Three poems from José-Flore Tappy’s « Trás-os-Montes » / The Bitter Oleander

• Post By: johntaylor
• Date: 25 avril 2019
• Category: News

Three poems selected from the Swiss poet José-Flore Tappy’s collection Trás-os-Montes (Éditions La Dogana, 2018) have appeared in the review The Bitter Oleander (Volume 25, No. 1, 2019), in John Taylor’s translation:

Curtains drawn, feet propped

on a low chair,

she knows without knowing,

vanishes behind the lamp,

hastily folding around her

what little shines

 

wrapped in wool, rags,

her legs look like dolls

 

Beneath her blouse,

the raw onion blends with sorrow,

love, or whatever resembles it,

she holds it tight between her breasts,

remembers

 

*

 

At the entrance to the shacks,

behind the canvas tarp hanging

from the roof beam—

buckets, plastic jerrycans,

a shoe washed up over there

between ropes and sacks,

on four piles

a rowboat

like a child’s spoon

 

this is where one would like to come

to a halt, beneath this shelter of boards,

to put one’s memory to rest, softly,

to lull it to sleep

in this wooden hull

 

to entrust it for a long time

to this very last

cradle

 

*

 

To run away, head for the edges

of land lying fallow, into the depths

of ravines where no one ever

ventures, where the few trails

fade out, pale scratches

at the end of a steep

slope

 

Perhaps this is where

I’ll hear—if it is still audible—

the breathing of the missing,

the painful babbling

of those we have lost

 

buried

so far from us

in the infinite

 

© translation John Taylor.

From Trás-os-Montes (Éditions La Dogana, 2019)