Marie de Quatrebarbes, The Vitals (translated from the French by Aiden Farrell,

The Vitals, Marie de Quatrebarbes
Translated from the French by Aiden Farrell
New York NY: World Poetry Books, 2025
originally appeared in SOME magazine

 

 

Described on the back cover as French poet Marie de Quatrebarbes’ debut title in English translation, The Vitals (2025), originally published as Les vivres in 2021 by French publisher Les Éditions P.O.L, “is an elegiac long poem in the form of a fragmentary journal that tracks the loss of a loved one.” The internet provides that Les vivres is the sixth of her published collections-to-date in French, alongside Les pères fouettards me hantent toujours (Lanskine, 2012), Transition pourrait être langue (Les Deux-Siciles, 2013), La vie moins une minute (Lanskine, 2014), Gommage de tête (Éric Pesty Éditeur, 2017), Voguer (P.O.L, 2019) and Aby (P.O.L, 2022). As the website Versopolis writes, Quatrebarbes’ “poetic approach mixes an autobiographical dimension with a reflection on narrative dissociation and language registers.” Is The Vitals an assemblage of prose poems in sequence or fragments of a first-person journal set in lyric prose? Perhaps both, perhaps neither; perhaps it doesn’t actually matter, allowing the structure to speak for itself.

The Vitals is made up of six sections of numbered poems, titled from “July” to “December,” each constructed as stand-alone prose poems individually numbered within each month-section. “1st.,” the opening poem in the “November” section, begins: “At the occasionally very steep edge on which I lean, I’m going to align myself with higher hopes.” In the “Translator’s Afterword,” Aiden Farrell writes:

Marie de Quatrebarbes’s The Vitals is, at least on its surface, a recomposition of a daily journal whose entries run from July to December of an unspecified year. Though not directly stated, it becomes clear that at some point before or during the writing of this journal an irreparable loss has occurred, mauling a hole at the center of the journal writers’ consciousness: “I’m no longer there when she leaves me.” Avoiding anything resembling a linear narrative to relate this loss, de Quatrebarbes’s journal is all the more intimate, exhibiting a deep, messy, and earnest interiority.

When I think of French writing, at least what I’ve read in translation, I immediately think of a sense of interiority, paired with an ongoing interest in the lyric prose journal that English-language writing doesn’t necessarily hold in similar regard. My own reading recalls André du Bouchet’s innumerable journal entries, scattered through various of his poetry collections, or Montréal writer Nicole Brossard’s Journal intime ou Voilà donc un manuscrit (Les Herbes Rouges, 1984), translated into English by Barbara Godard as Intimate Journal, Or Here’s A Manuscript (The Mercury Press, 2004), or French writer Jean Daive’s memoir on Paul Celan, translated into English by Rosmarie Waldrop as Under The Dome: Walks with Paul Celan (Burning Deck, 2009; City Lights, 2020). Quatrebarbes’ poem “11,” from the section “September,” is a lyric equally at home in Brossard, or Emmanuel Hocquard (1940-2019), combining the bare bones of language and narrative structure with a foundation of desire:

A fiction dances through him, which is neither his body nor a second body without his arms, his legs. Barely larger, the garment comes first (the other inside). Evocation of a music made of fragments of his own body, maybe, or pieces of a body around the size of his. Decision: beaches extend across him. Ligatures: the subterfuge of a resolute hesitation. I don’t read these words—the plot of a fact. If you face an ash tree it will say that you are face. Looking at your face, you suppress your desire.

The Vitals offers an abstract music long held in what I’ve seen from poetry originating from France over the years (titles from Litmus Press, Canarium, New Directions and Burning Deck). There are echoes as well, through Quatrebarbes’ accumulative texts around tone, silence and interiority, of the work of Etel Adnan (1925-2021), specifically her collection Time (Nightboat Books, 2019), as translated from the French by Sarah Riggs, and Shifting the Silence (Nightboat Books, 2020), both of which examine the meditative lyric across accumulated short bursts, writing a blend of the prose poem sequence and ongoing journal entries.

Online sources suggest a specific, almost otherworldly, uniqueness to Quatrebarbes’ work, such as the Poetry International site, which offers, as part of her author biography, that “It is not easy to label or situate Quatrebarbes’ poetry. Most striking are her resolutely experimental approach, her tendency towards estrangement and her powerfully developed use of form.,” but there is also a familiarity to the lyric of her prose poems. What emerges, too, is the way that she offers pinpoints of observational elegance, describing and alluding through tone and touchstone the world through which she moves and how it moves through her. It is the heart through the clear observation through the world through language that marks her particular craft. As Quatrebarbes writes to close the second numbered poem of “August”:

Here we invent a tarpaulin to cover over. The fear to see reappear. The fist in progressive approach. I’m only repeating: the umbrellas whose shadow falls on the mass of people on the bridge and the black net. I live in this world.

Quatrebarbes moves through the world as the world moves through her, through her lyric, and then, takes a dark turn into loss, into suddenness, one that isn’t described but so deeply held, and deeply felt.