Translator’s Note

The translation of poetry is a long walk.

You seek some sort of origin, try to discover some text that fixes your feet firmly in one direction.

You look ahead at the landscape, try to get a look at the text’s face, evaluate your expectations and aspirations, and then you make start making decisions.

Then you take a step. Then another.

If all goes well, if the origin was steady and the steps line up as required, you will end up at a destination. That’s the process, defined as concretely and as specifically as I’m able: discover, decide, then step and repeat.

I discovered Ouanessa Younsi one August morning in 2019 because of an article by Dominic Tardif in the Québécois newspaper Le Devoir. The article, dated November 2018, focused on prominent young women in Québécois poetry. Ouanessa Younsi’s work caught my eye immediately — she spoke of phantom limbs, and of identity as being shaped by absence as well as presence. I was in a meditative place in my own life: I had just moved back to my hometown in western New York, was newly jobless and motherless, and was attempting to live authentically in a repressive and dishonest America. I read a few excerpts from Métissée and felt seen: I felt deeply affected at that time by people I missed, and by the jarring sensation of encountering things in my city that no longer felt familiar. I wondered what I had gained in my years away — and what I had lost — and how those changes were affecting me. I bought Métissée that afternoon. I immediately responded to the poems with wonder and curiosity. Younsi was telling me about places and things I knew, like snow and schoolyards, and things I didn’t, like Arabic pronunciation and the twists of orange trees. I felt like I was holding her hand and walking with her and learning about her life in a way that had me looking more closely at my own.

Published in September of 2018, the prose poems in Métissée (Little Wet-Paint Girl) examine Younsi’s identity as a French-Canadian woman born to a Québécois mother and an Algerian father, beginning with her birth, and moving forward chronologically. By analyzing her family and herself through the eyes of a child, Younsi attempts to locate herself within her culturally mixed family. This includes the little girl’s craving for connection with relatives she has never met, and with “the sunburned side of the world” these people came from.

Younsi has explained that the title of this book, the feminine term for a mixed-race person, refers to the mixing of ethnicities but also to the mixing of absence and presence. My goal in this translation is to communicate this overall message: the things that we feel are lacking in ourselves and our lives are just as crucial, and as formative, as those we know to be present.

Speaking as a woman of colour — a Muslim woman of colour — in Québec, Younsi provides a fresh voice in Canadian and Québécois poetry. She addresses rootedness, family, dispossession, and race in a visceral and contemporary ways through the fractured body and the hankering for a diasporic family she connects to most strongly through her namesake grandmother.

In Little Wet-Paint Girl, elements of the un-canny, combine with the grotesque to create an unsettling, yet riveting, world. Throughout the collection, Younsi resists the idea of the authority of concrete details or linear narrative, instead inviting the reader to search for their own points of connection. The text demands slow, careful reading, breath between each fragment. The effect is an experience of the text and its themes through a feeling of disorientation or uncertainty.

My translation also accents Younsi’s psychological and anatomical imagery. By discussing herself as disparate parts, with pages discussing her teeth, her feet, her lungs, her voice, her legs, and so on, Younsi communicates the struggle of a narrator who is either decomposing or constructing her own self — perhaps both — before our eyes.

I began to translate Métissée after reading three poems, making three conscious decisions as I set out:

First, that I would translate the whole collection. I liked it, I liked its face and the way it tugged at my fingers, and I wanted to see where it led.

Second, that I would read it as I translated. The experience of reading a poem for the first time is irreplaceable, and that uncovering process, my own shifting relationship to the presence and absence Younsi describes, was something I wanted to try to capture. Aside from some polishing, this volume is meant to reflect that fresh, first encounter. Younsi writes through a child’s eyes as she encounters trees and ghosts and lemonade stands and Souk Ahras; I wanted to mimic that (self-)discovery.

Third, I would translate on paper, with a pen in my hand. As a young translator still toying with routine, I felt that I couldn’t examine intention, or the dichotomy between presence and absence, without the physicality of handwriting.

I have tried to maintain the meditative flow of Younsi’s prose poetry. The work does not separate poems into discrete units but allows each reader to interpret the pacing and rhythm of the collection independently. In this way, Younsi begins the work of creation and directs the reader to reach a personal conclusion to that work.

In his essay “La Traduction de la poésie,” Yves Bonnefoy cautions the translator against over-valuing the “fixed form” of the poem — that is, the written word, be it the word of the source text or the translation.¹ We should, instead, find what motivates the poem, relive the act that spoke the poem into being, and dissociate that from the words. The words are traces. The intention, the obsession, the desire, is that which occupies the space between impulse and utterance. When done sincerely, it becomes possible to occupy that space and to create a translation that is just as true, both in honesty and in clarity, as the source. A good poem seems to hold a shred of the poet under glass, preserving their voice in the space between inspiration and language.

Readers may notice that at the beginning of this note, I spoke of a destination, not the destination, when working with a translation project. Texts don’t have singular destinations in mind — that’s too metaphorical, even for me — and it’s hard to know when a translation is finished. I will say, however, to trust the poem.

If you find a space somewhere between the yearning that set the poem in motion and the utterance that preserves that yearning, if you echo that intention, and use the words of a new language to preserve it, you’ve begun to translate.

If you take that step, and then do it again, you will end up finding a bit of yourself fixed under glass, and you’ll become part of the poem. Both present and absent within the poem, if you will. That was my destination.