The Vitals

Marie de Quatrebarbes (trans. Aiden Farrell)

Acclaimed French poet Marie de Quatrebarbes's debut in English translation is an elegiac long poem in the form of a fragmentary journal that tracks the loss of a loved one. As if the relic of a long-forgotten history, The Vitals ghosts through five successive months, measuring time through the vacillations of a bereaved consciousness. An estranged voice staggers through glimpses of childhood, domesticity, conversations lost and found, and memories reverberating into language. These elliptical prose vignettes ask questions about family, survival, and of the shared experience of grief and longing. Through a documentary impulse, de Quatrebarbes's poem persists suspended in the space left by a sudden disappearance.

'How to unremember the details of grief in order to think, to exist past its consuming intensity? In intricately nested poem-boxes, de Quatrebarbes dis-orders the sequences of experience. “I form a word for something with my mouth. I disremember myself.” And in that dis-remembering, she dis-covers subtle tensions between interpretation, explanation and where/when perception might actually allow for illumination. “My gaze becomes what it is,” she writes, and Aiden Farrell’s translations keep up, conveying in new language the complexity of life’s increasing accumulation of time.' – Marcella Durand