Going to meet the water

Translator Remarks

In its original French, “A la rencontre de l’eau” consists of sixteen lines, each of a similar length and meter. The poem repeats the first word or phrase at the beginning of half of its paired lines. The cumulative effect of this repetition of structure and sound creates an incantatory feel which I sought to reproduce in my translation.

In the original text, the word “rencontre” by itself and the expression “aller à la rencontre de . . .” form the core of the poem’s “sense”. In the translation I sought to capture the range of meanings they would convey to a reader in the original. The meeting which this poem describes seems to vacillate between something like a hoped for encounter to a adversarial confrontation between the narrator and the river.

The fact that most of the verbs in poem are in the passé composé posed particular challenges. By their very nature, statements in the passé compose are meant to be definitive and final. In English such statements seem to bring out the most consonantal and punctuated sounds of the language;in contrast, an equivalent French statement can be just as flowing as any other statement in that relatively vowel saturated language. So, in writing the translation I worked to balance the need to honor the semantic restraints of the passé composé with my desire to capture as much as I could of the fluid sound of the French

The last line was the hardest to translate. Simply because of its position in the poem it both bears the weight of and colors all that has preceded it. Furthermore, this line lends itself to a variety of interpretations. Both the verb “se noyer” (which means to drown ones self but which also has other figurative meanings) and the noun “bassin” (bowl, basin, pond, dock, etc. . .) could evoke any number of different possible images or tones that would shape the reader’s response to the poem as a whole. In the end, I took a leap of the imagination into the clashing waters of sound and sense.

In turn, the author herself translated her poem into her native Creole.

Peter Small,
Translator
May, 2008

Peter Small has at different times worked as an attorney, secondary school teacher, newsletter publisher and Spanish language interpreter. He began writing literary translations in earnest in 2007 when he discovered that the International Writers Program provides free bagels at its reading.