as a professor of literature. Most of his work has been translated from French, though he has written several books and poetry collections in English. He gained public recognition when his first novel – Bleu-Blanc-Rouge – won a literary prize, the first of many. 

The two translations here are of the poem [au deuil de la flore] published in Tant que les arbres s'enracineront dans la terre (2004) which was published in Paris. The poem is short – five lines – the first of which is identical to the title. It, and some of the other poems in the collection, have brackets around the title and no capital letters used. The poem also has no rhyme scheme or rhythm. 

One possible translation of the title is in mourning for nature which sets the stage for what the poem is about. While it never specifies why nature is dying, the examples of damage to it are clearly caused by people: farming, overhunting, removal of sources of water, and removal of prey from ecosystems. This poem considers the process of “mourning” as being the process of attempted reconciliation – that we (humans) must add back what was lost because of us. The first three examples are phrased as to be more noticeable or human relevant – what we notice happening to our farmland, how we can’t get as much food from hunting, and how the earth is dry and dusty – which contrasts with the final line, focusing more on what is less immediate or what we can’t see: predators starving because they have been deprived of prey. 

For my first translation, I chose to focus on that last line, which I perceive to be the most important part. I found the wording of it particularly difficult, as there are many ways I could have phrased it, but eventually I chose the word “skeletal” for how I was describing the animals, as I felt that that best encapsulated the feeling of that line. My focus in the second translation was trying to make the poem feel hopeless and to make the desolation seem abject, as I thought that was one emotion in the original and wanted to see how the poem would work if that part was pronounced. One challenge I experienced in both translations was the second to last line – “l’éternuement de la terre aride.” The difficulty wasn’t that there was no good translation for it, but that it was hard to create translations for it that fit the theme of the translation. In my first translation, I changed “sneeze” to “cough” as it fit the tone of disturbing but not fully problematic issues (that leads to the issues we don’t see) better. In the second one, I specified what the line means by referring to what it is coughing (or in that translation, hemorrhaging) — dust. 

In the words of Carina del Valle Schorske “You have to get inside the poem in order to articulate it, but the poem you get inside is someone else’s.” This is quite an apt phrase, and I feel I had to do this throughout the translation. I spent a lot of time thinking about what the author meant — by the poem and individual parts — which required immersing myself in the ideas of the poem, rather than my own. While this was difficult, it was also quite beneficial for my understanding of and therefore ability to translate the poem. 

Acquiring the content of the blackout poem by interviewing my mother about her thoughts on her heritage languages was a strange experience for me. I very rarely talk with either of my parents (or my extended family) about “our” (I put the word “our” in quotations because I feel no relation to it and question its importance in defining who we are) culture or heritage, so it was quite unusual. For the final part of my blackout poem, I chose to use a paragraph from an article that was quite formally written. I made this decision because I thought the contrast of having the final lines be very formal, while also affirming some of the ideas present within the previous parts of the poem, made an interesting combination. I felt that the distanced certainty almost seemed to “justify” or “prove” the ideas of the poem. 

Bibliography

Alain Mabanckou. UCLA European Languages & Transcultural Studies. (2022, August 15). Retrieved April 25, 2023, from https://elts.ucla.edu/person/alain-mabanckou/  

Mabanckou, A., & Author Alain Mabanckou Alain Mabanckou. (n.d.). Three poems: Center for the art of translation: Two lines press. Center for the Art of Translation | Two Lines Press. Retrieved April 25, 2023, from https://www.catranslation.org/journal-post/three-poems/

Del Valle Schorske, Carina. “Letter of Recommendation: Translation.” The New York Times, 26 October 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/26/magazine/letter-of-recommendation-translation.html. Accessed 25 May 2023.

Wikimedia Foundation. (2023, February 16). Alain Mabanckou. Wikipedia. Retrieved April 25, 2023, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alain_Mabanckou  

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QC is 15 years old and lives in Boston, Massachusetts. He goes to Meridian Academy, and enjoys learning new things. His favorite hobbies are reading and playing Euro Style board games.