Awards
Beverley Bie Brahic has been awarded a Canada Council for the Arts Grant (2003-4) and residencies at Yaddo and MacDowell. She won the 2013 Scott Moncrieff Prize for Translation, for Apollinaire, The Little Auto, (CB Editions), which was also shortlisted for the Northern California Book Awards.
Her collection of poems, Hunting the Boar (CB Editions, London, 2016) is a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. She was a finalist for the 2012 Forward Prize for Best Collection, for White Sheets (CB Editions, UK, and Fitzhenry & Whiteside, Canada), a Poetry Book Society Recommendation; for the 2009 Popescu Translation Prize, for Francis Ponge, Unfinished Ode to Mud (CB Editions); for the 2010 French-American Foundation Translation Prize, for Julia Kristeva, This Incredible Need to Believe (Columbia University Press).
Héléne Cixous, Twists and Turns in the Heart’s Antarctic (Polity Press) was longlisted for the 2014 Pen Translation Prize.
A pamphlet (chapbook) Catch and Release was awarded the 2019 Wigtown Book Festival Alastair Reid Pamphlet Prize.
Reviews
Baudelaire: Invitation to the Voyage
The Times Literary Supplement, 23 October 2020
‘Brahic…has shown care and attentiveness to language when it comes to the translations themselves. She stays close to the original rhyme schemes, but not so close that she makes a mockery of them. As a result, she achieves some fine correlations, especially in the sonnet, “Exotic Perfume”, the pantoum, “Harmonie du Soir” and the famous “Spleen”, where she succeeds in keeping both to the rhyming couplet scheme of the original and to the dark melancholia of the poet’s mind: “And long hearses with neither drums nor music / File slowly through my soul; Hope starts to sag / And routed weep; and Anguish, despotic, / On my bent cranium plants its black flag”. Chapeau, as they say in France.’
Invitation to the Voyage: Selected Poetry of Charles Baudelaire
The Bookbinder’s Daughter, 1 March 2020.
Beverley Bie Brahic is not only a talented poet, but she is also a gifted translator. Her latest work, a series of Baudelaire’s poems selected and translated for this edition entitled Invitation to the Voyage, was chosen from the wide array of the French poet’s oeuvre. Brahic describes her experience choosing, organizing and translating of Baudelaire’s work in the introduction to this volume: “When I began to translate Baudelaire, it was as an exercise in reading, visceral, as translation always is. The sensuous poems—dreams of escape to an impossible, often tropical, elsewhere, visions of voluptuousness—drew me first for their descriptive and perceptual richness. But the sensual Baudelaire needs the bitter, compassionate, desolate Baudelaire…”
“I adore you like the starry night sky…” is a favorite from the collection and best illustrates Baudelaire’s tension between the passionate and the bitter:
I adore you like the starry night sky,
O vase of sorrows, taciturn beauty,
And love you all the more as you flee me,
As you appear, oh how ironically,
Rich jewel of my dreams, to increase the waste
Between my arms and the immense blue space.
I rise to the attack, mount the assault,
Like a choir of maggots after a vault,
And cherish, beast cruel and implacable,
Even the coldness that makes you more beautiful.
The beautiful coldness, the taciturn beauty—Baudelaire’s jarring descriptions are still perfect in Brahic’s translation.
My favorite in the collection is a poem entitled “The Cat” not only because of the juxtaposition of the sensual and the bitter but because of the unexpected twist in the poem. The title is almost deceptive:
Come, my fine cat, to my amorous heart;
Keep your claws sheathed,
And let me sink into your eyes that dart
Sparks of metal and agate mixed.
When my fingers can stroke at their leisure
Your head and your elastic
Back, and my hand gets drunk on the pleasure
Of your body electric,
It is my wife I conjure up. Her gaze,
Amiable beast, like yours,
Deep and cold as a spear, penetrates me,
And from her toes to her ebony hair,
A dangerous perfume, a subtle air,
Swims around her brown body.
And the most wonderful thing about the collection is that the prose poems and short essays are paired with the appropriate poems thematically. In “Invitation to the Voyage” he writes,
You now the fevers that assail us in our cold wretchedness, our nostalgia for the country we don’t know, the anguish of curiosity? There’s a land that resembles you, where everything is beautiful, rich, tranquil and honest, where the imagination has constructed and decorated a western China, where life is soft and sweet to breathe, where happiness is wedded to silence. We must go there to live, we must go there to die!
Yes this is where we must go to breathe, dream and while away the hours in an infinity of sensations. A musician has composed an Invitation to the Waltz; who will compose an Invitation to the Voyage,that we may offer it to the woman we love, the sister-elect?
Whether one is familiar with Baudelaire or not this is a lovely volume to have sitting on one’s shelves. The poems also come with the original French facing the translation and since this published by Seagull Books the cover is a work of art.
. . .
Joseph Houlihan in The Chicago Review of Books, December 4, 2019
The Sensualities of Surrealism
Charles Baudelaire is for everyone; his sibilant decadence, his sultriness, his eroticism. In the Arcades Project, Walter Benjamin dedicated a book to Baudelaire’s vision in the emergence of modernity. Baudelaire crystalized a frenetic lyricism, in ardor, in tumult. He wrote, “the splenetic cupola of the sky,” and “the boisterous sun beating a tattoo upon his windowpane.”
Baudelaire was equally suited to a life in solitary refuge or on a busy thoroughfare, carousing and translating Poe. And he remains the archetype for modernity. The surrealists named him a forebear. And Sophie Calle draws on his streetwalking for her feminist performances. Baudelaire epitomizes what Emerson called, “the rhapsodic.” And James Schuyler’s Morning of the Poem begins with the image of Baudelaire’s skull, “which stands for strength and fierceness, the dedication of the artist.”
The new translation of Charles Baudelaire, Invitation to the Voyage, translated by Beverley Bie Brahic is a welcome reminder of the poet’s fierceness and strangeness.
The sensual coexists alongside a strange attraction to the schematic. Across his majors works, “The Spleen of Paris,” and “Invitation to the Voyage,” Baudelaire develops axiomatic allegories. There are recurring visions: time, the sea, the crowd, love, fate. In Man and the Sea, he evokes the oceanic submission, “Free men, you will always cherish the sea/ It is your mirror; in its endless roll/ you contemplate your soul/ and regard yourself no less bitterly./ …Both of you are circumspect/ Man, no one has sounded your abysses; Ocean, no one knows your inmost riches,/ Intent as you are on keeping your secrets.”
And draws a parallel in the modernist city crowd, “Not everyone has the gift of losing themselves in a throng of people: loving crowds is an art; and only someone whose good fairy bestowed on him a taste for travesty and masks, a hatred for domesticity and the love of travel, can, at the expense of humankind, feast on a crowd’s vitality.”
He sings the song of intoxication, in “The Soul of Wine,” “For I feel an immense joy when I glide/ Down the gullet of some work-worn fellow,/ And his warm breast for me a soft bed/ I much prefer to my clammy cellar.”
And in the contemporary translation “Get Drunk!” “If you don’t want to be the martyred slaves of Time, get drunk; never stop getting drunk! With wine, with poetry, or with virtue as you like.” And he captured the eroticism of certain gloomy gothic traditions, so beloved by the surrealists. In “A Phantom,” he writes about the smells of seduction and musk:
“Reader, tell me, have you ever at dusk
Slowly, avidly, dragged on the crumb
Of incense that fills a church, or some
Old sachet of the inveterate musk?
A deep charm, magical: spellbindingly
In the present the past to us is restored!
So the lover from a body adored
Picks the exquisite flower of memory.
From the resilient, dense mass of her hair,
A living sachet, the boudoir’s censer,
Rose a fragrance, savage and animal,
And, muslin or velvet, her dresses all
Were drenched with a youth so pure
Even they gave off a scent of fur.”
****
The poet of modern times still drags us through the streets and voyages of revery. But there’s more, a sadness and existential terror, or “an oasis of horror in a desert of ennui,” as Baudelaire states.
In her translator’s introduction, Brahic writes: “But the sensual Baudelaire needs the bitter, compassionate, desolate Baudelaire.”
Before this, I was most familiar with the Wallace Fowlie translations of Baudelaire. And that writing feels a little stiff, compared with Beverley Bie Brahic’s work.
In the canonical, “Invitation to the Voyage,” Brahic updates Fowlie. She writes, “Love then expire/ In a land as fair as you are!/ The damp suns that rise/ In those misty skies.”
This feels fluid and energetic compared with the Fowlie, “Loving and dying/ In the land that bears your resemblance!/ The wet suns/ Of those disheveled skies.”
Some of the updates might cause nostalgia pangs. Brahic replaces, “You must always be intoxicated.” with “Get drunk.” Simple and direct.
But her work is masterly. Her “Autumn Song,” is a revelation, “Winter is going to repossess my soul–/ Anger, hate frissons, horror, drudgery,/ And like the sun caught in its polar hell/ A red frozen lump’s what my heart will be.”
This is significantly clearer and more fluid than Fowlie’s, “All of winter will gather in my being:anger,/Hate, chills, horror, hard and forced labor,/ And, like the sun in its polar hell,/ My heart will be only a red icy block.”
Baudelaire is our modern imagination, and Brahic’s work does a service expanding his vision in a contemporary voice.
Poetry
Invitation to the Voyage
By Charles Baudelaire
Translated by Beverley Bie Brahic
Seagull Books
Published Jan. 1, 2020
Suzannah V. Evans in The Times Literary Supplement, 24 September 2019:
Translucent slices
The Hotel Eden opens with an opening: “Madame Martin will throw back her shutters at eight / One arm will scoop up sun”. This is typical of the sense of immediacy and physical ease that characterizes Beverley Bie Brahic’s fourth collection. Later in the poem, it is imagined that Madame Martin will “tie an apron about her waist / Fingers doing that brief couple dance” in an image that is as quotidian as it is sensual, and it is this attention to the everyday stuff of life that makes Brahic’s poetry shine. A people-watcher as well as a flâneuse, Brahic fills her poems with regulars at the Luxembourg Gardens, who sit “Toasted round the edges like chestnut leaves”, “paysans”, boulistes, belotte players, Provençal storytellers and friends. The poems revel in companionship, as in “Landline”, which discusses a father’s aversion to the telephone, “that hard-shelled crab / Hunkered in the den”, and ends with amiable silence: “We sloshed back across the shingle / With our buckets of oysters, / The silence not uncomfortable”. “A Community Garden” also features intent activity; this time weeding, rather than oyster picking. The speaker’s work is interrupted by an old man who “squats down” and joins in with the difficult task of “Pulling weeds / Without breaking the roots” in the Californian heat: “His wife and children grow impatient. / He ignores them. He is happy weeding. / We are happy too”. Immersion in the present moment is shown to be a “recipe for peace – of a sort”. Group gatherings are equally cherished, and Brahic celebrates both storytellers and listeners in a prose poem set on Christmas Day evening in southern France, drawing attention to the “pauses, the winks, the sotto voce, the gestures, the audience as claque and chorus”.
The collection also thrums with a delicious erotic energy. Often, it is food, and particularly fruit, that lends a sensual or sensuous element to Brahic’s poems – there is a translation from Baudelaire here which speaks of “fruit oozing with flavour”. (Brahic is an esteemed translator as well as a poet, and has published translations of Guillaume Apollinaire, Francis Ponge and Yves Bonnefoy, among other French or francophone writers.) “Red Berries” sees the speaker savour produce at a farmer’s market – “I bought two slabs / Of the wild salmon / Sweet butter / To seize it in” – while “Winter Pears” ends with the slow simmering of translucent slices of fruit. Both these poems, like the collection as a whole, are simple, painterly, offering the same “abundance” for the reader that Beverley Bie Brahic finds in her pears.
Maryam Hessavi in The Manchester Review, June 2019:
Beverley Bie Brahic | The Hotel Eden | Carcanet: £9.99
And I carve out the bruises, the fine-bore
Tunnels of worms.
I slice the fruit thinly, until the white flesh
Is almost translucent,
I arrange the slices in the new pot from Ikea
(I burned the old one),
Add a trickle of water
And leave them to simmer.
(‘Winter Pears’)
Brahic’s fourth poetry collection, The Hotel Eden, is a sharp and tender act of assemblage, simmering often over questions of how we see the world and how we decipher our stories and experiences. Moving through the natural world, picking up pots from Ikea, populating the pages with their many people and across the many spaces that they travel, these poems fine-bore through contemplations of life and existence, to the ordinary things that make them tangible.
A book of bewildering turns – each poem forms a slight dissection of the everyday occurrence, producing a separateness that creates the ongoing sense of transition and disorientation that contributes so well to the varied land and thought-scapes that these pages point towards. With the poems as singular slices, the silence in the gaps between each one may be compared to the instantaneous presence and absence of the ‘bruises’ carved out from ‘Winter Pears’, which despite their removal, become the louder images on the page. As our attentions are drawn to the ‘carve[d] out’ spaces, these are not without the knowledge of a former violence incurred, and equally, the silences between the poems, might be considered in this way; as pauses for thought on the unspoken, removed, dissected, and the violence of those acts. This forms a complex and daring characteristic of the work that relies greatly on its whole symbolic presence, as it does in the particulars of each poem. It relies also, on the reader’s willingness to track the trickles of connection between a collection of poems whose eye impulsively shifts from California to Syria to Vietnam, from France to Afghanistan, generating a medium for new horizons. Varied also, are the forms on each page, where this oscillation from the particular object or thing to expansive shifts through time subject and space, is mirrored in moves between shorter lyrical pieces and a looser narrative style.
The title poem is written after Joseph Cornell (Pioneer of the Assemblage Art movement) and forwards some of the fundamental traits of this work, in that Brahic lifts the things noticed in the everyday and composes this collection. ‘The Hotel Eden’ then, stands as both ekphrastic poem and manifesto for the wider work.
Fragments of a life, protected under glass:
A parrot on its perch. A crock of corks. Butt-end of an egg.
The spring from a clock.
This poster for Eden
Scorched and brittle as a boy’s treasure map.
The poem traces one of the artist Cornell’s ‘boxes’, where a parrot and various other objects are assembled, ‘protected under’ glass. That opening line forefronts the concept of a whole ‘life’ fragmented, where the world of this book embodies that conceptual approach. If these poems are read through the lens of Assemblage, as symbolic fragments, the book as a box, the alignment of Brahic and Cornell’s aesthetic methodology might bridge some connections between a set of, at times, apparently disjointed poem. It’s easy to experience dissolution in that, where the poems can feel unfamiliar when crossing the page, and it’s certainly a risk to take. But the collection, in its apparent everydayness (which achieves universality and allows easy connections with those things it makes subject matter of) is discreetly combatant, utilising that disjuncture to enact a refutation of habitual continuity, linearity and expectation:
Against survival. Against feathers. ,em>Against corks-in-bottles. Against
the pathos of stuffed birds. Against against.
From laughter to slaughter the house of objects is repossessed.
(‘The Hotel Eden’)
And like the leap from ‘laughter to slaughter’, the poems jump from place to place, between ‘the hard-shelled crab’ in ‘Landline’ to ‘the overripe pulp’ of grapes in ‘Hornets’, from ‘the old man’ ‘weeding raspberry canes’ in ‘Community Garden’ to ‘Ulysses’ in ‘Happy he who like Ulysses’, and so the reader’s gaze is drawn across a multitude of dimensions, textures, colours. These are complicated further with changing sound patterns, stylistic leaps and formal variations which undulate between shorter poems like ‘Red Berries’, and looser narratives such as ‘Winter Pears’.
But in all its inquisitiveness, its shifting gaze, and in the promulgation of its artistic intention, the collection and its poems at their best, find ways to momentarily slow the pace and demand consideration. Elegant rhyme schemes call back to previous lines, requiring patience from the reader:
What does the poet ask of Apollo?
For what does he pray as they pour
The libation from the clay bowl?
Not fertile Sardinia’s fields of rich corn,
From laughter to slaughter the house of objects is repossessed.
(‘Olives, Endives and Mallow’)
While the images of everyday things are written and rewritten with a grounded clarity, to fasten and develop their multifaceted manifestations in the reader’s imagination, as in ‘Red Berries’:
This morning I walked
To the farmer’s market
Half a mile over
Half a mile back
I bought two slabs
Of the wild salmon
Sweet butter
To seize it in
[…]
And a basket
Of the red berries
Under every message
Another message
With that said, there are moments where a seeming preoccupation with the overall concept or intention for the collection, perhaps poses as a disadvantage to the finer details of some poems. Sometimes the rhyme scheme feels contrived:
Gut-freezing din.
Shocked, I spin
(‘Monday Morning, Croissy-sur-seine’)
And later in that particular poem, ‘desire-red cans’ raise the question as to whether a hyphen does enough to renew such worn undertones of ‘red’. Numerous appearances of the ‘moon’ and ‘love’ across the book feel similarly trite, in this respect, and lines like ‘[a]nd let the sun fondle their flesh’ ‘[i]n the Luxembourg Garden’ don’t quite deliver the image or occasion with relatable accuracy, as they do in many other instances.
There is an interesting and finely managed characteristic attributed to the speaker’s tone in this book – it is not an authoritative voice, in that assemblage and exploration take precedence over definition and naming. These unfinished acts are left squarely on the page, to simmer with other questions of authority, perspective, value, violence and control:
On the tip of God’s tongue, the bird waits to be named.
[…]
There’s a key to it somewhere. Break the glass?
(‘The Hotel Eden’)
Here, and as a wider effect of the collection, Brahic denies and questions the reader’s habitual desire for revelation, along with the authority that holds the key to it and indeed, whether the key is even a requirement. Beyond these philosophical provocations, Brahic’s aesthetic works effectively to nurture a sense of instability that dismantles expectation by way of elevating the everyday, played out in this ‘house of objects […] repossessed’, leaving the answers to the questions at the foot of the reader.
The ambiguous, unrevelatory nature of Brahic’s work is one of the many subtleties that render this book both daring and delicate. The endearing nature of these poems lies in the groundedness of their looking to the mundane object for beauty, where questions on the violence of unseeing and complacency towards the everyday object simmer and echo throughout. They are, as a collective, quietly startling when paid due attention.
Carol Rumens on “The Moon and the Supermarket Trolley” (The Hotel Eden) in The Guardian, November 2018:
Born in Saskatoon, Canada, Beverley Bie Brahic maps a distinctive, broad geographical range in her poems, including the US west coast, Paris and provincial France. As a translator, she has published English versions of work by Hélène Cixous, Jacques Derrida and Julia Kristeva, as well as poetry collections by Francis Ponge, Yves Bonnefoy and Guillaume Apollinaire. In her original poems, she characteristically moves towards compassionate celebration.
Both the short lyrics and the more discursive narratives in her collections are richly and variously peopled, and the Mediterranean glow of generous physicality extends to fruits, flowers and an abundant natural world. Moon with a Supermarket Trolley has a playfulness, visual and tonal, suggesting the French surrealists, Apollinaire particularly, though not at the cost of Brahic’s own grounded and casually sensuous voice. It is from her latest collection, The Hotel Eden…
David Starkey in the Santa Barbara Independent, April 2019:
The Hotel Eden…is titled after a Joseph Cornell box assemblage, and like the artist, Bie Brahic has an eye for the telling detail. In “Red Berries,” for instance, the speaker buys “two slabs / Of the wild salmon / Sweet butter / To seize it in / A wedge of ripe cheese.” Yet she is never satisfied with simple description. “Under every message,” she tells us, there is “another message.”
Carol Rumens on Hunting the Boar, in Poetry Review, Winter 2017:
Beverley Bie Brahic...has the translator's sixth sense for intertextuality, and deploys it wittily in the mischievous interleavings of 'Two Varieties of Common Figs.' Botanical and sexual description are an easy match, but here the sex needs no fig-leaf of metaphor. Post-coitus the speaker sips coffee, "thighs parted/round the wet spots/on the sheet." Fearlessly physical and observant (John Updike's fiction comes to mind), Brahic carries on writing where many poets would stop, and earns that space.
Her aesthetic intelligence feeds her fascination with the human encounter... . ['Côtes du Ventoux' is] beautifully and economically done, sufficiently discursive as narrative-plus-dialogue, while sustaining the rigour of its shape. [...] There's a new music in these poems, and, while it originates in an oral tradition of story-telling, Brahic translates it brilliantly into the poetic line.
. . .
Ian Pople on White Sheets in The Manchester Review, April 2013:
Beverley Bie Brahic has already received a PBS Recommendation and a Forward short-listing for the British edition of White Sheets, and it’s easy to see why. At a time when so many volumes of contemporary poetry are so uniform in both technique and content, White Sheets has a most pleasant variety; from translations from French surrealist, Francis Ponge, to renderings of Thucydides, from rhymed quatrains and third person narratives, to moving and loving poems about her elderly mother and the death of her father. [...] Tenderness is also part of the erotic and sexual, about which Bie Brahic writes with singular, and non-sentimental, brilliance. This book is to be highly recommended.
. . .
David Wheatley in The Yellow Nib (University of Belfast, Seamus Heaney Poetry Centre) July 2014:
Little Thunder Palaces
Guillaume Apollinaire, The Little Auto (translated by Beverley Bie Brahic). CB Editions, £7.99.
While Yeats was discovering the labour involved in being beautiful and Eliot decreeing that modern poetry had to be difficult, across the Channel Wilhelm Albert Włodzimierz Apolinary Kostrowicki was teaching modernist poetry to be lovable above all else. Is there a more sheerly delightful, more playfully inventive twentieth-century poet than Guillaume Apollinaire, as he became? Apollinaire is the original cubist cabaret singer, all Gemütlichkeit and vibrato one minute and all shock-of-the-new photomontage and post-decadent absinthe hangover the next.
He was also a war poet, retired from active service with a shrapnel wound in 1916, but not before bringing the surrealist revolution to the front line, comparing exploding shells to champagne bottles and delivering sarcastic paeans to the ‘virility of the present century’. Trench walls reminded him of nougat and breasts were ‘the only bombs that I love’. It was the flu that carried him off in the end, just before the appearance of the visual blagues of Caligrammes and all the clock-melting surrealist fun of the 1920s on which he so sadly missed out. By the 1930s, Beckett was describing the Chanson du mal aimé as ‘worth the whole of the best of Merril, Moréas, Viéle-Griffin, Spire, Régnier, Jammes put together’, and in 1950 he made good on his enthusiasm with one of his single best translations, of Zone. His English-language apotheosis was nicely in hand.
In The Little Auto Beverley Bie Brahic has concentrated mainly on later Apollinaire. The title poem describes a car journey from Deauville to Paris in August 1914 in which ‘we bid farewell to a whole era’. Sniffing political change in the wind, the dogs are howling over the borders, and Apollinaire breaks into a sinusoidal vispo swoosh I won’t try to reproduce here: ‘I shall never forget this journey by night during which none of us said a word.’ Apollinaire was fairly in the thick of it in what followed (having requested a transfer from Nîmes to the front), but makes an instructive contrast with the Anglophone lot. There is no straight opposition between the horrors of war and the pleasures of innocence and vainglory indulged at a safe distance from the chevaux de frise. Much of Apollinaire’s poignancy derives from the peculiar survival of his innocence behind the lines, his childlike sense of excitement:
And while the war cry
Turns the earth bloody
I hoist the odours
Beside the colour-savours
And I am sm
o
ke
the
to
bac
co
of
the ZoNE
‘Zone’ is one of the greatest modern French poems, up there – certainly where its Anglophone readers have been concerned – with Le cimetière marin and Anabase. It was placed first in Alcools despite having been written last, and opens the door to much that would follow in the 1920s and beyond, to Reverdy and Char in French, and Beckett’s Echo’s Bones in English, to go no further. As well as its military connotations, ‘zone’ suggests a region outside the city walls peopled by transients and immigrants, of whom Apollinaire was one, and whose street life he so memorably paints. The poem’s ironic opening panegyric to Pope Pius X is one of the great things in modern poetry, and is reframed by the closing invocation of ‘fetishes from Polynesia or Guinea’ (Apollinaire’s Picasso connection, perhaps). These gods are ‘Other Christs with other beliefs / Lesser Christs repositories of obscure faiths’, and this is a modernism minoritaire, the ethnographic modernism of Hope Mirrlees’ Paris: A Poem and Nancy Cunard’s Negro Anthology.
His many friendships with painters and ekphrastic poems are another of the many ways in which Apollinaire resembles Frank O’Hara (though he planned to title his poems about art not ‘Why I Am Not a Painter’ but Me Too I’m a Painter). He was also possessed of O’Haraesque powers of spontaneous overflow, as witness Philippe Soupault asking him for a poem and receiving ‘Ombre’ three hours later. It is a shimmeringly lovely elegy:
Destinies
Multiple shadow may the sun watch over you
You who love me so you never will go away
Who dance in the sun without kicking up dust
Ink shadow of the sun
Script of my light
Caissons of regrets
A god who humbles himself
Between The Little Auto and her versions of Francis Ponge (An Unfinished Ode to Mud), Brahic has made herself an invaluable conduit, well on her way to doing for French poetry what Michael Smith has done for Spanish or Michael Hofmann for German. The Little Auto is an entirely delightful production, and it is we should humble ourselves anew before the little ‘thunder’s palaces’ to which Apollinaire compared his wonderful poems.
. . .
Adrian Tahourdin on Apollinaire, My Little Auto, in The Times Literary Supplement, 12 February 2014:
‘It’s appropriate in this Great War anniversary year that the Scott Moncrieff Prize for translation from French should have gone to a new edition of poems by Guillaume Apollinaire, a poet indissolubly linked with the conflict. The Little Auto (132pp. CB editions. Paperback, £7.99. 978 0 9567359 4 2) offers us a handsome dual-language selection. As the translator Beverley Bie Brahic reminds us in her excellent introduction (the volume also contains useful Translator’s Notes), Apollinaire was a bon-vivant with his heart on his sleeve, a man of letters whose letters turned into poems, . . . and, from 1914 to 1918, when he died, he was a soldier”. He was wounded by shrapnel in March 1916, trepanned, and died of Spanish flu in November 1918.
The poems are taken from Apollinaire’s two great, unpunctuated collections Alcools and Calligrammes, the former represented by the long poem “Zone” (“In the end you’re tired of this old world . . .”). Bie Brahic tells us that she has “tried to respect Apollinaire’s preference for the plain word” and to “suggest, where poems in this selection are rhymed, his use of rhyme”; in both objectives she succeeds. Apollinaire confounds our notions of what a war poet should be when he writes “Coeur obus éclaté tu sifflais ta romance” (“Heart burst shell you whistled your romance”) or “Que c’est beau ces fusées qui illuminent la nuit” (“How beautiful these flares are that light up the night”). Elsewhere he has sympathy for the outsider: in “The Sighs of the Dakar Gunner” the narrator recalls “Again I see my father who fought / For the English / Against the Ashantis”.’
. . .
Michael Dennis Blogspot, June 5, 2013
‘White Sheets is Brahic's second book of poems (her first book of poetry was published outside of Canada) and is jammed full of poetic gems. Brahic has been perfecting her craft busily translating the works of Guillaume Apollinaire, Francis Ponge, Helene Cixous, Jacques Derrida and Julie Kristeva. After sharpening her teeth in translation Brahic has become a deadly serious poet in one poem and then uproariously funny in the next. […] Brahic's poems jump around between styles and emotions - but the weight and presence is always the same. Beverley Bie Brahic cuts like a surgeon, kisses it better like an old pro. These are the poems of a mature writer who has mastered craft but is more concerned with content. Some of these poems appear deceptively simple and that is a very hard trick to master and pull off. Brahic does it with alacrity.’
. . .
Kit Toda on White Sheets in The Times Literary Supplement, October 12, 2012:
‘In a relatively short career, Beverley Bie Brahic has already achieved critical acclaim as poet, translator and, at times, translator-poet. White Sheets, her second collection of poems, reveals a voice that somehow melds contradictory aspects: beguilingly elusive yet unabashed in its solidity, it exercises a curious fascination.
Unsurprisingly, some of the strongest pieces are Bie Brahic's translations of the meticulously observed prose poems of Francis Ponge. (Her volume of Ponge translations, Unfinished Ode to Mud, 2008, was highly acclaimed.) But her original poems also bear the miniaturist's impress: in "Solstice", for example, Bie Brahic observes, with beautiful clarity, how a "knife / pares the shadow / of a red onion" while in "Coda", she stills a heron by the water into "a Venetian / glass figurine toeing the line of a mirror's bevel".
There is plenty of intense observation of objects, reminiscent of still life paintings - not just in the helpfully titled "Still Life with Peaches", but in almost every poem here.’
Link to Full Review:
http://www.the-tls.co.uk/tls/reviews/other_categories/article1145335.ece
. . .
White Sheets in The Common, September 11, 2012:
‘In addition to poetic shape-shifting, subtle confrontations often lurk deceptively behind the ordinary. The title poem “White Sheets” opens Brahic’s collection, and its epigram, Airstrike hits wedding party, creates tension in what appears to be the everyday—a domestic scene troubled only by the anxiety of one line against the ominous instinctive movements of the woman collecting laundry:
The world is beautiful,
she thinks, or feels, as deer
sense something coming
and move out of range. Beautiful
the woman thinks, and lifts
the laundry basket to her arms—
beautiful, and orderly.
This painterly attention to detail common in Brahic’s work continues elsewhere in the deeper trails carved out in “Ancient History,” ... .’
. . .
Luke Kennard on Francis Ponge, Unfinished Ode to Mud, in Poetry London:
‘The directness and simplicity of Brahic’s translation are refreshing, and to finally see such previously untranslated works as the titular ode is a great thing indeed.’
. . .
The Times Literary Supplement, 13 May 2009, on Francis Ponge, Unfinished Ode to Mud:
‘Beverley Bie Brahic’s translation is wholly in keeping with Ponge’s own premiss . . . that he should “never sacrifice the object of [his] study in order to enhance some verbal turn discovered on the subject”. These new translations never interfere with Ponge’s vision, and things do not lose their thingness. We can be grateful to both the translator and CB editions for bringing the unique work of Francis Ponge back to the attention of English-speakers.’
. . .
Readysteadybook, Books of the Year 2008 on Francis Ponge, Unfinished Ode to Mud:
‘The French master, Francis Ponge -- difficult to translate, as I know well -- speaks his things and their words in a collection of impressive versions by Beverley Bie Brahic…’.
. . .
Peggy Kamuf on Hèlène Cixous, Portrait of Jacques Derrida as a Young Jewish Saint.
Source: Review of work in the area of deconstruction published in 2004.
‘The translator, Beverley Bie Brahic, herself a poet, displays here an extraordinary gift for conveying the redistributions and explosions of sense that Cixous practises in this writing/reading that never strays far from the most idiomatic and thus untranslatable layer of the language she shares with Derrida. Portrait of Jacques Derrida is a rarity, a singular and powerful addition to Cixous’ own important oeuvre that at the same time enriches and expands that of her great contemporary.’
. . .
The Times Literary Supplement, 18 August 2006 on Hélène Cixous, Dream I Tell You, Reveries of a Wild Woman, The Day I Wasn’t There:
‘The quality of the translator’s work, the agile and elegant expressions she puts forth, mean that this triad of recent Cixous texts, appearing for the first time in English, is a fine resource for non-Francophone readers.’