Hongo, Hirshfield, Andrews, et. al.

Nancy Naomi Carlson on Translating Louis-Philippe Dalembert:

Translating Dalembert opened up a new world for me, as I’ve never before translated a writer from Haiti, a country that shares its Caribbean island location with the Dominican Republic. First under Spanish rule, and later a colony of France, Haiti achieved independence in 1804 and was the first Black republic in the Western hemisphere. Despite its rich contributions to the cultural arts, including literature, art, and music, Haiti remains an economically impoverished country plagued by vestiges of colonialism, political repression (including a thirty-year dictatorship), and natural disasters.

Dalembert is considered “among the major contemporary voices, not only in Haitian letters but also on the global francophone and international literary scene” (Professor Micheline Rice-Maximin, Swarthmore College). In addition to writing about  “vagabondage” (wandering around the world), biblical allusions, and recollections of childhood, Dalembert’s themes run the gamut between lost love to sharp political and social commentary. Stylistically, Dalembert’s poems are lyrical and generally accessible, and include a minimal amount of punctuation. Lower-case letters begin new sentences, and titles of poems are not capitalized. Dalembert makes generous use of Haitian Creole. He consciously avoids locking himself into a language or an identity: “I claim all the contributions of my Creole identity—those which I inherited and those I acquired ‘en route.’” The poems presented here—”dune” and “the shipwrecked city”—give the reader a sense of Dalembert’s wide-ranging view of the world encompassing both the quotidian as well as the visionary.

I find myself again, in the spring of 2022, in southeastern Poland near the Ukrainian border, an area I think of as “the borderlands,” and that historian Timothy Snyder has called “the Bloodlands.” My own family history is deeply entangled with the history of this region – the bloody partisan battles, the shifting allegiances, and the ways that the lack of a fixed national identity (who were these people, my people, people of the margins, people from nowhere?) contributed to what amounted to a cultural genocide in the years immediately following WWII. While many in my grandmother’s village took up the Ukrainian nationalist cause, and adopted a staunchly Ukrainian identity, my grandmother and at least a few others were swayed by the promise of Communist ideology. In the end, I feel, everyone lost.

So, this is a poem addressed to the grandmother I never knew, and to others like her, who had to face, in those terrible years, a choice I have never had to face. And yet  here I am, here we are, again, back in that place, an unthinkable war raging over the right to self-determination, the very right for some of us to say who we are, to write and live the stories of our own lives, to be the authors of our own history and our own destinies.

The poem is still new, perhaps a bit raw, but this seemed like the time to share it, and to offer forgiveness, to forgive ourselves.