denis hirson | The Common

March 2021 Poetry Feature: Sylvie Durbec

March 25, 2021 Poetry, Translation

Poem by SYLVIE DURBEC, translated from the French by DENIS HIRSON

Sylvie Durbec was born in Marseille and lives in Provence, near Avignon. She writes texts in both prose and poetry, as well as painting and making collages. The many books she has published over the past twenty years include the prose-poetry memoire Marseille : éclats et quartiers (Marseille, fragments and quarters) which won the prestigious Jean Follain prize; Prendre place (Taking place) concerning the internment camp at Douadic in France and Soutine, a prose-poem about the painter, published in The Common. This year she has published 50 carrés du jour (50 squares of the day) and Ça qui me poursuit (That which pursues me).

Denis Hirson grew up in South Africa and has lived in France since 1975. He has published nine books, several concerning the memory of South Africa under apartheid. The latest, both published in 2017, are Footnotes for the Panther, ten conversations with William Kentridge, and Ma langue au chat, in French, concerning the torture and delight of speaking and writing in that language.

Table of Contents

The Ignorance of Beasts

The Ignorance of Beasts

I still don’t know how to type a tilde on a computer keyboard

when writing the name of a Spanish or Portuguese writer I love.

Nor do I know what poetry is.

January 2016 Poetry Feature

January 29, 2016 Podcasts & Audio, Poetry

New Work for the New Year

This month we welcome Cassandra Cleghorn to our pages, presenting poems included in her first book, Four Weathercocks, which will be published by Marick Press in March. We’re also happy to be welcoming back TC contributors David Lehman, Jonathan Moody, and Sylvie Durbec. Lehman’s new book is Sinatra’s Century: One Hundred Notes on the Man and His World. Jonathan Moody won the Cave Canem Northwestern University Press Prize for his collection Olympic Butter Gold, published in November 2015. The book includes five poems first published in The Common. Jean Follain Prize-winner Sylvie Durbec’s poem “Shining Red in the Torrent” is offered here in its entirety, translated by Denis Hirson. An excerpt from the poem was published in The Common Issue 10.

Shining Red in the Torrent

November 1, 2015 Issue 10, Issue 10 Poetry, Poetry, Translation

By SYLVIE DURBEC

Translated by DENIS HIRSON

Go to meet redness.
Reach it with all the necessary brutality.
Refuse facile images. Self-portraits. Portraits of any sort.
But go without reserve, crushing water underfoot, unyielding to the childlike pleasure of splashes against naked legs.
Go as a painter.
Roll up trouser legs, remove espadrilles and dig your will into the torrent: meet the red there, take it captive. Bury your madness in the icy water.
Without dying of this.
Without speaking of it either.

A Little Man

November 1, 2014 Issue 08, Issue 08 Poetry, Podcasts & Audio, Poetry, Translation

By SYLVIE DURBEC

Translated by DENIS HIRSON

A little man walks
Through the golden dust
It is a summer’s morning
A morning fresh and mild
As other mornings, other sorrows
He walks across roads
Where no one else walks
With a tiny wooden coffin
Tucked under his arm

Yes or Know?

November 1, 2014 Issue 08, Issue 08 Poetry, Podcasts & Audio, Poetry, Translation

By SYLVIE DURBEC

Translated by DENIS HIRSON

On the unbolted gate to the garden of the dead I wrote
Voi che entrate and was pulled short swift and sharply
As the strain of writing in an unknown tongue rather than

A Story with a Crack in It

April 1, 2012 Issue 03, Issue 03 Poetry, Poetry

By DENIS HIRSON

and it all begins

 and it will never cease 

—Mxolisi Nyezwa

This story begins on a lake in the Berkshires, up among the low hills and wild blue turkeys and deep woods, up in the northeast before you get to Canada. There I am with my daughter, pulling a rowing boat out across the sand and onto the weed-thick water.

All posts tagged: denis hirson

March 2021 Poetry Feature: Sylvie Durbec

January 2016 Poetry Feature

Shining Red in the Torrent

A Little Man

Yes or Know?

A Story with a Crack in It

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