Translator's Note

Growing up in New England, I was not fully aware of my Quebecois, and originally Breton, heritage. I knew only that my grandparents spoke an archaic form of Quebecois whenever we grandkids were around, and that that language seemed far removed from the Parisian French I was learning at school. Still, it intrigued me enough to learn Old French in order to translate Old French poetry, beginning what's now an academic career as a medievalist. It's only been recently that I've learned of the Breton immigrants who made Quebec their home, including one of my ancestors, Pierre Hudon dit Beaulieu, a baker who settled at Rivière Ouelle, Quebec, with "douze arpents en culture" and "deux bêtes aux cornes," and who relished firing on heretics from Massachusetts.

The poetry of Anne Jullien is very much in touch with the landscape, climate, and traditions of Finistère, the Breton region of France that juts out into the Atlantic Ocean. It is a westward, seaward, looking culture, one traditionally, and still, very much connected to the sea, to its flora and fauna, and to the fishing and shipping industries which are a part of its lifeblood. The current motto of Finistère is "Tout commence en Finistère" [Everything begins at the End of the World], a lovely play on the name of the region: its geographical location, its Celtic roots, its wandering ways and immigrations. It also nicely expresses my own linguistic journey, a circle of sorts, back to the land, and the language, of my ancestors.

The poetry of Anne Jullien frequently makes quite sophisticated maritime and literary references that may not be easily understood by American audiences, and so a few explanations are in order. In "de la mer", 'Alvins' refer to Alvin, the first deep-sea submersible capable of carrying passengers. Owned and operated by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution since 1964, Alvin participated in the 1974 Project FAMOUS (French-American Mid-Ocean Undersea Study), which confirmed the presence of a sea-floor spreading along the mid-Atlantic Ridge. It will probably also help the reader to know that wrasses, and many species of moray eels, are hermaphroditic, that Black smokers are the hottest of hydrothermal vents, and that Gilliatt, a fisherman from the Isle of Guernsey, is the main character of Victor Hugo's Toilers of the Sea. In her "ingénieurs et fariboles", 'ludions' has a doubled meaning: they are simultaneously Etruscan dancers and the floats, or divers, used in physics experiments. The reference to Hanna and Wind Island, which we know as Fanoe Island, a Danish island in the North Sea near Esbjerg, is to the children's book by Hedvig Collin, Wind Island (New York: Viking, 1945) [L'Ile du Vent(Paris, Albin Michel. 1950)]. The reference to Queequeg is, of course, to the South Pacific islander and cannibal who serves as chief harpooner on the 'Pequod' in Herman Melville's Moby Dick. Blaise Cendars, who inspires the poem of the same name,was the pseudonym of the Swiss writer Frédéric Louis Sauer (d. 1961). He wrote that 'the sea continues to be a sea blue' in his 1924 poem, "Sillage," from his Du monde entier au coeur du monde and, following Cendrars' own travels, Jullien alludes to Trois-Rivières, a neighborhood of Saint Luce, on the south coast of Martinique, known for its rum; Capesterre-Belle-eau, in Guadeloupe, and as its name implies, known for its rivers and waterfalls; and to the waterfalls of Carbet and Acomat in Guadeloupe. She concludes the poem making reference to Javier Sicilia, the Mexican poet and activist whose son, Juan Francisco Sicilia Ortega, was found murdered with six others on March 28, 2011 in Temixco, Morelos, allegedly by drug gang members. The May 12, 2011 edition Courrier International reported that after reading a poem to his son, he told a crowd protesting the violence who had assembled at the central square of Cuernavaca on April 2, 2011: "The world is no longer worthy of poetry, this is my last poem. I can no longer write poetry, poetry exists no longer in me." It was at this event that he read "Estamos hasta la madre… (Carta abierta a los políticos y a los criminales)" [We've had it up to here {Open Letter to Politicians and Criminals}], published in the April 2, 2011 edition (n. 1796) of Proceso, the Mexican review for which he is still a contributor.

Michelle Bolduc

In the Classroom