Charlestown Blues: Selected Poems, a Bilingual Edition [Hardcover]

“Unlike many of his French contemporaries, Goffette’s leanings are neither conceptual nor abstract; rather, translator Hacker describes him as ‘unabashedly lyrical.’ Delectable, fresh, and centered on expressions of earthly desire, longing, and despair, Goffette''s poems point to a love ‘laced with lust.’ In the series ‘Letter to the Unknown Woman Across the Street,’ evening falls fast as a male narrator voyeuristically watches his neighbor, imagining himself enveloped by her thighs and her joining him in play (‘Open up your shadows, your lap, your lips’). In ‘The Raising of Icarus,’ there are traces of ‘uninterrupted joy,’ blight and memories of ‘bottomless sky.’ Contemplating mortality, the poet parenthetically suggests ‘(In the end,/ despair''s not so bad, it''s even/ a kind of consolation, the evening''s/ pill which drops without a splash/ into the elixir of old lovers)’ in ‘Construction-Site of the Elegy.’ . . . Hacker''s superb translation will undoubtedly build a broad new following of readers. Recommended for academic and public libraries.”—Library Journal
 
 
 
 
 
 

“Goffette is an heir to Verlaine. A poet who very courageously has decided to remain faithful to his own personal life, in its humblest moments. He keeps things simple, he is marvelously able to capture the emotions and desires common to us all. Goffette is without question one of the best poets of the present moment in France.”—Yves Bonnefoy

 

 

“Guy Goffette is a distinguished French poet who has been translating W. H. Auden. Now the compliment is indirectly returned, thanks to Marilyn Hacker, a fine American poet of Goffette''s generation. She hears the French poems with great precision—poems which are the work of a master, integrating and transcending his influences, Rimbaud and Verlaine among others—and recreates them as English poems with equal precision. Pitch-perfect, she re-presents Goffette''s rhythm and lexicon, diction and tone: this is poetry translation at its best.”—Anthony Rudolf, poet, translator and publisher
 
 

Letter to the unknown woman across the street, I
Curtains, blinds, draperies, shades, no, nothing
Madame, to conceal from your Cyclops’ eye
in the shadows from which it spies on me
this long pale body, false corpse tired out
with debauchery, which is swooning too
before your balcony, with your drying
stockings and scanties of a nun at bay—
poisonous flowers for a lonely man
whom death panics, draws erect, demarrows
in the night, riveted to your white thighs.
 
Readers who denounce most contemporary French poetry as self-referential experimentation, word games, exercises in deconstruction, or other kinds of incomprehensible writing disconnected from everyday life—brace yourselves for a revelation. Erotic and urbane, distinguished by formal skill yet marked by the subtlest shades of feeling, Guy Goffette’s unabashedly lyrical poems pay homage to both Verlaine and Rimbaud, whom he counts as his important forbears, with echoes of Auden and Pound, Pavese and Borges.

In Charlestown Blues, poet and translator Marilyn Hacker has chosen a tightly thematic selection of poems, all centering around the notion of “blue”—the color and the emotion, as well as that quintessentially American style of musical performance. Hacker’s crystalline and musical English renderings will show Anglophones why Goffette is considered one of the most important poets writing in French today.

Guy Goffette is the author of seven books of poems, most recently L’adieu aux lisières, as well as two novels and imaginative studies of poets and painters including Auden and Bonnard. He has had a long career as a teacher, literary critic, and editor at Éditions Gallimard.
 
Marilyn Hacker is a member of the faculties at the Graduate Center, City University of New York, and at the City College of New York.  She is the author of eleven books of poems, including Desesperanto and Essays on Departure, and of five collections of translations.