POETRY TRAVELS with Anna Blasiak and Lisa Kalloo: A SALVO by Charline Lambert, translated by John Taylor

Never again the blackness, its hand of anguish;
   never again on me that dark star-heavy body –
   that lunar crust scraping my soul for an obol of
   light.
Inhabit the night.
Never again the evening, its descent from the
   auroral plateau, that vise biting into sparkling
   splinters and shattering my bright core like a
   stone.
Never again willfulness, its talons hoeing my lips;
   never again that dark body on me — those gums
   extracted from the nocturnal bridle bit when
   tightened verve arms itself to the teeth.
Inhabit the night.
Never again sight, its eyes aborting the horizon,
   that rude roughness in the psalms of the hand
   from which the song of the clouds is removed.
Never again knowledge, that sacredness soiled
   with false airs; never again that star-heavy body
   on me — that spit profaning the purple water
   subdued in the pagan’s hearth.
Enter the sea.

By Charline Lambert

Translated by John Taylor

From Charline Lambert’s Of Desire and Decarceration (Diálogos, 2024)

Charline Lambert was born in 1989 in Liège, Belgium. She is the author of five books of poetry: Chanvre et lierre (“Hemp and Ivy,” 2016), Sous dialyses (“Dialyzing,” 2016), Désincarcération (“Decarceration,” 2017), and Une salve (“A Salvo,” 2020), Quiconques (“Whoevers,” 2023). Before its publication in 2016, the manuscript of Chanvre et lierre was awarded the Georges Lockem Prize in 2014 from the Royal Academy of the French Language and Literature of Belgium and the Geneviève Grand’Ry Prize in 2015 from the Belgian Writers Association. The book subsequently won the First Book Prize in 2017 from the Wallonia-Brussels Federation. In 2020, following upon the publication of her fourth book, Une salve, Charline Lambert was awarded – for her first four books – the Literature Prize from the Société Civile des Auteurs Multimédia (SCAM) and, in 2021, the Fintro Prize. In 2023, the Éditions Les Impressions Nouvelles published her first book-length essay, devoted to “Doctor Strange,” the character of American comic books published by Marvel Comics: Docteur Strange, les mains et l’esprit. As of 2024, Lambert is finishing her Ph.D. thesis on the relation between poetry and deafness.

John Taylor was born in Des Moines in 1952. He has lived in France since 1977. As a translator from three languages (French, Italian, Greek) and as a critic who has written books of essays about contemporary poets from all the European countries, he has long been one of the bridges between European literature and English-speaking countries. Among his many translations are books by Philippe Jaccottet, Jacques Dupin, José-Flore Tappy, Pierre Voélin, Pierre Chappuis, Pierre-Albert Jourdan, Catherine Colomb, Lorenzo Calogero, Alfredo de Palchi, Franca Mancinelli, Elias Petropoulos, and Elias Papadimitrakopoulos. Diálogos Books has published his translation of Veroniki Dalakoura’s Bird Shadows: Selected Poems and Poetic Prose 1967-2020. He is also the author of several volumes of short prose and poetry, most recently The Dark Brightness, Grassy Stairways, Remembrance of Water & Twenty-Five Trees, and a “double book” coauthored with the Swiss poet Pierre Chappuis, A Notebook of Clouds & A Notebook of Ridges.

POETRY TRAVELS with Anna Blasiak and Lisa Kalloo: A SALVO by Charline Lambert, translated by John Taylor

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