Book record
Homesick for the earth
Jules Supervielle
Translated from French by Moniza Alvi
Homesick for the earth, by Jules Supervielle and translated by Moniza Alvi from French, brings Uruguayan French-language poetry into English through homesickness, earthbound longing, and the odd displacement of a French-language poet whose imagination does not stay neatly inside one nation. The metadata gives the reader a doorway, but the real value is what happens once the poem begins making its own weather. I would read it for earth, exile, sky, and the bodily ache of wanting to belong somewhere more fully than language allows, not as a fixed lesson about a nation, period, or school. The best entry point is still the poem itself: the line that catches, the image that refuses to explain itself, the feeling that arrives before paraphrase. Homesick for the earth belongs in the translated poetry library because it helps the library hold Uruguay not only as a geography but as a lyric pressure on French modernism.
- Published
- 2012
- Publisher
- Bloodaxe Books
- Language
- French
- Country
- Uruguay
- ISBN
- 9781852249205