Two Poems by Hédi Kaddour, translated and introduced by Marilyn Hacker
PN Review 136, November - December 2000
Translator’s note: Hédi Kaddour is of Kabyle origin, born in 1945 in Tunisia but resident in France since childhood. He has published three books of poems with Gallimard: La Fin des vendanges (1989), Jamais une ombre simple (1994) and Un parcours au Luxembourg (2000), as well as three books with smaller publishers, most recently Les Fileuses with Le Temps qu'il fait, in 1995, and a collection of essays on poetry, L'Emotion impossible, also with Le Temps qu'il fait in 1994. He lives in Paris, where he teaches comparative literature at L'Ecole Normale Supérieure, and is a frequent contributor to La Nouvelle revue française on theatre and music. He is one of a younger generation of poets continuing Jacques Réda's and Jacques Roubaud's contemporary colloquy with the sonnet form.
The Bus Driver
What has gotten into the bus driver
Who has left his bus, who has sat down
On a curb on the Place de l'Opéra
Where he slips into the ease of being
Nothing more than his own tears? The passers-by
Who bend over such a shared and
Presentable sorrow would like him
To tell them that the wind used to know
How to come out of the woods towards a woman's dress,
Or that one day his brother said to him
Even your shadow wants nothing to do with you.
His feet in a puddle, the bus driver
Can only repeat This work is hard
And people aren't kind.
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Jardin du Luxembourg: Bright Interval
Sunlight caresses the wooden benches
And heats up the silk of silence
Backlit between the trees.
Meanwhile a little girl
Will not go down the walk
Where, for a century, a green lion
Has devoured an ostrich. In the corner
For storing wheelbarrows, where memory
Already hunts for words, Flaubert
Merely merits a foolish bust.
A woman seated at the boat-pond's rim
Tugs her sweater primly off over her hair
Without noticing that all this time
Her brunette girlfriend's looking at her breasts.
These poems by Hédi Kaddour, translated and introduced by Marilyn Hacker, are taken from PN Review 136, November - December 2000. Further contributions from Kaddour and Hacker, including the rest of the poems in this issue, are available in the archive to paying subscribers, as well as more poetry, features, reviews and reports from across the back catalogue.
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