#marilyn hacker

Our fall season includes two bilingual collections of poetry newly translated from the French, by Alice Paalen Rahon and Claire Malroux—both poets who occupy the space between two worlds, be they of language, nation, culture, sexuality, or philosophy.

Alice Paalen Rahon, Alice Paalen Rahon(September)

Alice Paalen Rahon was a shapeshifter: a surrealist poet turned painter who was born French and died a naturalized citizen of Mexico. Bicultural, bisexual, and fiercely independent, her romantic life included affairs with Pablo Picasso and the poet Valentine Penrose. This new selection of Rahon’s poems celebrates the visionary work of a woman who defied easy definition.

Claire Malroux, Daybreak: New and Selected Poems(October)

Claire Malroux holds a unique place in contemporary French poetry, with influences from both the French and Anglophone traditions—especially the work of Emily Dickinson. Her subtle, intimate poems move between an intense, abstract interiority and an acute engagement with the material world. This new volume is a bilingual selection by the award-winning poet and translator Marilyn Hacker.

You happened to me. I was happened to
like an abandoned building by a bull-
dozer, like the van that missed my skull
happened a two-inch gash across my chin.
You were as deep down as I’ve ever been.
You were inside me like my pulse. A new-
born flailing toward maternal heartbeat through
the shock of cold and glare: when you were gone,
swaddled in strange air I was that alone
again, inventing life left after you.

I don’t want to remember you as that
four o’clock in the morning eight months long
after you happened to me like a wrong
number at midnight that blew up the phone
bill to an astronomical unknown
quantity in a foreign currency.
The U.S. dollar dived since you happened to me.
You’ve grown into your skin since then; you’ve grown
into the space you measure with someone
you can love back without a caveat.

While I love somebody I learn to live
with through the downpulled winter days’ routine
wakings and sleepings, half-and-half caffeine-
assisted mornings, laundry, stock-pots, dust-
balls in the hallway, lists instead of longing, trust
that what comes next comes after what came first.
She’ll never be a story I make up.
You were the one I didn’t know where to stop.
If I had blamed you, now I could forgive
you, but what made my cold hand, back in prox-
imity to your hair, your mouth, your mind,
want where it no way ought to be, defined
by where it was, and was and was until
the whole globed swelling liquefied and spilled
through one cheek’s nap, a syllable, a tear,
was never blame, whatever I wished it were.

You were the weather in my neighborhood.
You were the epic in the episode.
You were the year poised on the equinox.

Marilyn Hacker