Alta Ifland, Voix de Glace / Voice of Ice

 

My language

My language lies buried in the center of the earth. When night comes, dreams open time’s gates at the black ravens with rustling wings take off, leaving behind a long, leaden sleep. Language’s guardians, mute mummies draped in shrouds, float at the four cardinal points, their faces stiff, lips crimson, eyes painted blue. At dawn, they sink back into memory’s cracks.
            My language doesn’t belong to me. All that belongs to me is a long, flower absence at whose edges roses are growing alongside my legs, encircling them, climbing and covering my body like a tomb. Deep in the absence, my language unearths its words of fog, dead like me, and holds them for an instant above the tomb, then lets them fall like rose petals.

I’m absolutely fascinated by the reissue of Romanian poet Alta Ifland’s Voix de Glace / Voice of Ice (Punctum Books/Les Figues, 2026), included with a hefty critical introduction by John Taylor. Originally published by Les Figues in 2007, the reissue comes from the Les Figues imprint of Punctum Books, who appears to have absorbed the press and backlist, working to keep titles in print as best as possible. A bilingual edition, the work has been translated by the author (the introduction, also, in both English and French), a process that Taylor articulates as part of his introduction, writing that these pieces (resting quite comfortably between prose and the prose poem) were “[…] first written in French, the author’s second language, and then self-translated into English, her third. Moreover, there are indications that “Ifland” is a pseudonym, even perhaps a heteronym in Fernando Pessoa’s sense, with its imaginable literal meaning of an “if-land,” a “place of conjecture,” and a lofty one at that.” Through fifty-three short prose pieces, each in French and English, no more than a page per piece, Ifland offers a kind of counterpoint, a call-and-response; not simply a text composed in one direction and translated, but one that suggests, in large part through the author’s own translation, more of a conversation between the two. “Like everyone else,” Ifland writes, to open the poem “My double’s double,” “I have a double.” By referencing the doppelgänger, Ifland hints (one might infer) at the dual nature of translation itself, her own translation, and the heteronym, as suggested by the introduction, as Taylor offers:

If taken at her word as an author, not as a mask mostly implying artifice, Ifland is focused much less on geography, European history, and personal history (in its ordinary sense) than on the ontological rootlessness in our human condition. The French writer Pascal Quignard has suggested that our anxiety vis-à-vis our origins results from our absence at the sexual act that procreated us; we can never get back to it. in Voix de Glace / Voice of Ice, Ifland associates the insoluble enigma of our being-in-the-world with a mother whom she cannot really “attain,” at least in the state in which she was when she gave birth to her.

Through a suite of sharp and nuanced prose poems, Ifland’s collection invokes comparisons not only with Pessoa’s heteronym work, but that of Montreal poet and translator Erín Moure, working her own Pessoaesque through multiple projects, an early example of which is Sheep’s Vigil by a Fervent Person (Toronto ON: House of Anansi, 2001). The element of Ifland’s composition and translation worked as counterpoint, as well, offer comparisons to works such as Franco-Canadian poet Patrice Desbiens’ classic L’homme invisible / The Invisible Man (Penumbra Press, 1981) and J.R. Carpenter’s Le plaisir de la côte /The Pleasure of the Coast (Pamenar Press, 2023) [see my review of such here], holding the translation not as separate texts, but interconnected, twirled together akin to a strand of DNA. Through two threads of language, beyond her own mother tongue, Ifland writes out and through the differences between and amid language, slipping back and forth across a line in the introspective sand.