шш in review DISCOURSE OF THE OTHER - University of British ...

BOOKS IN REVIEWon the importance of music to poetry:"II cherche une langue qui atteigne àla transparence, dont le sens serait immédiatcomme celui de la musique."Here he writes of "le poème / naît parlente improvisation" and of poetry as"chant muet / où s'entend toute musique,figure / sans forme où remue / le possible"("mute song / in which all music'sheard, formless / figure that contains therange / of the possible"). This mellowsound is matched with a "taste for skiesof clouds / where the hours melt together/ in a neutral light" ("ton goûtdes ciels de nuages / où les heures seconfondent / dans une lumière neutre").Again and again the poems depict varietiesof light and surface, leading Stratfordto a diction replete with wordslike incandescent, shimmering, glistening,laquered, washed, melted and shadowless,somewhat over-rich in English perhaps,but faithful to the original and inany case quite unavoidable.Melançon's verse gives the impressionof unobtrusive music revealing by degreesan inner world of finely tuned perceptions.On the whole Stratford has beenable to do justice to his subtle tonalrange, even to the internal assonance ofindividual lines. He has succeeded in producinga convincing and familiar Englishmovement to the lines while committingfew injustices agamst the original. Wherehe does deviate significantly, it is to avoidan awkward literalism by choosing a conveniently"poetic" English word: "Notrepeu de raison" becomes "our fragile wisdom,""l'obscurité lavée" becomes "silverobscurity," and "dans l'inachevé" becomes"into the inchoate." I found onlyone truly unfortunate line. When Melançonwrites: "Les bois, les champs, laLoire, les villages / résumaient alentourle désordre universel," Stratford construesthe verb cumbersomely as "resumedaround."Michel Garneau's celebratory, idiomaticpoems are another kind of challengealtogether. There is the temptationto make him sound like Walt Whitman,and indeed there are certain similarities:a happy self-centredness, an unabashedcommitment to pleasure, a tendency tolively inventories. But Garneau seemsmuch closer to the primal juices, and hisego much less prone to cosmic posing.Some of the poems in Small Horses andIntimate Beasts, given as they are toflights of boastfulness and tongue-incheekexcess, are really for afternoondrinkers :je pète en couleurset je prends à la santé de tousune belle grosse botte de vie(I fart in technicolourand to everyone's healthI take a great big flying fuck at life)Clearly the political and social Garneauoftimes past has been swallowed upby a more elemental voice defying death,seizing the day, celebrating kinship withother creatures:comme des bouleaux qui auraient gagné laparolenous nous écorchons jusqu'à la vulnérablevéritéen nous criant des noms par-dessus latendressepour faire reculer la mort l'empêcherde baver sur nos vies(like birch trees given the power of speechwe skin ourselves down to the barest truthscalling each other names louder thantendernessto make death back off to keep itfrom drooling all over our lives)Poetry, Garneau has said, "is made byeveryone / the poet is anyone at all /and man is anyone at all." These poemsare an extended gloss on this democraticand populist affirmation. Garneauspreads his sympathies to animals of allkinds, the "animaux intimes," which are,in fact, metaphors for human feeling,and, collectively, an environment of141