Jacqueline Risset , Sleep's Powers
Translated by Jennifer Moxley
Ugly Duckling Presse, Essay/Criticism 2998, 120 pages
Review by Kiki Petrosino
Winter is the season for good books and long investigations. These days are short on sunlight, but rich with opportunities for new thought and—dare I say it?—dreams of all sizes. Jennifer Moxley’s new English translation of Jacqueline Risset’s Sleep’s Powers (originally published in French as Puissances du Sommeil, 1997) offers a delicate, yet vivacious series of ruminations that invite the reader down addictively winding paths of lyric language. Released in 2008 as part of Ugly Duckling Presse’s Dossier Series, Sleep’s Powers is just that: a portfolio on sleep, a collection of reveries in prose. The resulting volume is more collage than treatise; it’s a multi-part meditation that delights in making associative leaps that feel dream-like as they go along.
In Sleep’s Powers, Risset presents some 60 lyrical essays, each ranging in length from a few lines to several pages. Each piece contemplates the subject of sleep from a different angle: “The Sleep of an Apple,” “Sacred Sleep,” “Sleep with a Baby,” etc. In her hands, this most banal of biological activities becomes a rich storehouse for the imagination and a catalyst for the creation of new art. “Sleep is the loam of dreams, the material in which they grow,” she insists early in the collection. The speaker’s history, memories, and conversations are vitally constitutive of the soil here, too. In Risset’s formulation, sleep stays with us even when we’re awake, spilling into our daily lives and influencing our relationships in subtle ways, as in this passage from “The Telephone:”
One day, while talking about something else, he says: “I would like to call you in the evening. “Of course, yes, do.” A short time later, in another country, I am awakened by ringing. I reach out in the dark and hear his voice, hurried and intimate. I think to myself, “How can I hide the fact that he’s just woken me up?”
For Risset, the form of the essay is another kind of literary “loam,” which gives rise in this volume to moments of beautiful language and to surprising lyrical turns within the argumentation. Sleep’s Powers is full of digressions, anecdotes, scientific and literary allusions—it’s a sometimes unruly compendium lashed together by the keen intellectual energy behind it. Jennifer Moxley, a poet who works in both verse and prose (and who also translated Risset’s 1996 poetry volume The Translation Begins), brings her lexical agility to bear in translating these essays. Her graceful work draws strength from the dynamics of prose poetry, a form that relies on the skillful deployment of the sentence to advance the poem’s action. In translating Risset’s prose, Moxley makes masterful use of this tool to strike some lovely sonic effects. Note the “verdant landscape” of streams, rocks, and waterfalls enacted by the punctuation in this passage from “A Sleep Book:”
The jolts of sleep are also represented in this stream. It carries us along, gently rocking and slipping—but it is also troubled—with sudden interruptions—and sudden downfalls. Celadon and Astrea are also like a verdant landscape. Words and clods of earth and skin, great soft naked and gorgeous bodies in myriad pastoral concerts where what we love awakens—Astrea and Celadon melt into this seventeen-century French literary countryside, in an uninterrupted line they lead straight toward us, toward the westward hills of Forez, toward the setting sun.
Moxley’s use of the dash is kinetic—it creates a disturbance in the stream-like unit of thought that precedes it, and this small eddy (“it is also troubled”) empties into the “sudden downfall” that seals off the sentence. From streams and waterfalls, we move to Celadon and Astrea, conceived here as the “clods of earth” that characterize the pastoral landscape of French literature, a heritage that moves in “an uninterrupted line” toward the present. That luxurious, verdant, run-on sentence proceeds with the rhythms of poetry. It is poetry, after all, that allows for “toward” to be repeated three times at the end of the passage, thus creating an incantatory effect like the striking of chimes. The sheer variety of sounds available to us here, and throughout Sleep’s Powers, makes the volume a must-read for poets and prose writers alike. Moxley’s attention to sound and sense creates a pleasingly variegated terrain for us to explore; each essay begins and ends in a unique way, having realized its own particular charms.
In the end, Sleep’s Powers is a meditative dossier, a gathering of thoughts and images that take sleep as their first point of departure. Risset travels to different destinations on this journey (as she says: “There are certainly as many kinds of sleep as there are plants in the garden”), and it is this variety—the wealth of discoveries that Risset fashions from lived experience, from literature, and from the natural world—that accounts for the delight of this work.