No Rhymes
by Hédi Kaddour
No ocean, no rhymes, the prudent
mountain, long walks and sometimes
when we thought too highly of ourselves
a huge bovine herd, just before the slap
of Mont Blac, on the far side of a grassy shoulder.
we walked right through. “Don’t be afraid,
they’re only cows.” “I’m telling you,
over there, no, on the right, there’s one
with balls, where…” “Speed up,
she’s right behind us!” And in the evening,
her panties were tangled with the devil’s in
laughter and the smell of straw, life
danced like a vertigo of stars but
only water never forgets its course
and in the city, after midday, there are
no more cows: she goes by
slowly, that lady, at a distance of years
without recognizing and passes by! While there’s
honking at l’Opéra because a bus driver
is weeping in the gutter; you’re left to quibble
about memories like some excommunicate, plunge
your nose in your Spaten, then
write this right away, what’s left of it
is more fragile than a spider’s house
but you must feel as if any passer-by
could get your table hurled at his jaw.
Hédi Kaddour (Tunis, 1945) is one of the French writers currently designated as the new lyrical poets, a somewhat misleading name for a heterogeneous group that began releasing work through smaller publishing houses halfway through the 1980s and went on to appear with the major ones. Kaddour’s debut collection of poetry, Le chardon mauve, was published in 1987 by Ipomée. His breakthrough came two years later with his first book for Gallimard, La fin des vendanges, which received exceptionally favourable reviews. Kaddour, who is a university professor of French literature, is mainly interested in those poets of the great European tradition who have found their own way of “reducing the unified song of the nightingale to silence by deserting the place of the poet”. Currently Kaddour is concentrating on prose, and he was awarded the Prix Goncourt du Premier Roman for his novel Waltenberg (2005).