The Smoke That Carried Us: Selected Poems of Rene Char Review

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(More customer reviews)I hesitate to write what follows. I would like to be able to believe that the boon of ANY book of Char's work being available to English-language readers is sufficient in itself. After all, as Cid Corman states it in his jacket blurb: "That more of [Char's] work is laid bare to us in English is a gift and a grace." But would such an attitude, an acquiescence, really be a service to those readers? I can't believe it is. Susanne Dubroff's translations are not simply plodding and prosaic, they're at times patently wrong. I was stunned when in the very first piece offered, "Artine," a masterpiece from Char's brief Surrealist period, I found as simple an expression as 'remettre à neuf' translated "put up by nine p.m." The phrase actually means "to make good-as-new" and no sense of artistic license can justify Ms. Dubroff's choice. And what is one to make of a translator who, in the poem which gives this volume its title, replaces a potent image of forced silence like "avec un verrou aux mâchoires" ('with a bolt through our jaws') with as pale an approximation as Dubroff's "with stiff jaws"? It would be easy to compile a litany of her ugly, colorless and presumptuous turns, but to what end? Poetry has few enough readers; when Char's name enters the spirit of one of these few and they go looking for a volume of Char's work to experience how his genius might touch their own, I can only hope that this is not the volume that falls into their hands. It represents a disservice to Char, to poetry. Look elsewhere.

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