Description
Joël Des Rosiers is an acclaimed Haitian-born francophone writer whose work has been nominated for the Governor General's Award and whose life reads like a novel — he is a psychiatrist, an award-winning poet and a political activist on the international stage. His poetry collection Vetiver, which won the 1999 Grand Prix du livre de Montréal and the 2000 Grand Prix du Festival international de la poésie de Trois Rivières, is now published for the first time in English.
Vetiver, a grass also known as cuscus, was brought from the Indies to Haiti. There it has taken root and flourished, becoming all-pervasive. The heavy aroma of the grass permeates everything. In Vetiver, the grass is a powerful, mythical symbol for Joël Des Rosiers, representing the root of lyrical possibility. An homage to his native land, Des Rosiers' narrative poem evokes all of the wild opulence of the Caribbean world and plumbs the depths of memory in language that is rich and multihued, full of tangible flavours. It is a hymn to the power of the word, the book and the voice, guided by the heritage of ancestors and the sensual proximity of people and things.
Des Rosiers revisits themes from his three previous collections here: nostalgia, the search for roots and identity, the pain of memory, and the exploration of real and imagined spaces. Rooted in mystery and sacrifice, these narrative poems are shaped by extreme tensions that blend, in a strange way, with a seemingly clinical erudition where the melancholy of the flesh offers itself up as a substitution for mourning, religious ceremony and sensuality.
About the authors
Joël Des Rosiers' profile page
Hugh Hazelton is a Montreal writer and translator who specializes in the comparison of Canadian and Quebec literatures with those of Latin America. He has written four books of poetry and translates from Spanish, French and Portuguese into English; his translation of Vétiver, a book of poems by Joël Des Rosiers, won the Governor General’s Literary Award for French-English translation in 2006. He is a professor emeritus of Spanish at Concordia University in Montreal and former co-director of the Banff International Literary Translation Centre. In 2016 he won the Linda Gaboriau Award for his work on behalf of literary translation in Canada.
Excerpt: Vetiver (by (author) Joël Des Rosiers; translated by Hugh Hazelton)
"Cayenne"
she spoke with a certain absence in her gestures saying she wanted a dedication and that she’d been spying on me long before I arrived in Cayenne because she’d found out the names of the writers who’d been invited and had copied my photograph as well as the uselessly flattering biographical note that she got off an Internet site and that photograph she said the one in which I wore a bow tie that looked like it had been tied by hand had inspired her to write letters that she addressed to me but could never bring herself to send because her thoughts had gotten away from her and in her opinion it was horrible to write only for oneself and not send off the letters to their recipient and so risk leaving them without even an echo
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she said she’d gone to the first book fair ever held in Cayenne to meet me in person unlike all those people who press forward without looking or linger around the books alone or with their families enthusiastic or indifferent silent or garrulous at times without any other reason than simply to be seen there she came herself for a specific reason to ask me to dedicate a book to her
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because I was she said according to the biographical notes she’d attentively read both a doctor and a writer and my double profession conferred on me in her eyes an exquisite understanding of people in other words a knowledge of pain because I looked at them with one eye on their life and the other on their death and adding literature to medicine forced me to give people back the insidious gift I had received of their suffering she said that by delving into that space beyond their bodies and their souls I revealed to others and especially to her my immense desire to heal and that this understanding of others presupposed a fascination with misfortune that she had no trouble understanding and that was enough for her to trust me
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she said that was the main reason she’d spoken to me and for the sake of which she asked me to be truthful that is to write just for her on a card with a reproduction of a painting by Matisse which she’d specifically brought with her and now placed upon the table next to the pile of books a sort of portrait a dedication that would show her truth light and shadow she said which I was most certainly capable of drawing out from her from the first time I set eyes on her from our very first encounter an immemorial nameless thing that would set her apart from the people around her and that I shouldn’t avoid her request and that although she was for me a kind of stranger this shouldn’t provide me with any excuses because when you really thought about it what she was asking me for didn’t have to be that personal
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even though she hadn’t yet read a single one of my books she said that my voice which she’d heard on Radio France International during the program on visiting writers had crept into her mind strangely enough not so much for what it actually contained as for the language that carried it along and more important than the features of my face which she had already perfectly memorized in order to recognize me she had observed the liberated way I moved on television my origins gave me away she said as I strolled through Place des Palmistes but what she’d appreciated most of all was the mixture of intelligence and humour in the comments I made on the architecture of creole houses adorned with wrought-iron balconies when the afternoon light made them seem unreal she said she’d told herself now here’s a writer who finally doesn’t take himself too seriously
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she said she had only been in Cayenne for a short time that she had lived before in the 16th arrondissement in Paris and that she’d come to French Guiana just for a change perhaps out of nonconformity or because she was bored and most probably for some reason still unknown to her she said that even supposing I had wanted to I couldn’t have avoided her request I was neither a real writer nor a true doctor or else if I’d risked embarking on both professions which seemed so opposed to one another it was because she said I felt free enough of any double association sufficiently carried along by my double vocation to answer this kind of question and because she calculated on observing my photo that behind a sad smile I was trying to hide a kind of melancholy that was concealed in my eyes
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she said that on account of my destiny I led a double life the risks of which I should accept including that of granting her wish and that a true writer (which wasn’t necessarily what I was) had the capacity to sound out souls to be able to feel like others the excessive love that threatens the devastation of feelings that don’t by rights belong to it and that it’s from this ability that the writer draws the sense of his existence and what’s more she said if I were a true physician I wouldn’t have the slightest chance of escaping her wish because she could be ill she could be in pain she could be in distress even without knowing it and her desire despite the unusualness of the situation could correspond perfectly to a symptom a sign even if she wouldn’t dream of expressing it that way of the upheaval of time and of her way of living triggered by my presence she said she’d never felt such desire for a dedication
Other titles by
Beyond the Park: An Anthology of Ecological Experiences
An Anthology of Ecological Experiences
Aquí era el paraíso / Here Was Paradise
Selección de poemas de Humberto Ak’abal / Selected Poems of Humberto Ak’abal
Complete Works of Oliverio Girondo, The
Volume I
Obras completas / Complete Works
The Doorman of Windsor Station
Vesuvius
All is Flesh
Silver
Hallucinations in the Alfalfa and Other Poems
