POETRY TRAVELS with Anna Blasiak and Lisa Kalloo: DAYDREAM by Béatrice Douvre, translated by John Taylor

The iron childhood
Was happy
And as old as we were
Beneath a bare blue sky

We were walking, nostalgic
Behind the vast gardens
Of so few roses, of so little air
To remember less
A land of deep water

I still regret this lost child’s daydream
Because he was wearing a rose on his torment.

By Béatrice Douvre

Translated by John Taylor

From Inhabit the Brief Halt. Collected Poems 1986-1994 by Béatrice Douvre, translated by John Taylor, published by The Bitter Oleander Press, 2025

Béatrice Douvre (1967-1994), whose real name was Béatrice Viennot de Vaublanc, was a poet and artist who passed like a comet through the sky of French literature. At the age of thirteen, she began suffering from anorexia, an affliction against which she would struggle throughout her short lifetime. Despite her illness, she managed to study French literature at the University of Nanterre, where she completed a master’s thesis under the direction of her professor, the poet Gabrielle Althen, about “anorexia and orexia in the Rimbaud’s oeuvre,” and then a D.E.A. thesis about “color in Yves Bonnefoy’s poetic oeuvre.” Also under Althen’s supervision, she was engaged in writing a doctoral thesis about Pierre Jean Jouve when she died from exhaustion and a heart attack on a train on 19 July 1994. At the time, she had published only a few poems, beginning in 1991, in various literary reviews, but some three hundred poems were found among her papers, as well as a diary, Journal de Belfort. During her last years, she had also met, and was encouraged by, several important French poets, including not only Althen but also Philippe Jaccottet, Yves Bonnefoy, and Jean-Yves Masson (who, like Althen, played a key role in publishing Douvre’s work and calling critical attention to it). In 2000, the Éditions Voix d’encre issued her collected poems, Oeuvre poétique, with a preface by Jaccottet and an end section devoted to her drawings and paintings. In 2019, the Éditions de la Coopérative published Journal de Belfort, a journal kept during her last year and distinguished by its visionary erotic prose. Summing up this remarkable output, Masson observes: “Language was the body that she lacked.”

John Taylor was born in Des Moines in 1952. He has lived in France since 1977. As a polyglot literary critic and translator from three languages, Taylor has long been a bridge between European literature and English-speaking countries. He has translated books by Jacques Dupin, José-Flore Tappy, Pierre Voélin, and Franca Mancinelli. Among Taylor’s own books are If Night is Falling and Remembrance of Water & Twenty-Five Trees, as well as The Dark Brightness, Grassy Stairways, a “double book” coauthored with the Swiss poet Pierre Chappuis, A Notebook of Clouds & A Notebook of Ridges, and What Comes from the Night.

POETRY TRAVELS with Anna Blasiak and Lisa Kalloo: DAYDREAM by Béatrice Douvre, translated by John Taylor

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