CARNAC

The ninth in the Contemporary French Poets series, continues the recent trend of enlisting working poets as translators, with parallel translation rendered by Irish poet Montague (who began and completed the project in a fit of passion and then polished it for 20 years). Guillevic was born in the town of Carnac, in southern Brittany, and grew up at a time when standard French, not local dialects, was taught in the public schools. The few words of Breton he uses—"dolmen" (table stone) and "menhir" (long stone)—deal with the prehistoric site at Carnac. Though an intellectual heir to French Surrealism and the postwar movements of film noir, Theater of the Absurd, and Structuralism (not to mention the dogmatism of the French Communist Party), Guillevic sets forth on his own tack, avoiding what are essentially urban artistic and ideological sensibilities in favor of the toughness and self-reliance which comprise the rural Breton attitude and which form the backbone of this work. Guillevic is a pantheistic Romantic, declaring that there can be "no poetry without sacredness." But the homage he pays is not to the megaliths and their human architects; it is to the monolithic sea that he addresses his verse. "Without you, ocean, they would have done nothing at Carnac." At times humorous, at others solemn, the poet weaves his leitmotifs into language wholly appropriate to the task, in words both primitive and powerful.

A fine translation of a beguilingly simple work. The effects Guillevic achieves are cumulative—geologically slow, but also imposing.