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Poetry From the June 2012 issue: The Queer Issue III

from “Edgard’s Lessons”

from "Les Leçons d’Edgard"

Jean Sénac was an Algerian pied-noir poet, whose European heritage, open homosexuality, and advocacy of a native Algerian literature put him in conflict with the nascent Islamist government.  He hosted a popular radio broadcast and helped to see many new writers into print, himself publishing multiple volumes of poetry increasingly under the sway of Allen Ginsberg and other radical American writers.  “Edgard’s Lessons” predates those influences, written in the summer of 1954, shortly before the Algerian Revolution, when he was desperately in love with a young man about whom we otherwise know nothing except his name.  Sénac lived his last years in poverty in Algiers, murdered in the night of August 28, 1973, for reasons much speculated about.
 
If singing my love is loving my country,
I am a soldier who won’t go back on what he said.
I hold his name tight like a nettle bouquet,

I walk in his footsteps, and I share his bed.


 
Summer camouflages squalor on the beaches,
So many hungry bellies bronzed by the sun
In town there’s ivy that evening interweaves 

With thistles of pain, this meal their only one.


 
We can forget in one easy kiss, guileless,

The blood spilled at Casa or Diên Biên Phu,

There’s always a time beauty goes into exile.

 
A time heat tears us from our sheets, in two.

When I lose I carp, but in combat I recoup 

The right to cherish you and to save our isle.
 
© Jean Sénac. By arrangement with the estate of the author. Translation © 2012 by Douglas Basford. All rights reserved.
Si chanter mon amour c’est aimer ma patrie,
Je suis un combattant qui ne se renie pas.
Je porte au coeur son nom comme un bouquet d’orties,
Je partage son lit et marche de son pas.
 
Sur les plages l’été camoufle la misère,
Et tant d’estomacs creux que le soleil bronza
Dans la ville le soir entrelace au lierre
Le chardon de douleur, cet unique repas.
 
Nous pouvons oublier dans un baiser facile
Le sang de Diên Biên Phu ou celui de Casa,
Il vient toujours un temps où la beauté s’exile.
 
Un temps où la colère nous arrache à nos draps.
Lors je perds, me plains et retrouve au combat
Le droit de te chérir et de saveur notre île. 
 
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Jean SénacJean Sénac

Jean Sénac (1926–73) was a Francophone Algerian poet who published a number of poetry collections during his life, including Poèmes Illiaques, Avant-Corps, La Mythe de la Sperme-Mediteranée, and Dérision et Vertige.  He founded the literary magazines Soleil, Terrasses, and Galery 54.  His collections Les Désordres and Corpoème were posthumously published, as were collections of his critical prose and journals.

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Translated from FrenchFrench by Douglas BasfordDouglas Basford

Douglas Basford’s poems, translations, and critical prose appear in Poetry, Western Humanities Review, Two Lines, Subtropics, the Hopkins Review, the Texas Review, Smartish Pace, Diagram, The FSG Book of Twentieth-Century Italian Poetry, and elsewhere.  He has received scholarships and awards from the Sewanee and Bread Loaf conferences, the Summer Literary Seminars, and the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Memorial Fund.  He teaches at SUNY-Buffalo, founded and co-edits the online poetry journal Unsplendid, and is reviews and prose editor for the National Poetry Review.

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