The following is an excerpt from my critical introduction accompanying a translation project that gathered a number of poems from disparate collections by contemporary French poet Gabrielle Althen. My translations of two of Althen’s poems from her collection Saxifrage Life (2012) were recently published in Asymptote and my translation of Althen’s titular poem from her 2015 collection La Cavalière indemne, “The Unscathed Rider,” appeared in Journal of Literary Translation.
I have completed a translation of the entire Saxifrage Life, whose title derives from an intrepid Mediterranean flower with herculean roots that can burrow through rock, and I am in the process of finding a publisher for the manuscript.
Oscar Duffield
The work of French poet Gabrielle Althen (pseudonym of Colette Astier) is a simmering broth of intensity, strangeness and wild overgrowth verging on surrealism. These qualities are paradoxically nurtured rather than inhibited by her preference for miniscule, aphoristic snippets of text ‘sculpted’ (her phrase) out of the blank space that envelops them.
She chooses her words carefully, and knots or weaves them together into miniature scenes, often abstract and containing at most what she calls “embryonic” narratives. In a not-yet-published poem that she shared with me she writes “It must be one of my days of intensity hunting”: I think this hunt permeates all of her work.1 Unless otherwise noted, all direct quotations from the French, whether from Althen or others, are my own translations; I refrained from translating titles, however. All of the secondary literature I reference was in French originally, with the exception of the majority of the translation theory I cite. For her, poetry is always a kind of search. One of her collections is entitled Le Pèlerin sentinelle–this paradoxical figure of the pilgrim-sentinel, both searching/traveling and engaged in stationary observation, is a wonderful metaphor for the persona and practice that she has cultivated.
A significant aspect of this persona is her pseudonym, itself exhibiting a kind of internal tension or paradox: critic Claude Leroy argues (28) that ‘Gabrielle’ is an evocation of the messenger Archangel, while ‘Althen’ is drawn from the name of the village Althen-des-Paluds in Vaucluse, southeastern France, which apparently arose from a swamp or bog.
The intensity of Althen’s work is sometimes, but not always, emotional. While much of her writing is abstract and fragmented, bristling with sharp shards of contradiction and conflict, there is also a thread of touching simplicity and kindness that regularly surfaces, in warm and poignant lines like “you belong as the stars belong” (La fête invisible, 42).
She remarks, in a 2002 interview with John Stout (177), that a critic was once surprised to find her “a smiling woman.” She then adds “Fundamentally, I wonder if I have a view of the world that could well be catastrophic, but I have another as well that is harmonious. I even have one where playfulness comes in.” These coexisting worldviews seem to deeply imbue most of her work. But despite the presence of warmth, emotion, and occasionally humor, she explicitly avoids the kind of saccharine sentimentality that is sometimes associated with poetry.
This translation project assembles poems from a wide range of her collections, including La Fête invisible (2021), Le Nu vigile (1995), La Cavalière indemne (2015), and Vie Saxifrage (2012). They are ‘randomly’ chosen, in the sense that I did not look for an overarching thematic relationship between them. Rather, I wanted to give any readers a curiosity-invoking sampling of her work that will hopefully inspire further exploration.
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Althen has been writing prolifically for almost half a century (her first poetry collection was Le Cœur solaire, published in 1976). Throughout her career she has experimented with many styles of writing. Most of her individual collections are internally heterogeneous, with prose and verse, aphorism and (relatively) lengthy poems cohabitating peacefully.
As professor emerita of comparative literature at the Université de Paris X-Nanterre, she is very widely read. One place this former vocation surfaces is in the variety of poets she draws on for her many epigraphs. As with any writer, her poetry acts like a watershed fed by many separate and intertwining tributaries, or like a dew-spangled spiderweb lovingly constructed from a multitude of different strands of inspirations and stylistic signatures distilled and adapted for her own purposes.
Some of the most significant of these strands are the French prose and symbolist poetry of Arthur Rimbaud and others, the Surrealist movement catalyzed in the 1920s by André Breton, and above all, the poet René Char. Much of her work is in ‘prose’ though not all (she hesitates to use that word to avoid misunderstanding, observing that “a poem is a poem regardless of the linguistic method that it employs”).
In Stout’s interview with Althen, he says “Close to the Rimbaud of Illuminations and Char, Althen endeavors to grab onto moments of intensity likely to deliver a feeling of “overgrowth” to the reader–which corresponds, according to her, to the characteristics of poetry and the poetic vision.” Althen corroborates this sense of legacy from Rimbaud with the comment “Rimbaud lives in me, whether I want it or not.”
While Althen does not consider herself a “Surrealist” poet (she claims that despite appearances, she “does not want to change anything in the order of reality, just to indicate it, with the underlying desire to celebrate it”), some stylistic features of the movement seem to have at least informed her practice. One example is the idea of “écriture automatique” (automatic writing or psychography in English), a practice of writing in a sort of trance, attempting to channel subconscious or oneiric materials. In a review, Gérard Noiret playfully calls her most recent collection, La Fête invisible, “the party of automatic writing.” Another example is the abundance of contradiction, strangeness and mystery (Noiret also mentions her taste for “sybilline mystery”).
At least on the surface level, this can be seen in the proliferation of literary devices which often seem to fall under a broad theme of contradiction and paradox: hypallage, oxymoron, hyperbaton, juxtaposition, personification, etc. For example, in the poem “Colors of the World,” Althen writes, “the wind breathes.” Beyond mere personification (although that too abounds in her poetry), this is a beautiful instance of hypallage, a device in which the natural relationship between two elements is transposed. In this case the behavior of breathing, usually a property of organic life forms, is attributed to the wind. The title I mentioned earlier, The Pilgrim-Sentinel, is a great example of an oxymoron, the conjoining of apparently contradictory terms.
The most significant of her inspirations is the French poet René Char, with whom Althen had a substantial correspondence. In the introduction to the 2009 edition of Le Belle mendiante (which includes some letters from Char), she discusses what drew her to Char and his work at the beginning of her career: “I was in search of the proposition of a strong and lively poetry, vivacious, non sentimental. I also needed confirmation and to have been preceded.” One of the major overlaps in their styles is the love of aphorisms that I mentioned earlier, something that Char was famous for. Char was ‘officially’ a member of the Surrealist movement and a member of the French Resistance in World War II.
Besides the work of other poets and writers, another major inspiration for Althen is the region from which she draws her partially toponymous nomme de plume, Vaucluse. In part three of a five-segment interview for the France Culture podcast Au Singulier, she says “I believe I fell in love with that Vaucluse village…I was searching for a precondition…maybe a quest for an existential taking-root.” In the interview with Stout she says “I resemble a sunflower!…This tropism towards light has brought me to the Mediterranean” (Stout, 182). Her love for this beautiful, arid region, which Char famously called an “aphoristic landscape” (Mora, 9), and for its brightness often appears indirectly in her poems, but also sometimes directly–such as when “partridges run between the olive trees” in a poem from Vie saxifrage.
This Mediterranean light has special qualities, as Althen says in that podcast: it is “extremely fine, extremely precise…and in this light, the emergence of beauty, the ubiquity of an elusive beauty…a kind of pulling at the mind.” Althen often includes concepts such as time, death, and love, reifying and personifying them in her poetry, and light is no exception. One of my favorite instances is a brief mention of “skinless light” in Vie saxifrage. What an interesting image!
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The ‘translator’s realm,’ according to Michael Emmerich, “is on a highly abstract plane, rather like that of a mathematician, grammarian or logician.” And he continues, “The material objects are distanced. The domain of consciousness in which the translator operates is detached from the whole natural world. Abstracted from reality, the translator operates outside the spatio-temporal system in the world of pure consciousness.” Emmerich makes a case here for a somewhat novel way of looking at translation, a field often theorized in terms of spatial metaphors (such as ferrying the meaning or essence of a text across a river or over a bridge spanning two languages and a gulf of mutual incomprehension). He considers it to be more of a cognitive or intellectual behavior than those metaphors tend to imply.
Mark Polizzoti begins his book Sympathy for the Traitor with this thought: “Though certain guidelines might prove helpful, no theory or dogma can replace the translator’s work of grappling with the text on its own terms, of devising an appropriate strategy. In other words, and despite the claims of many commentators from ancient times down to the present day, there is no magic, one-size-fits-all method” (xv). Like many practicing translators, Polizzoti’s approach is pragmatic and mildly anti-theoretical. As that quote demonstrates, he sees translation as a practice, firmly rooted in or centering the text itself, that can be fruitfully influenced or guided by theories, but should ultimately take place on the project’s own terms.
Both of these insights deeply resonated with me. So in my introduction I try to thread the needle between these two paradigms, acknowledging the abstraction inherent to translation and some of the theories that have cropped up around it, while also addressing the experience of translating Althen’s poetry in particular. I like to think of it as walking around with a helium balloon of theory bobbing around overhead that is nevertheless solidly tethered by a string of pragmatism and the embodied practicality of writing.
Luckily for that attempt, Althen’s own understanding of her writing process, as she describes it in many interviews and essays, seems to have a lot in common with Emmerich’s understanding of translation. In one of her poems (from Vie saxifrage), “spacious attention reigns”; I think that in her view writing poetry is a kind of meditation, involving a deep receptivity fueled by that expansive kind of attention. But even though her poems are firmly rooted in reality and observation (she even says in an interview that the job of a poet is to “call a cat a cat”), she often inhabits her own kind of ‘abstract plane’ à la Emmerich as well.
Translation is a kind of impersonation, in a sense, so in my translations of her work, I try to inhabit that mindset. Emmerich describes translation as a “ghostly” activity, where the translator is a node of convergence between languages; I might add that it’s also a kind of convergence of identities. Yasmine Seale, in a discussion that was part of the 2025 Jed Deppman Translation Symposium at Oberlin College, mentioned that translation can feel refreshing because it gives you a break from using your ‘own voice’. When asked if she felt a different kind of responsibility translating very old works compared to new ones, she answered that when translating contemporary works or doing the first translation of something, a closer, more ‘literal’ approach is often more appropriate. This is how I’ve tried to approach Althen, who has barely been translated at all (I’ve found a total of four poems formally published online; certainly no one has published a full translation of any of her collections).
Yves Bonnefoy echoes the kind of impersonation project Seale was alluding to when he says “we should in fact come to see what motivates the poem; to live in the act which both gave rise to it and remains enmeshed in it: and released from that fixed form, which is merely its trace, the first intention and intuition…can be tried out anew in the other language.” Essentially, according to this view, translation is a particular kind of writing which mimics a prior instance of writing. The inspiration which gave rise to the first (what “motivates” it) is a quality that is identifiable, and which can be re-applied in the secondary act of writing, i.e., translation.
With these thoughts in mind, my approach to translating this varied selection of poetry was to trust my intuition, and allow my writing to haunt and be haunted. As in Robert Frost’s famous “road not taken,” I feel that translations and their translators are haunted by (among other things) the translation possibilities not taken, the possible choices that were excluded by necessity but still retain a feeble ghostly presence in the work. This idea also brings to mind the enigmatic question with which Breton opened his strange surrealist novel Nadja, and which serendipitously bridges several of the things I’ve been discussing so far: “Who am I? If this once I were to rely on a proverb, then perhaps everything would amount to knowing whom I ‘haunt'” (translated by Richard Howard). This phantom sense of identity, or estrangement from and confusion of self that Breton uses to launch the rest of his novel feels very much in alignment with Emmerich’s understanding of translation as a “ghostly activity.”
As I mentioned earlier, Althen’s writing practice exhibits many facets of Surrealism. In the essay collection Proximité du Sphinx, Althen says something which corroborates that impression: “Poetry runs ahead of thought. You need to let it venture ahead until it becomes clear that thought is running along right behind it” (38). So in my translations I tried to let my writing run ahead of my thoughts as well, only allowing my conscious brain to intercede in the revision process.
In addition to the landscape of Vaucluse and other inspirations, another precursor to, or Bonnefoy-ian “motivation” for, each of her poems is an emotion. As Althen writesin her most recent publication, a collection of journal entries which appear in Les Moments littéraires (issue 53), “What I await in the silence before writing, is quite simply an emotion liable to provide me with the melodic line of what I will write, an emotion, I must add, this is impersonal, or almost.” Thus I have tried (not always successfully) to consider what emotion may have nudged each poem into being as I translate it. One poem, from Vie saxifrage, sticks out to me as having a particularly clear emotional impetus (although even for this one the possibilities are multiple–is it anger, fear, paranoia?):
LIEU
Couteau pour l’âme
Prescience folle
Vitre martyre
La pureté extravagante
– Les pins ricanent
This poem exemplifies Althen’s ability to saturate minuscule text-shards with intensity. Unlike most of her work, I can almost imagine this strange, vicious little poem scrawled in aggressive graffiti on an alley wall somewhere. Here’s one of my translated versions, in which I tried to really draw on the idea of fear or angst as “préalable”:
PLACE
Knife stabs soul
Demented prescience
Martyred windowpane
Outrageous purity
– The pine trees snicker
The “stabbing” is not, strictly speaking ‘in’ the original, just as the pane or windowpane of the original is ‘martyr’ rather than ‘martyred’ in the original, but I think these choices emphasize the directionality, the pointed sharpness of Althen’s lines more than other possibilities (e.g.. “Knife for the soul”).
In the untitled poem also from Vie saxifrage that starts with the line “Bleu de trop d’une piscine,” I decided to translate the line “Des êtres tuent le temps” as “Beings assassinate time” rather that the more straightforward “Beings (or some beings, or entities) kill time,” to avoid the mundanity of the idiomatic implications that phrase has in English.That particular signification isn’t attached to the French in the same way as far as I know, and furthermore that sentiment doesn’t seem to mesh well, in my reading, with her poetic style, which if anything is about observing and appreciating the present, or the “hic et nunc,” to cite the latin phrase she herself uses in the Stout interview.
Another permutation of the idea of “imitation” for me in this translation process was asking myself the unanswerable but helpful question: “Would Althen use this word were she writing in English?” This query gets at considerations of register and style of course, but also at the less tangible, more mischievous and hard to pin down qualities of words, such as connotation and the subjectivity of personal interpretation.
Questions (answerable or otherwise) constitute, in fact, a major theme in Althen’s work. She has a fascination with riddles; in one poem “the riddle [or mystery/enigma] is a celestial wheel…” In the same vein, Stout observes that there is a ‘secret’ hidden in each of her poems. In the spirit of this appreciation for the unknown and mysterious, I will now begin to lower the curtain on this introduction.
Althen always keeps her readers (and translators!) on their toes as they navigate the beautiful, eldritch, miniature labyrinths each of these poems seems to be, but I hope that I have given my readers a kind Ariadne’s thread that they can rely on when her work seems too obscure and misty and full of unexpected turns. If you give these poems enough time, you might come to realize that, as with a window onto the night, they are in fact transparent, and the view is enthralling.
Oscar Duffield translates from French, Spanish, and Italian. His translations have appeared in Asymptote. He attended Oberlin College, Ohio, where he studied comparative literature, literary translation, and music performance. He is currently working as a baker and an interpreter on guided tours of Yellowstone National Park and intends to pursue graduate studies in literary translation.
Works Cited
Bonnefoy, Yves (2020) “Translating Poetry”. In Biguenet, John, Schulte, Rainer, Theories of Translation: An Anthology of Essays from Dryden to Derrida, 186-192: University of Chicago Press.
Breton, André. Nadja. Translated by Richard Howard. New York: Grove Press; London: Evergreen Books, 1960
Emmerich, Michael. “Beyond Between: Translation, Ghosts, Metaphors,” May 5, 2009. Words Without Borders. https://wordswithoutborders.org/read/article/2009-05/beyond-between-translation-ghosts-metaphors/
Leroy, Claude. “Débat de l’Ange et du Sphinx chez Gabrielle Althen.” Nu(e), vol. 73, 25 Oct. 2022, 21–72. Poèt(e)s.
Mora, Edith, Interview with René Char, “Poesie-sur-Sorgue,” 16 September 1965, Les Nouvelles Littéraires.
Noiret, Gérard. “La Fête Invisible, de Gabrielle Althen : La Fête de l’écriture Automatique.” En Attendant Nadeau, 6 July 2021, www.en-attendant-nadeau.fr/2021/06/19/fete-ecriture-automatique-althen/
Polizzotti, Mark. Sympathy for the Traitor: A Translation Manifesto. The MIT Press, 2018.
Richeux, Marie. (Host). June 2015. Au Singulier [Audio Podcast]. 5-Episode Series with Gabrielle Althen. Radio France-France Culture. https://www.radiofrance.fr/franceculture/podcasts/au-singulier/gabrielle-althen-1-5-dostoievski-9591384
Stout, John C. Interview with Gabrielle Alten. L’Énigme-Poésie : Entretiens Avec 21 Poètes Française. July 3, 2002.