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ALT View of the Black Sea; on the sand, close to the waves, my latest book, An Absence of Sea
ALT THE NINTH ELEGY Why, if this interval of being can be spent serenely in the form of a laurel, slightly darker than all other green, with tiny waves on the edges of every leaf (like the smile of a breeze)—: why then have to be human—and, escaping from fate, keep longing for fate? ... Oh not because happiness exists, that too-hasty profit snatched from approaching loss. Not out of curiosity, not as practice for the heart, which would exist in the laurel too ... But because truly being here is so much; because everything here apparently needs us, this fleeting world, which in some strange way keeps calling to us. Us, the most fleeting of all. Once for each thing. Just once; no more. And we too, just once. And never again. But to have been this once, completely, even if only once: to have been at one with the earth, seems beyond undoing. Translated by Stephen Mitchell
ALT wet apron, calipers on my desk, dear Joseph, I write to Joseph, caught up in a writing fever again, or something like that, feet in basin, Pergolesi on endless replay, feeling like a stone pedestal, no, like a cement figure somewhere up in the heights, exposed to the winds, sleeping fitfully, because you called me, late at night, and wished me good night, I write to Joseph, restless night, because you tell me: a large meteor has escaped its orbit and in one calamitous explosion it is going to annihilate all life on earth, extinguishing the sun, o earthshaking prophecy, from time to time this is asking too much of me, I am all too locked up in my everyday comings and goings, brütt, or The Sighing Gardens, translated by Roslyn Theobald
ALT Now, between the horizon and the beach, something shifts in the depths of the sea. It is slow. It comes late, discovered though it was already there. Against my body, this cold of the glass, this dead mirror. I no longer see anything of myself, I no longer see anything. Now, now I begin to see again. SIX FILMS, Marguerite Duras, Translated by Olivia Baes and Emma Ramadan
