The first time I mistranslated Hélène Bessette
I called her poet and not novelist. I guess I was confused
By her lines except that they seemed to me, and still do,
To contain some of the most important verse on
The condition of being a woman who must drive back
The plot of her own distortion. The second time
I mistranslated her I refused to carry suite into English.
I was a tired of my mother tongue, so I left the French word
On the page in orange like an open tulip about to droop.
I had thought I could be her translator and then the man
Who is in charge of her future didn’t reply to my emails.
March 2019. July 2019. December 2021. Puis I didn’t have the rights,
And so many people in literature will shoot your horse in the head
Over the rights. I told myself it would make me more Bessettian
To be this ignored, but I eat that realization every day like a pile of glass.
To be quite honest, it wasn’t until 2023 when I saw her name go up
On a plaque in the 6th arrondissement that I finally conceded romancière.
I guess I was ready to listen, really listen to her. She is the novelist.
I am the poet. I had wanted kinship at every door. Follement. But I botched
The transfusion. Si. We have got to stop writing over a woman’s mind,
Yet that’s what I maintain translation is, though no one, and I mean almost
No one likes to hear that. The academics tell me, there is already so much talk
Of loss in translation, as if I, cornered into a smallness like every other
Alabamian, was attempting to say something institutionally damaging.
But I’ve stopped talking about it for now, except in poems.
I’m developing a color theory and am sitting with the rage of this woman
Who reminds me of myself though I will not force her to resemble me.
So, I read Bessette out loud, trace Desira’s blood back to the cartridge
Of her heart, feel her gaze on my tongue like a rind, and instead become
Her, woman with eyes a color qui ne s’accorde pas.