Est Mort Research Articles

Entendre ces silences : traduire, transmettre et refléter Entendez-vous dans les montagnes… de Maïssa Bey, en italien et en anglais

Listen to those silences: translating, communicating and reflecting Entendez-vous dans les montagnes…by Maïssa Bey, in Italian and English
 Maïssa Bey is a French-speaking Algerian writer whose first works were published in the 1990s, during the "black decade" of the civil war that ravaged Algeria. Algerian people, especially women, of whom the author is an integral part, are the protagonists of her stories and novels that aim to break the silences and censorship, to explore the small stories hidden behind the big story. This article aims to analyse the Italian and English translations of Entendez-vous dans les montagnes..., a novel published in France in 2002 and in Algeria in 2007. The Italian translation, published by Astarte in 2020, is by Barbara Sommovigo, who had already translated Bey’s Puisque mon coeur est mort in 2013, initiating an almost paradigmatic author-translator relationship that allows for an effective approach to a short but complex text like Entendez- vous dans les montagnes... The English translation is by the American Erin Lamm, and is the result of her doctoral thesis, with a clearly more academic intention than the Italian text, whose publishing house Astarte aims to communicate voices from the shores of the Mediterranean. In fact, Bey's work travels between two languages and therefore between two cultures, the French and the Algerian, which intersect in the pages of the story like the lives of the three protagonists. An Algerian woman, an elderly Frenchman and Marie, a young blond woman, meet in the same compartment of a train to evoke memories and thoughts, which lead them to the past and recent history of Algeria, through painful pages among which is evoked the loss of the author's father, killed in 1957 by French soldiers. It is a difficult task for the translators to render this multiplicity of themes and languages from the title: for a French-speaking reader, there is a strong reference to both a line from the Marseillaise and an Algerian patriotic song (Min Djibalina). The Italian title is therefore changed to Dietro quei silenzi…, while the English title is purely literal, Do You Hear in the Mountains... This is just one of the translation choices that will be analysed in this paper, in which the comparison between the strategies and techniques used in the two translation works will be constant, creating a perpetual dialogue with the original text, in the image of the friendship that now exists between the author Maïssa Bey and the two translators.

The 7th Lawrence R. Schehr Memorial Award Winning Essay

Popular music abounds in Afropean literature, yet to date scholars have primarily read novels’ musical elements through author biography. In this article, I focus narrowly on the rich musical peritexts and musico-literary intermediality of two novels by Insa Sané: Du plomb dans le crâne (2008) and Daddy est mort…: Retour à Sarcelles (2010). In addition to the abundant diegetic musical references, both novels also feature two structural musical layers. I argue that these three musical elements constitute critical sites through which the novels’ narratives, which center around young, black, male protagonists who seek to escape vicious circles of violence through recognition, emerge. Ultimately, these novels’ musical elements situate the narratives’ discussions of black masculinity within much broader conversations transpiring between French and African American communities, thereby providing a much larger cultural genealogy to supplement the characters’ fraught literal ones.

The Ancient Near East: History, Texts, etc

The Ancient Near East:History, Texts, etc Christopher T. Begg Christopher T. Begg Catholic University of America 1783. [1st Millennium b.c. Babylonian Temple Rituals] Claus Ambos, "Babylonian Temple Rituals of the 1st Millennium BC," Cult, Temple, Sacred Spaces, 71-80 [see #2530]. My article deals with Babylonian temple rituals from the 1st millennium b.c. In it, I discuss the conception that the sanctuary, along with the cult image and the related rituals, had been created at the beginning of time by the gods themselves. I deal as well with the topic of the care and feeding of the gods in the temples by their human attendants. I likewise address the question of how human access to the divine abode was regulated and provide a short overview of the rituals of the cultic calendar in the above period. [Adapted from published abstract—C.T.B.] Google Scholar 1784. [Burial Rites for Neo-Assyrian Kings] Fabrice De Backer, "Le Roi est mort: Vive le Roi. Une base de réflexion pour le ritual funéraire royal néo-assyrien," RANT 17 (2020) 43-74. My paper presents a proposed reconstruction of the funeral rituals employed in the burial of Neo-Assyrian kings. In developing this reconstruction I make use of textual, visual, architectural, and material data in identifying and analyzing the various steps and actions involved, whether directly or indirectly in the burial process as well as the various sites where the king's corpse was prepared for burial. I likewise draw on ethnographical comparisons and the expertise of contemporary undertakers in formulating my hypothesis, which I hope may be of use to archaeologists who are looking forward to returning to the one-time territory of Assyria and resuming excavations there. [Adapted from published abstract—C.T.B.] Google Scholar 1785. [The Mortuary Chapel of the High Priest Hapuseneb (TT 67)] Tamás A. Bács, "A Theban Tomb-Temple: The Mortuary Chapel of the High Priest Hapuseneb (TT 67)," Discourse between Tomb and Temple, 11-39 [see #2523]. Hapuseneb was high pirest of the god Amun at Thebes during the reign of the female pharaoh Hatshepsut of the 18th Dynasty (see #1793), to whose inner circle of advisers and administrators he belonged. During his tenure, Hapuseneb oversaw the construction of his [End Page 670] own mortuary chapel (TT 67) which was left unfinished at his death and subsequently suffered much damage due both to human depredations and natural attrition. From the surviving remains of the structure's inscriptions and iconography, one feature stands out in particular, i.e., Hapuseneb's underscoring of his close association with and loyalty to Hatshepsut and his utilization of features of various Middle Kingdom temples and tombs, the latter feature serving to call attention to the high antiquity of the office exercised by him.—C.T.B. Google Scholar 1786. [Hittite Nocturnal New Moon Rites] Francesco G. Barsacchi, "'The King Goes Up to the Roof': Hittite Nocturnal Rites Performed during the New Moon," Cult, Temple, Sacred Spaces, 345-62 [see #2530]. On particular occasions, Hittite ritual practices might take place on the flat roof of sacred or profane buildings, which were perceived as the ideal setting for the carrying out of rites directed to celestial or astral deities. My paper analyzes selected examples of cultic activities taking place on a roof, before focusing on a particular group of texts describing a sequence of ritual actions performed by the Hittite king during the night in connection with the first appearance of the new moon. Many fragments of this group of texts are currently filed under the rubric CTH 645. Besides providing a general description of the above text corpus, my paper also addresses the debated issue of the possible relationship of these rites with the great monthly state festival. [Adapted from published abstract—C.T.B.] Google Scholar 1787. [Ostracon Deir el-Bahari Inv. No. F. 8941] Miroslaw Barwik, "Building the Temple 'To the North of the Royal Tomb'—Ostracon Deir-el-Bahari Inv. No. F. 8941," Discourse between Tomb and Temple, 41-54 [see #2523]. The partially preserved ostracon of B.'s title was...

Translation as a Form of Literary Communication in Poetry of Silver Age: Three Lyrical Versions of a Poem by Paul Fort

Three translations of Paul Fort small poem “Cette fille, elle est morte” by Konstantin Balmont, Valery Bryusov and Mikhail Kuzmin are considered. The results of a comparative analysis of these three texts using the analysis of the original are presented. The question is raised about the originality of the form used by Paul Fort: the text he wrote is a deformed trio, and this deformation should be recognizable for his potential reader. It is stated that the semantic side of the text is ambivalent: in the first half of the text negative moods prevail, in the second - positive ones, which is shown not only lexically, but also rhythmically. The relevance of the study is due to a detailed analysis of the three translations using material about the biography and work of the translators themselves. The novelty of the research is seen in the fact that such an analysis of the translation options for the Fort text and its formal, rhythmic and sound features has not been carried out before. The author dwells on the characteristic features of each of the three translations, noting both their connection with the original and the reliance on the translation of the predecessor, or, on the contrary, ignoring it. Particular attention is paid to the grammatical and lexical features of the original, which allow for an ambivalent interpretation of the meaning of the text.

The Ecopoetics of Reparation: Energy, Air and Cosmos in Marie Darrieussecq’s Tom est mort

This article establishes that reparation from grief is a process of “working through” trauma in which death is a catalyst for a re-imagination of the human form. “Working through” trauma comes about in different ways in Tom est mort. It manifests itself firstly as a process “outside” Judeo-Christian and socio-cultural signifiers and outside traditional limits of cognition and subjectivity. Darrieussecq views reparation as a process of nonanthropocentric and anthropogenic relationality (with other species and other non-human phenomena) in which new coalitions and affinities offer an alternative post-human ontology founded in the reduction and dissolution of human form into atoms and particles. Secondly, reparation finds an ecopoetic continuity and sustainability in the narrator’s proximity to and approximation with the physics and spherical production of motion (energy, air, cosmos) and the reparative possibilities posed by this physics to traditional, psychic forms of communication. Darrieussecq’s vision is the hidden energy that operates in space around us. It is a knowledge of the hidden that comes from an acknowledgement of human redundancy in the face of the planet’s eco-vitality.

After the End: The Death of a Child in Marie Darrieussecq's Tom est mort and Hèléne Cixous's Le Jour où je n' étais pas là

The death of a child is typically seen as incommensurate, a limit-experience defying articulation and comprehension. In her most recent book, Literature in the Ashes of History (2013), the literary critic and trauma theorist Cathy Caruth theorizes a history that inscribes itself in and through its own (self-conscious, and traumatic) self-effacement; what is striking is that her attempt to theorize and initiate what she calls 'a new kind of language', produced 'After the End' (as she titles the second part of the book), must thus be understood not only in relation to the post-Holocaust world, but also in the context of the more personal, individual trauma of the loss of a child. This article seeks to explore Caruth's notion of a different kind of language through analysis of two French fictional representations of the death of a child published in this century: Marie Darrieussecq's novel Tom est mort, and Hèléne Cixous's autofictional novel, Le Jour où je n'étais pas là (2000). I read these texts (which both explicitly locate writing 'after the end') alongside Caruth's Literature in the Ashes of History to contemplate what it might mean to write 'after the end'. Tom est mort, I argue, experiments with linguistic form, self-consciously stammering — in a manner curiously similar to Caruth's — in its attempt to express the impact of the death of a child on the mother (and on her language). Cixous's text, by contrast, gives voice to the mother's impossible mourning through figures of absence and lack. The 'new language' announced by Caruth is in these texts not a new language in itself, rather a language that is articulated in and through its own erasure, disintegration and absence, that 'undoes' its subject even as it gives voice to it, and locates itself after an end that cannot be defined.

An allegorical-ideological trinity: the beast is dead — the second World War among the animals (1944)

ABSTRACT During 1941, while France was being crushed under the iron fist of the Third Reich, the cartoonists Edmond François Calvo, and Victor Dancette began work on La Bête est Morte – La guerre Mondiale Chez Les Animaux [The Beast is Dead: The World War Among the Animals]. The two, secretly wrote and drew a cartoon epic that reimagined the history of the French nation during the war and cast animals as the warring nations. During 1944, a few months after the liberation, the first part of the work was published under the title Quand la Bête est Déchaînée [When the Beast is Unleashed]. The second part appeared a year later, as Quand la Bête est Terrassée [When the Beast is Defeated]. This article presents a literary and ideological discussion of both parts of La Bête est Morte, which is also the first graphic novel written to allegorically depict the Second World War and the Holocaust. The article also examines ways in which La Bête est Morte took part in the establishment and preservation of the Gaullist narrative and of the French collective memory of the war and its events.

Post/Past Violence: The Aftermath of Revolutions and Literature as Reconciliation

In this article I argue that Maïssa Bey’s Pierre Sang Papier ou Cendre (2008) and Puisque mon cœur est mort (2010) highlight Bey’s hesitation to support the use of violence in response to violence. Whereas a figure like Frantz Fanon supports anticolonial violence as the near inevitable reply to colonial atrocity, Bey’s textual representations of brutality during the Algerian War and especially the Algerian Civil War are much more focused on illustrating the dangers of retaliatory violence and demonstrating the power of literature as a mode of healing and reconciliation. I will thus examine how these novels propose reconciliation through fiction—and especially reconciliatory writing in contrast to further violence—in the aftermath of revolution and martial cruelty more generally.

Отражение во фразеологической неологии травматических исторических событий, связанных с террористической угрозой

Skorobogatova Taisiya Ivanovna, Nazarova Ekaterina Alexandrovna The article is devoted to the analysis of phraseological units - neologisms which are associated with such traumatic historical events, as the implementation of terrorist acts. Particular emphasis is placed on the description of English, Russian and French phraseological units that have introduced the memory of the terrorist threat in the XX-XXI centuries.: Eng. That’s so 10th September (lit. today September 10, fig: Do not worry ahead of time about nothing); Rus. мочить в сортире (descriptor: беспощадно расправиться); фр. le prince s’est mari, le m chant est mort, c’est une semaine Walt Disney (lit. prince married the villain died, week Walt Disney; descriptor: Idyll), g n ration Bataclan (lit. Bataklan generation; descriptor: young people age of the victims who died in the “Bataklane”, i.e. young people aged 25-35). Phraseology description of new, emerging units is one of the most important problems in theoretical linguistics, namely: to illustrate and confirm the fact that the phrasebook body of a single national language is the result of the two memories - historical and linguistic. At the same time important to consider such a significant factor that determines the specificity of the national phraseological fund as memory selectivity in general and historical memory in particular. Key words : phraseology, phraseological unit, phraseological neology, traumatic historical events, historical memory.

L’« anomalité » à l’œuvre dans Ma mère, musicienne … de Louis Wolfson

This article focuses on Louis Wolfson’s second book, Ma mere, musicienne, est morte de maladie maligne a minuit, mardi a mercredi, au milieu du mois de mai Mille977 au mouroir Memorial a Manhattan, published in French in 1984, and emphasizes its characteristic ambivalence, which is perceptible at all levels—type of narrative, subject matter, author, narrator, language, etc. Wolfson’s singular narrative is characterized by all sorts of tensions and splits, and actually offers a reflection of the author’s schizophrenia. Therefore it denies traditional categories such as pathography (suggested by its title) and psychopathological narrative. But the notion of “anomalie,” as it was defined by Canguilhem and taken up again by Deleuze, can account for this borderline work and its no less borderline author.

<p>CAUSAL CONSTRUCTIONS WITH AN ADJECTIVE IN GERMAN AND FRENCH: TYPOLOGICAL AND<br> PEDAGOGICAL CONSIDERATIONS</p>

The study will explore the variety of causal constructions with an adjective in French and German, as they are realized in French Pierre est rouge de colere (‘Peter is red with anger’), German Maria ist gelb vor Eifersucht (‘Maria is yellow with jealousy’), French Il est fou d’amour (lit. ‘He is crazy of love’), French Anne est morte de faim (lit. ‘Anne is dead of hunger’). First, the different elements of the construction will be described in detail in the framework of Goldberg’s Construction Grammar model (1995 and 2006) and of different phraseological studies (Burger 2007, Dobrovol‘skij 2011, Donalies 2009, and Fleischer 1997). As we will see, one and the same syntactic structure can convey different meanings (also a non-causal meaning) with different degrees of idiomaticity, which leads us to classify the different examples as a continuum between Construction Grammar and Phraseology. In a contrastive approach, the study further highlights the typological differences in the causal construction between the Germanic language German and the Romance language French. These differences can lead to difficulties for French-speaking learners of German. The study proposes some teaching strategies to facilitate the learning of such causal constructions with an adjective. We will advocate a teaching methodology which privileges holistic sequences or so-called ‘chunks’ (Handwerker 2008) and which further focuses on the typological differences in the lexicalization patterns (e.g. different prepositions in German, different colour terms,…), but also on conceptual metaphor and metonymy (Barcelona 2001; Lakoff & Johnson 1980; Niemeier 1998). This will help foreign learners to ‘rethink for speaking’ (Ellis and Cadierno 2009: 123) in the foreign language.

Psychic Plagiarism: The Death of a Child in Marie Darrieussecq's Tom est mort and Camille Laurens's Philippe

The notion of ‘psychic plagiarism’ was formulated in 2007 when Camille Laurens, the author of Philippe , a memoir recounting the death of her son, accused fellow writer Marie Darrieussecq of borrowing from it in her novel Tom est mort . In alleging that Darrieussecq had appropriated her loss, Laurens also suggests that any first-person fictional narrative of the death of a child necessarily appropriates others’ grief. Rather than debating the charge of plagiarism or determining the extent to which fictional narratives of child death might be deemed inappropriate, this article rethinks what it means to narrate the death of a child in the first person through the notion of ‘psychic plagiarism’. Psychoanalytic and trauma theory are drawn upon alongside close analysis of Tom est mort and Philippe to theorize a parent’s awakening to the death of his or her child as a ‘missed encounter’ engendering an imperative to give testimony to the child as inescapably ‘other’ to the self. My analysis explores how narratives of child death give voice to the Other precisely through a ‘missed encounter’ that is ultimately projected on to the reader, who is awakened to the realization of (having missed) someone else’s traumatic loss.

Amenhotep III: Egypt's radiant pharaoh

Prologue: the birthplace of Amenhotep III 1. An heir unapparent: reign of Amenhotep II, years 15-25, c.1411-1401 BC 2. The making of an heir apparent: reign of Thutmose IV, years 1-5, c.1401-1396 BC 3. Thutmose IV and King's Son Amenhotep in Nubia: reign of Thutmose IV, years 5-8 c.1397-1393 BC 4. Le roi est mort, vive le roi!: Reign of Amenhotep III, year 1, c.1391 BC 5. Establishing divine might and divine right: reign of Amenhotep III, years 1-4, c.1391-1388 BC 6. Year 5, 'The First Campaign of Victory', Amenhotep III's river war: reign of Amenhotep III, year 5, c.1387 BC 7. The spoils of war: reign of Amenhotep III, years 6-9, c.1386-1383 BC 8. The king's first two wives: reign of Amenhotep III, years 10 and 11, c.1382-1381 BC 9. The lost years: reign of Amenhotep III, years 12-19, c.1381-1370 BC 10. Bringing heaven and Earth to see the living gods: building the king's religious monuments at Thebes: reign of Amenhotep III, years 20-29, c.1369-1360 BC 11. Per Hai ('The House of Rejoycing') Palace at Malkata: reign of Amenhotep III, years 25-29, c.1364-1360 BC 12. Beneath the divine falcon's wings: a new world takes shape: reign of Amenhotep III, years 26-29, c.1363-1360 BC 13. The first jubilee festival (heb-sed): reign of Amenhotep III, year 30, c.1361 BC 14. Raising up old officials and buying a new bride: reign of Amenhotep III, years 30 and 31, c.1361-1360 BC 15. International trade in princesses and other goods: reign of Amenhotep III, years 32-33, c.1359-1358 BC 16. A mixed forecast: dazzling sun and dark clouds: reign of Amenhotep III, years 34-36, c.1356-1355 BC 17. The last hurrah: reign of Amenhotep III, years 37-38, c.1354-1353 BC 18. Year 38. Whose heaven is it? The reign of Akhenaten and beyond Epilogue: one god left standing.

The construction of national and foreign identities in French and Belgian postwar comics (1939-1970)

The second World War had various repercussions in the comics produced in the 25 years after the Liberation in France and Belgium: one remarkable consequence was the construction, in comics as La Bête est morte ! and Astérix, of a fictive French ethnicity which was eagerly contrasted to the stereotype of the militaristic Prussian. Despite a few comics demonstrated the positive effects of reconciliation with former enemies or of European cooperation, most comics rather clung to older stereotypes of other European people. These popular culture products offered a particular - but not always consistent - view on national identities in the post-war period

Romance nerveuse by Camille Laurens

d’odeurs et de saveurs tropicales. / Cela fait si longtemps que je ne fais pas partie d’un tel paysage” (82). Upon his return to his father’s grave, Dany writes the following: “Mon père est revenu / dans son village natal. / Je l’ai ramené. / Pas le corps que la glace / brûlera jusqu’à l’os. / Mais l’esprit qui lui a permis / de faire face / à la plus haute solitude” (289). He randomly continues his voyage and arrives at a remote hamlet where he writes “C’est la fin du voyage” (300). According to Wikipedia, Laferrière usually avoids having his books published in the fall, since that is the season of literary awards. However, at the insistence of his editors, this book came out in the fall and received the Prix Médicis. Laferrière is accessible on Facebook and a Google search produces links to short videos of his comments, recorded when he first arrived in Montreal. The recent earthquake in Haiti and the ensuing media coverage heighten the relevance of this novel and can potentially increase its readership, which this reviewer wholeheartedly recommends. Messiah College Lois Beck LAURENS, CAMILLE. Romance nerveuse. Paris: Gallimard, 2010. ISBN 978-3-07-011991-2. Pp. 219. 16,90 a. In 1995, Camille Laurens published Philippe, the wrenching narrative of her infant child’s death, apparently due to medical negligence. From that point her writing fell increasingly into the autofiction mode, which for some readers means learning more about the author than is deemed necessary. In 2007, Marie Darrieussecq published Tom est mort, a fictional account of the death of a young son. Laurens accused Darrieussecq of plagiarism. Since both women were publishing at the time with P.O.L., the directeur général, Paul OtchakovskyLaurens , attempted to placate each party, to no avail. Laurens quit P.O.L. and eventually wound up at Gallimard. Her long friendship with OtchakovskyLaurens was apparently broken by these incidents. In 2010, Darrieussecq published Rapport de police (P.O.L.), a study of literary plagiarism. All of these events find an echo in Romance nerveuse. The main character, Camille Laurens, is involved in a very bitter and public argument with the author of a novel called Dolorosa who “a repris presque textuellement certaines phrases de [...] Philippe” (19). The editor, Georges, has turned some of his house’s writers against Laurens, but others have rallied to her side, and toward the end of the novel Georges seems to apologize for his conduct. Readers of this journal may or may not be interested in this squabble. If it is mentioned here, it is because it is by far the more interesting part of the novel. Otherwise, one is treated to a narrative of an intelligent and established novelist’s affair with a considerably younger, unstable paparazzo. Luc had bummed around the world before combining his gift for photography with the world’s hankering for gossip, and he manages to make a decent living supplying sundry “National Enquirers” with fodder on the rich and famous. Yet, as Laurens notes, it is hard to immediately grasp what “un paparazzi [sic] et une agrégée” (214) have to share. The problem with Luc is not, however, what he does; it is how he acts. Extremely volatile and incapable of controlling his appetites or his emotions, uncertain of his sexual identity, Luc more often than not behaves like a whiney child with Laurens serving as his loving and beloved mother. But since the child has apparently read Freud or studied Reviews 859 Lacan, he hates Mom as well. Laurens does have a sort of alter ego, Ruel, who seems to sit on the novelist’s shoulders and provide counsels as wise as they are unheeded. The result is a catalogue of the abuses heaped on and accepted by Laurens. It is possibly true and certainly cruel to suggest that people often tend to find the emotional/erotic lives of others more silly than titillating. However questionable such an assertion might be in general, it is undeniable that in this novel the portrait of love and passion which emerges is much more ridiculous than moving. The sense of annoyance and...

Parrot and Olivier in America by Peter Carey

WORLD LITERATURE IN REVIEW ^^^^^^^^^^^Hpi i Using a consistently direct, ele gantly concise style, Ananissoh suc cessfully conveys his vision of an irreducible core of moral darkness in the heat and blinding light of the noonday sun. Edward Ousselin Western Washington University M?issa Bey. Puisque mon c ur est mort La Tour d'Aigu?s, France. LAube. 2010.254 pages. 18. isbn 978-2-8159-0000-3 Aida, a divorced, middle-aged Alge rian mother and English literature professor, is writing increasingly desperate messages to her recently assassinated only son. Part revenge tragedy, part mournful introspec tion, Ma'issa Bey's harrowing and superbly written novel bears witness to the tens of thousands of victims of Islamic fundamentalism in this long suffering North African country. Beginning with A?da's new status as a bereaved mother and ending with the moment when she confronts her son's killer, Puisque mon c ur est mort (Since my heart is dead) provides in the course of fifty short chapters the portrait of an ordinary, if somewhat unconventional, woman who strug gles against both her grief and the rigid social norms of her community. Due to a law of amnesty designed to put an end to a decade of civil war, A?da knows that the man who shot her son will not be brought to justice. She describes the societal effect of this law as a pro cess of relegating the brutal, bloody years of a war waged against civil ians to the presumably soothing sta tus of a distant dream. Meanwhile, the murder of her son has corifined A?da to a recurring nightmare that begins "au moment pr?cis o? j'ouvre les yeux sur la lumi?re du jour, de chaque jour" (precisely when I open Ma?ssa Bey Puisque mon cceur est mort roman my eyes to see the first light of the day, of every day). Spkaling into a form of madness, having abandoned her professional responsibilities, she spends her days alone in her apart ment, venturing out only to visit her son's grave or to walk along a desolate beach. A?da finds no sol ace when she learns that her son, Nadir, a medical student, was shot by mistake, the real target having apparently been his friend Hakim, the son of the local police chief. Fit tingly enough, it is the guilt-ridden Hakim who will supply the grieving mother with a gun, ostensibly for her own protection, but which will also allow her to plan and carry out her vengeance. Much of the narrative is devoted to A?da's recounting, in the form of a one-sided dialogue, of her son's short life. From Nadir's circumci sion to the beginnings of his medical studies, from his group of friends to his briefly glimpsed loves, A?da's son slowly becomes a fleshed-out character, even as the ramifications of his death propel the narrative forward. The posthumous portrait of Nadir also furnishes details about how daily life in Algeria has been impacted by the unrermtting terror and Jollings. Speaking about her son's generation, A?da points out that due to the long years of mas sacres and assassinations, normal leisure activities?such as going out to a concert or a film?have disap peared: "Toutes ces choses-l? appar tiennent ? un pass? r?volu" (all those things are part of a distant past). It is in such comments about her son's and her own daily life, which attest to ordinary human concerns, that A?da's own character transcends what might have been a stereotypical depiction of a grief-stricken mother, bent on revenge. While she is at one level an allegorical representation of her conflict-ridden society, A?da remains a deeply fascinating indi vidual, even as she succumbs to the violence that surrounds her. (Edito rial note: To read an essay by Bey, see the November 2007 issue of WLT.) Edward Ousselin Western Washington University Peter Carey. Parrot and Olivier in Amer ica. New York. Knopf. 2010. 387 pages, ill. $26.95. ISBN 978-0-307-59262-0 One thing the polymath Australian novelist Peter...

La Poétesse: homobiographie by Liliane Giraudon

by the earth. It is perhaps worth mentioning at this point that La Piste mongole is not for the light reader. Christian Garcin is a scholar not only in his references to the smells, sights, and sounds of Mongolia, but also in terms of the politics and religious beliefs of the region, as well as of international cinema, classical music, and English, Russian, and American literature. His is a concentrated writing. He uses a plethora of stylistic devices such as rich vocabulary, imagery, “oraliture,” a play within a play, a novel within a novel, multiple narrators, and two fonts. If one could find fault at all with the novel it would be perhaps the overabundance of minor characters whose names and identities are often confusing. He has, in addition, a sense of humor, for he includes himself in a list of names who “avaient tous été un jour retrouvés recroquevillés dans un terrier, un sous-sol ou au fond d’une grotte, à l’intérieur d’une niche qu’ils avaient eux-mêmes creusée, comme de petits animaux trouvés mort-nés dans l’utérus maternel” (174). Worlds within worlds, multiple realities, the invisible versus the visible, who we are and who we dream we are: complex webs which overlap and penetrate each other. Garcin’s novel is a saga of frontiers and boundaries that clearly do not exist, places where we are and are not, all at the same time. The reader must be patient, and nibble just a bit at a time. “On est entourés de réalités toutes concentriques [...] Il y a des mondes qui se frôlent, où fourmillent fantômes et spectres, revenants, âmes languissantes, esprits de toutes sortes [...] C’est ainsi que va le monde” (222-23). At least, the world according to Garcin. Millburn H.S. (NJ) emerita Davida Brautman GIRAUDON, LILIANE. La Poétesse: homobiographie. Paris: P.O.L., 2009. ISBN 978-2-84682302 -9. Pp. 121. 13,50 a. A challenging, fascinating work that resists genre classification, La Poétesse presents what Liliane Giraudon calls “une littérature accidentée” (44), one that calmly faces down life’s disorder and daily strangeness while ambitiously experimenting with form. Divided into three distinct sections with shared resonances, La Poétesse strikes a balance between pushing literature’s boundaries, questioning social norms and ontological contradictions, and offering an accessible whole that runs the gamut of emotions. Of special note are the varied structures and the interart discourse—“‘écriredessiner’ tout attaché”—that lend originality to this collection while exemplifying Giraudon’s approach to poetry as a space where unpredictable mixes and alternations reinvigorate language as our “bien commun ” (back cover). Giraudon envisions opening a path to a “nouveau livre, un livre défait, [...] un champ sous nos pieds” that resists and whose earth must be continually opened to better fulfill its role of nourishing “tout / Les fous avec les folles / [...] Les folles avec les fous” (121). She inscribes this desacralized resistance into part one by calling it “Ma chérie je t’ai fait des phrases trouvées partout,” a title that invokes intertexts and informality; by configuring this thirty-four-page section from short paragraphs placed in two columns per page; and by starting most paragraphs with “Hier” as an all-encompassing temporal indicator and/or “La Poète” as shorthand for the speaker’s “Mystérieuse identité fugitive” (11). We quickly see how the collection’s subtitle homobiographie took shape, in that the speaker seeks to relate experiences of all kinds without laying special claim to them as any more than the dispersed, dry flow of life “de livre en livre” (42). 416 FRENCH REVIEW 84.2 Nonetheless, Giraudon’s fragmented, collage-like form provides intriguing surprises, whether through quietly lyrical turns or measured detachment. Part one succeeds by shifting with clarity and concision between registers, time periods, and sensations: “Hier deux mois que maman est morte. Je ne supporte pas sa perte. Je ne savais pas que ce serait si dur cette idée: elle est morte et c’est pour toujours. [...] C’est ce qu’écrit La Poète” (35). Part two, “Kara...

Song without Words

Song Without Words Denis Donoghue (bio) We normally advert to eloquence when we note the exuberance with which a word, a phrase, a sentence, or a line of verse presents itself as if it had broken free from its setting and declared its independence. This explains why we remember a certain eloquent moment and, a split second or an hour later or never, the context in which it appeared. A selection from my own failing memory: "She should have died hereafter." "The seal's wide spindrift gaze toward paradise." "The troubled midnight and the noon's repose." "In the mountains, there you feel free." "Cover her face; mine eyes dazzle; she died young." "And sweet reluctant amorous delay." "J'ai tout lu, se disait-elle." "I coulda bin a contender." "You talkin' to me?" "Blown hair is sweet, brown hair over the mouth blown." "Agnosco veteris vestigia flammae." "So have I heard and do in part believe it." "And my poor fool is hanged!" "Those are pearls that were his eyes." "Thou art indeed just, Lord, if I contend with thee." "The fire that stirs about her when she stirs." "Inns are not residences." "But the snows and summer grieve and dream." "A bracelet of bright hair about the bone." "Did he who made the Lamb make thee?" "Twice no one dies." "On his wise shoulders through the checkerwork of leaves the sun flung spangles, dancing coins." "Dear incomprehension, it's thanks to you I'll be myself, in the end." What these have in common in my mind is their irreducibility: each has a context which in some cases I have forgotten, but each seems surrounded by empty space. Each exists in an eternal present moment. And each is so independent in that moment that it doesn't need to declare its independence. When one or another of these items comes to my mind, it makes me feel that nothing else in the whole world matters; that this is what life amounts to. The narrator in Blanchot's L'Arrêt de mort says: Je parle de faits qui semblent infimes et je laisse de cöté les événements publics. Ces événements ont été très grands et ils m'ont occupé tous les jours. Mais, [End Page 190] aujourd'hui, ils pourrissent, leur histoire est morte et mortes aussi ces heures et cette vie qui alors ont été les miennes. Ce qui parle, c'est la minute présente et celle qui va la suivre. A tous ceux qu'elle abrite, l'ombre du monde d'hier plait encore, mais elle sera effacée. Lydia Davis's translation, which I have slightly modified, reads: I am talking about things that seem negligible, and I am ignoring public events. These events were very important and they occupied my attention all the time. But now they are rotting away, their story is dead, and the hours and the life that were then mine are dead too. What is eloquent is the passing moment and the moment that will come after it. The shadow of yesterday's world is still pleasant for people who take refuge in it, but it will fade. II In "The Second Coming" Yeats tries to conceive an image of the impending historical dispensation, as he takes it for granted, dreadfully, but also with the force of desire for it, an image antithetical to that of the Christ child born two thousand years ago. What occurs to him is "a shape with lion body and the head of a man / . . . / moving its slow thighs, while all about it / Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds." Not birds but their shadows, the only parts of them that cannot escape from the weird shape in the sand. The eloquence of the passage breaks forth in "indignant." It is astonishing that the birds should be thought to feel what we would feel, faced with a new wild image that would govern our lives. Reel: to stagger or whirl, as here probably to whirl in circles, the birds being unable to release themselves from the appalling image below them in the desert. Indignant in this poem is the word...

After Sir Nigel Crisp, the ‘blame game’ and a three-way role split?

Even though ‘mad March’ is over, it will be a long time before anyone can let it go. “Leroi est mort”. But no-one right now can say “vive le roi” - not least because no-one has a clue who it will be.

Victorian Poetry: An Annotated Anthology by Francis O'Gorman

MLR, IOI.3, 2oo6 833 her argument often strays. A danger is that, in the absence of any thorough economic discussion, it is difficult to imagine what 'inclusive society' might actually imply (a fairer society? amore inclusive culture?). Pronouncements like the following on mid-nineteenth-century Britain are neither good style nor sense: 'The problem that engaged the collective imagination, especially that of the "cultivated" classes ... .]was how tomaintain social distinctions within amass society' (p. i66). All three definite articles are dubious (the third actually provokes an apologetic set of quotation marks round 'cultivated'). As for 'especially', are we really saying working-class activists (for example) were anxious to justfy the squire and his relations? Morris borrows the idea of a 'code of sincerity', but the codes of her own writing are often opaque. The price of safeguarding the 'mediocrite bienveillante' demanded of politically correct academics is the evasion of historic differences, which carries its own nemesis of leaving current orthodoxies unchallenged. Sentimental misreadings and botched shots at epigram fumble the argument. Mrs Boffin, for instance, does not actually have 'an instinct for fashion' (p. 2z8): she aspires, but cannot attain, a fact (Morris misses even this level of subtlety) that does not diminish our respect for her. Again, Spencer was not 'a social-Darwinian before Darwin' by virtue of his writings 'throughout the I850s' (p. i66), since Darwin had been publishing his findings from I836. Even as an essay in late twentieth-century neo-scholasticism, the quality of writing provokes comparison with the language of those fashionable works in French by German authors regretted by de Stael: 'elle a pourtant un defaut, c'est qu'elle est morte'. UNIVERSITYOF LANCASTER MALCOLMHARDMAN Victorian Poetry: An Annotated Anthology. Ed. by FRANCISO'GORMAN. Oxford: Blackwell. 2004. xxxviii+697pp. ?ig.99. ISBN o-63I-23435-7. In the introduction to this new annotated anthology, Francis O'Gorman writes that 'theVictorian period now seems, suddenly, further away' (p. xxxvii). There are few scholarly forms more illustrative than an anthology of this perceived, if not empiri cally regular, form of distance. On one level instruments of access and insight, such works also make a virtue of popular alienation from the cultural milieu they invoke. Providing opportunities for re-evaluation of familiar and neglected works, they foster a second, more productive, sense of distance. The publisher's claims for this selection-a 'provision of key texts, canonical and post-canonical, with detailed annotation, sufficient to facilitate close reading, for use on specialist and appropriate survey courses' (p. ii)-are those upon which the volume should first bejudged. Whether or not we deem the term 'post-canonical' ameaningful designation, it is true that O'Gorman manages to give space to such stalwarts as Macaulay, Tennyson, Clough, and Arnold without crowding out Pre-Raphaelites such as D. G. Rossetti and Swinburne, or the women poets of the century. The introductions to authors and to individual poems aremostly very helpful. They are clearly written, and rarely guilty of over-simplification. Equally good, itwould seem, is the textual apparatus. Some may think itunfortunate that O'Gorman feels it necessary to gloss a reference toWaterloo (p. 449) inAlfred Austin's 'Henry Bartle Edward Frere', and indeed the name 'Zeus' (p. 579) inW. E. Henley's In Hospital (I875), but generally speaking he exercises judicious restraint where explanatory interventions are concerned. In the light of these editorial labours, it is disappointing that all the lines of poetry have been individually centred. This contrasts with an otherwise well-designed page. The text is not cluttered with references, and room has been found for instructive illustrations. Examples include Filippo Lippi's Coronation of the Virgin (I44I-7) 834 Reviews as an aid to understanding Robert Browning's poem 'Fra Lippo Lippi'; and B. R. Haydon's Marcus Curtius (I843) as an 'intertext' (p. 30) to Elizabeth Barrett's 'Rime of the Duchess May'. It is also refreshing to leaf through an anthology that does not carve up the longer stanzaic poems of the period. Here we find Tennyson's In Memoriam (I850) and Christina Rossetti's 'Goblin Market' presented in their entirety. O'Gorman's policy of 'eschewing selection and abridgment' (p. xxxvii) deserves...