The Poetry Project

On Love is Colder than the Lake by Liliane Giraudon

Shira Abramovich and Lénaïg Cariou

conversations

from which time after time the truth breaks moist and green

–Adrienne Rich, “Cartographies of Silence”

Somewhere between poetry and cinematic narrative, Liliane Giraudon’s Love is Colder than the Lake is full of voices. Poets, characters, filmmakers, and fictional characters traverse the collection, recurring or collaged, quoted or paraphrased or snapped in stills from R.W. Fassbinder’s Love is Colder than Death. A translator always adds another voice, another filter—here, the translators Sarah Riggs and Lindsay Turner have collaborated to transform Giraudon’s already-bustling work into a finely calibrated English version.

Born in Marseille in 1946, Liliane Giraudon began publishing poetry at the end of the 1970s, working successively with various poetry journals (Action Poétique, and then Banana Split, which she created with Jean-Jacques Viton, then If). Turner’s solo translation of Sphinx (Litmus Press, October 2023) puts Giraudon in English for the first time in thirty years, during which she has become a central figure in French poetry, the subject of an upcoming international colloquium. Giraudon’s work resists the notion of a singular, isolated poetic voice, and frequently crosses genres and media—notably in what she calls “homobiography,” a form of third-person poetic self-narrative (as in La Poétesse). With her then-partner Henri Deluy, she was the co-editor of Poésies en France depuis 1960 : 29 femmes, the first-ever anthology of French women poets in 1994. More recently, Giraudon has pursued collaborations with many younger queer and women poets, including Amandine André, H. C. Hello, Elodie Petit, Lénaïg Cariou who co-authored this review, and the recent Goncourt winner Laura Vazquez.

Giraudon’s practice of collaborating with and including many voices particularly interests us, as translators with the Connexion Limitée / Limited Connection Collective. There is an intimacy in translation, the way we take in a writer’s words and lay out a response a language away. In this way, translation is always a conversation with the original writer, but the specifics of this conversation—the minutiae of understanding and viewpoint which inform the words we choose—usually remain implicit unless we co-translate, at which point they become audible or even visible on the page. We explain and defend translation choices as we knit together gaps in our understandings of the text, word by word and line by line. Still, in most co-translations (and this one is no exception), this labor is elided in the final text, corresponding with the traditional invisibility of the translator in order to render a singular authorial voice.

Love is Colder than the Lake is translated in this traditional manner, but the text is polyvocal, a multiplicity not only of voices but of selves. Besides the interruptions of quoted speech on each page of the book’s first part, the poems are split between two visible speakers on each page: one, written in roman type, spread across the page, and one which interrupts, in italics. The second part takes poems from the first, tears them up, and scatters them across the page in a semi-readable collage. In the third part of the book, beside a still from Love is Colder than Death, Giraudon writes, and Riggs and Turner translate:

To write became another action. Carried by the other. Escape from the plugged-in ghost body, lit up by a side projector. Not an author. Not a poet. Rather, an acolyte, which is to say, she who accompanies in order to follow, to assist.

Giraudon describes writing from a self outside the self, a disembodied “escape,” but still in the role of an “acolyte” following that self. Instead of smoothing the self and this alter-self into a singular voice for the collection, Giraudon makes both visible on the page and in her discussion of the writing process of the book.

Love is Colder than the Lake is itself a text that is partially about gaps and lacunas—gaps in words, gaps in the archive, gaps in memory—which attempts not to fill these gaps but to open them, to expel their contents, to see them for what they are. One has the sense that the speaker is attempting to violently rid themselves of some interior. “This inside which stinks and sickens / You must be able to bring it back to the light / To throw it in the lake,” writes Giraudon’s italicized speaker. It becomes clear that Giraudon is attempting to resurface a repressed memory, to “bring back to the light the buried images” of her sexual assault by an older man as a teenage girl. “To realize is to vomit one by one / the anachronistic pages,” she writes—uncontrollably drawing the interior memory onto the page, into language.

But language is not a perfect vehicle: “the words seek / to hide the sentences,” writes the speaker early in the collection. Language fails often in this book, either by inherent inadequacy—the impossibility of transforming an experience into language—or by intentional tampering. A recurring theme is Giraudon’s repulsion towards the euphemistic ways in which governments of the global North wield bureaucratic language to describe horrible things, which she lists towards the end of the book: “‘Procedure of distancing’ replaces ‘Measures of expulsion,’ ‘Different success,’ ‘Failure of schools,’ ‘Plan for saving jobs,’ ‘Group layoffs’ . . . death encroaches.” These phrases are directly pulled, in the original French, from governmental terms that paint over violence, hiding it in so-called neutral language, duplicitous and opaque. “The destruction of language has begun,” Giraudon says of these twisting phrases, a destruction we can recognize from the universalization of euphemistic language under global capitalism. Language breaks down, disrupting the process of rendering memories verbally: Giraudon describes it as “water crushed in a mortar,” dripping away while she attempts to refine the words.

At key moments in the text, Riggs and Turner choose to leave portions of the original text intact. On some occasions, this is due to the incorporation of anglicisms in French: “Nénufar is no longer waterlily / nor spatterdock” is Riggs and Turner’s answer to “nénufar n’est plus waterlily / ni spatterdock”—a retention, almost word-for-word, of the original. Another memorable retention occurs in the context of a musing on translation:

The translations will often be wrong ..... But that doesn’t matter

Since “translate” is a made-up word ..... For something that doesn’t exist

Intense désoeuvrement ..... Together with the most exhausting work ..... Only androgyny remains

The translators leave désoeuvrement—a word which means “passivity,” but a precise kind of non-doing which comes from being deprived of one’s primary activity or interest. A loose literal translation would be an “unworking,” but the translators choose to retain its original sound and concision, refusing to rework it into English. No doubt the translators’ decision-making process in itself was part of that “most exhausting work” of deciphering and attempting to communicate. The result is, perhaps, an “androgyny”—since the translation is not entirely binaristic, neither fully-English nor fully-French.

Giraudon’s speaker, nonetheless, attempts to expunge some meaning from the self through language, and to reimagine what language can currently do, whether by railing against the co-optation of language by colonialist states of the global North (“fuck off with your civilization thing,” Riggs and Turner translate) or simply to ask how to express what is currently inexpressible. Love is Colder than the Lake is full of these questions. “How to show what’s off-screen in the poem,” wonders the speaker at one moment. “The question of form in language / how to live it while making it,” they ask at another. Or, “the question of the poem’s backroom / its marginalia / how to show it / visually.” Giraudon leaves no answers to these questions, but keeps returning to them, gesturing to the spaces beyond language, behind the pages.

Towards the end of the collection, interspersed with stills from Love is Colder than Death, Giraudon describes the dream in which the title of this book came to her. “This time it’s a voice that says the title,” she writes. “There’s a voice inside another voice.” A voice inside another voice, an acolyte of the ghost-body—these analogies of writing poetry fit well for translating, too, and invite us to consider alternate ways of rendering texts across language, ones that perhaps reveal the material processes that co-translation entails. It’s worth noting that Giraudon describes her acolyte as “an accomplice…like the whore who betrays,” but this betrayal in fact becomes the final text:

​​She arranges the entrance of a lake, characters in order of appearance—from Macbeth to Fassbinder—and a setting, as well as the actions that unfold in it. She takes care to let stand each word that indicates them. Auxiliary, partner, or double, she finds the poem, like the film, only after a long absence.

Riggs and Turner’s translation renders Giraudon’s cutting original beautifully—and at the same time, we are left wondering: what might it look like to translate like Giraudon’s acolyte, to arrange the happenings as an “auxiliary, partner, or double?” As Giraudon’s own work does, perhaps it would make the translators’ hands and voices visible on the page. Or perhaps it could expose the collaborative process of harmonizing many voices into one. That polishing, almost physical, a sanding-down of the corners, allows many voices—the writer’s, the translators’—to live inside each other. Giraudon’s text invites this engagement.

#276 – Spring 2024

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