A Selection of Eight Poems
Véronique Tadjo
Translated by Alani Rosa Hicks-Bartlett
You have broken the mirror
in which you would look at yourself
and you don’t recognise yourself anymore
You don’t even know
how to write your own name
or what your voice sounds like
Tu as cassé le miroir,
dans lequel tu te regardais
et tu ne te reconnais plus
Tu ignores
jusqu’à l’écriture de ton nom
et le son de ta voix
Leaving / returning
these comings and goings of life
leave us fatigued
exhausted that nothing can fracture
the exigencies of time
Partir / revenir
ces allées et venues
de la vie
nous laissent fatigués
lassés que rien ne brise
l’exigence du temps
You are here
you are over there
The world is divided
but when you gather together
your loves
there is no difference
Tu es ici
tu es là-bas
Le monde est divisé
mais quand tu rassembles
tes amours
il n’y a pas de différence
I will come he said to her
to put sand
in your eyes
and loosen your mouth
I will put on your body
all the weight of the earth,
and your ears will become
silence
Je viendrai lui dit-il
mettre du sable
dans tes yeux
et décrisper ta bouche
Je déposerai sur ton corps
tout le poids de la terre
et tes oreilles deviendront
silence
It is dark it is lonely
just a few years ago
the moon belonged to me
Il fait noir il fait seul
il y a quelques années à peine
la lune m’appartenait
Who?
Who was there?
Who turned over his body?
Qui?
Qui était là?
Qui a retourné son corps?
Don’t let me die
Don’t let me
close my eyes forget the fury
of the outside world
Ne me laisse pas mourir
Ne me laisse pas
fermer les yeux
oublier la fureur
du dehors
Loneliness
has no border
and it is older than you
if you sometimes forget it
it will catch you
at the halfway point
La solitude
n’a pas de frontière
et elle est plus vieille que toi
Si tu l’oublies parfois
elle te rattrape
à mi-chemin
Véronique Tadjo was born in 1955 in Paris, France and raised in Côte d’Ivoire. Tadjo is a prolific writer who is active in various genres. In addition to three volumes of poetry and illustration work, Tadjo has written short stories, novels, children’s literature. She has also written a great deal of vital critical work on identity, gender, and genocide,, which provides an important contextual backdrop to her work on memory, travel, loss, and recuperation. The poems translated here are from Tadjo’s stunning third collection of poems, À mi-chemin (2000). Written in an incisive and somewhat mournful voice, À mi-chemin, as the title indicates, treats the themes of travel, orientation, memory and losing and finding one’s bearings. Writing about nostalgia both literally and metaphorically, Tadjo investigates what one gains while traveling through time and space, and what one must leave behind. Tadjo has received numerous awards and literary prizes, from a Fulbright and the Literary Prize of the Agence de Coopération Culturelle et Technique in 1983, a UNICEF Prize in 1993, and the Grand prix littéraire d’Afrique noire in 2005, to the Bernard Dadié National Grand Prize for Literature in 2016, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction in 2022, and an Honorary Doctorate from the University of St Andrews in 2024, among others.
Alani Rosa Hicks-Bartlett is a writer and translator who loves the invective genre, most of all, followed by lyric and epic poetry. She enjoys translating from Catalan, French, Italian, Latin, Spanish, Portuguese, and Yiddish. She has won awards for her poetry and translations, including the University of California, Berkeley’s Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Lyric Poetry Prize, Dorothy Rosenberg Memorial Prize in Lyric Poetry, and the Emily Chamberlain Cook Prize. Some recent translations and creative work have appeared in Cagibi, The Festival Review, Antonym, The Stillwater Review, IthacaLit, Broad River Review, The Fourth River, and Mantis: A Journal of Poetry, Criticism, and Translation, among others.
*Image by Savannah B. on Unsplash
