Ma Langue est Poetique: Selected Works

by Christophe Tarkos

Poetry. How rare!--A published translation of work that is still news in its original, but then Tarkos, a complex and vital force in contemporary French poetry, is going to be news for many years. And these translations capture all that vitality, that urgency, as well as retaining the crucial ambiguities and overall archeological approach of Tarkos' project. He's upending language with zeal, and thinking hard about it as he does. Nothing's missed here. These translations happen mid-air--Cole Swensen.

Paperback

First published January 1, 2000

Reviews

[W.B. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some of the best translators out there took on Tarkos, and I think they did a pretty good job of translating this strange poet, who died rather young a few years ago. Conceptualism in poetry's pretty much a snoozer, but Tarkos might be one of the few blessed exceptions. He's polymorphously perverse, playful, and his writing is often sexually charged. You really get the sense the guy got off on the Playdoh of languages. He was a wunderkind performance artist and published prolifically in his short life. I'll have to see if he's still alive on YouTube. I'm guessing some of his performances are preserved there. He was pretty much all over Europe, his public appearances as peripatetic as his mind in poetry. I like works like "Process" (excerpted here) where the poet is pretty much acting as collagist, placing different types of language sampled from technical, historical, poetic, pseud-poetic and personal sources, etc., next to one another to achieve a dizzying sense of the human animal's various and irreconcilable relationships to language, to the many languages we try to pretend are one thing. The snippets of interviews reveal a surprisingly candid artist who really doesn't have any avant-garde pretensions, even though his methodology surely places him in camps where avant-garde pretensions are legion (and tiresome). He slams irony and disavows it. That separates him from about 98% of avant and avanty poets right there. And if you read his poetry, you'll see he's telling the truth. He has no use for any of the many types of irony which compose your typical intellectual's first line of defense. Because he's French, there is the inevitable weird philosophical Wortspiel thang. I particularly liked his meditations on the elusive and allusive nature of pain in "hurt: a libretto," translated beautifully by Stacy Doris. I couldn't read him all day or every day but he's different enough that this sampler plate makes you want to go in search of more. His reputation is just beginning to take off over there. You can see it's already sensed he contributed something seminal. He's certainly the most playful poet I've read among the French avant-garde of the last few decades. And that alone endears him to me. Maybe he decided not to hold his birth against himself. I think you can, like, do that now.