after the great stories are lost in the world’s upheavals

by Gaby Bedetti and Don Boes, translated from Henri Meschonnic

after the great stories are lost in the world’s upheavals
memory begins to listen to each silence that is swallowed by the noise of now
to find its birth story
in a fragment of a Nahuatl poem written
after the conquest

a child talks to his
mother when I die
bury me under the hearth
when you will cry
if someone asks you why
you will say it's the smoke

Henri Meschonnic, Legendary Every Day (Légendaire chaque jour, Gallimard, 1979)

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ABOUT THE CREATORS

Gabriella Bedetti’s translations of Henri Meschonnic’s essays have appeared in New Literary History and Critical Inquiry. She interviewed him in Diacritics and wrote on his work in New Literary History. She and her co-translator, Don Boes, are circulating The Butterfly Tree: Selected Poems of Henri Meschonnic. Their translations have appeared in Puerto del Sol, World Literature Today, The Los Angeles Review, Rhino, Asymptote, and other journals.

Don Boes lives in Lexington, Kentucky. He teaches at Bluegrass Community and Technical College. His first book, The Eighth Continent, was chosen by A. R. Ammons as the recipient of the 1993 Samuel Morse Poetry Prize and published by Northeastern University Press. His chapbook, Railroad Crossing, was published in 2005 by Finishing Line Press in Georgetown, Kentucky. His book, Good Luck with That, was published in 2015 by FutureCycle Press.

Henri Meschonnic (1932-2009) is a key figure of French “new poetics,” best known worldwide for his translations of the Old Testament and the 710-page Critique du rythme: Anthropologie historique du langage. While his critical writing has been translated into English, his poems have never appeared in English in book form. His poetry prizes include Max Jacob International Poetry Prize, the Mallarmé Prize, the Jean Arp Francophone Literature Prize, the Guillevic-Ville de Saint-Malo Grand Prize for Poetry.

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