The rest of the voyage by Bernard Noël and translated by Eléna Rivera

This is poetry from France.

The rest of the voyage by Bernard Noël translated by Eléna Rivera is published by Graywolf Press. This is a Book originally written in French. This was published in 2011.0 and has the ISBN of 9.781555976002E12.

The rest of the voyage, by Bernard Noël and translated by Eléna Rivera, sounds like a book written after departure has already happened. Noël’s French poetry and prose are often associated with the body, political violence, erotic perception, and the limits of language under pressure. The title is beautifully weary: not the beginning, not the grand adventure, but what remains after movement has become endurance. Rivera’s translation gives English readers access to that later, searching momentum. I would read this book for its sense of passage without romance. A voyage can be geographical, bodily, historical, or inward, and Noël’s work tends to distrust easy separations between them. The poems seem likely to ask what language can still carry when the first map has failed.

If you’d like to see international poetry continue and gain traction, consider requesting this work from your local library, or purchasing it from places like Open Books (a poetry only bookstore), Asterism Books (an independent press distributor), or bookshop.org to connect you with your local bookstores.

Check out more of the always in-progress translated poetry index here.