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Reflections of reflections
the stereopticon’s cathedrals and châteaux
which we pass back and forth in the school’s roofed courtyard
Frozen scraps of France emerge under the glass
in black and white like penguins
Sometimes France comes to us in slides
unsettling as exotic beasts
in their caravan
and America comes with Charlot on Saturday evenings
when they show films in the schoolhouse
The teacher lines up the classroom benches
the farmer forgets his cattle and his plough
Laughter is the prince
of that authentic democracy
                                                          
*                                                           

There’s war and there’s peace
War like a game
projecting on the town square’s screen
the extraordinary film of an encampment
a troop deployed in the blink of an eye
endless comings and goings, tents scattered
around the pump in front of the town hall
while half-naked men
splash great slaps of water from big buckets
for their bath or their grub
By flashlight plates are passed around
Wrapped in the hubbub of their jokes
the soldiers seem like innocuous extras
Shadows absorb them: they could be ghosts
come back from the war of 1914
but hindsight today recognizes them
as actors in a catastrophe to come
of which that scene was only a rehearsal

*

There‘s war or there’s peace
Peace like a kind of sorrow
when the wait for who knows what prolongs itself
Hail rattles the tarp on an abandoned cart
where it  rumbles like a drum
Some children huddled inside
will stay there for hours which were only
minutes, perhaps; perhaps only seconds
The sky is leaden; an absence
without form, content, color, odor
nails them to the planks
Will they return
from that crushing
from that sinking
into the muddy, forgetful heart of the earth ?

(translated by Marilyn Hacker)

_________________________________________________________________________

CLAIRE MALROUX is the author of six books of poems: the most recent is Soleil de Jadis, a poem-narrative of her childhood in southwestern France in the years just before and the beginning of World War II, from which this poem is taken.. She is also an acclaimed translator of English language poetry, most notably of Emily Dickinson, and was awarded the Grand Prix
National de la Traduction in 1995. Others of her poems, in Marilyn Hacker’s translation, have appeared or will appear in The Antioch Review, Prairie Schooner, International Quarterly, Luna, The New England Review, Field, Boulevard, TriQuarterly and The New Yorker. Edge, a bilingual  collection of her poems, with Marilyn Hacker’s translations, was published by Wake Forest University Press in 1996. Sheep Meadow Press will publish A Long-Gone Sun, Marilyn Hacker’s translation of Soleil de Jadis, in 2000.

Click here to read Marilyn Hacker's poem in ForPoetry.

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