Hommes Continuels. Hombres Constantes: A Facing Page French - Spanish Translation of the Poems of Jean Orizet

“Orizet’s “prose” is extremely musical, taking advantage of the rhythms inherent in language, as much in the syntax as in the cadence of each word, and in the rapture created by the friction of vowels and consonants in the interior of certain words—especially, those that name living creatures of the animal and vegetal kingdoms. But Orizet avails himself of more common figures, such as alliterations, that Virginia Santos sometimes enriches with her own. For example, when Orizet writes “je reste cet homme à narguer le futur sur les dalles polies où se meurent des lunes,” the translation says “el hombre que se burla del futuro sobre las lisas losas fúnebres donde se mueren las lunas.” Or when Orizet writes “ses yeux en billes de nacre,” Santos translates: “sus ojos como canicas de nácar.” These are examples of how the translation, instead of impoverishing itself by following the original slavishly, acquires its own poetic value by creating on top of what is written by the poet.” - Prof. Roberto González Echevarría, Yale University

“Using the prose poem, which he recognizes as the most appropriate to modernity, Orizet claims his debt to A. Bertrand, Nerval and Baudelaire as well as the German lieder; but he updates the genre through a transcultural background. His practice of this very sophisticated form is simultaneously brilliant and very accessible to a wide audience. . . . definitely one of the most original productions of contemporary French poetry, and probably one of the most appropriately suited for translation.” - Prof. Marie-Hélène Girard, Yale University

“Orizet has found a novel and original tone for describing an experience common to so many today that of the continuity of landscape and human society in what seem such widely dissimilar places as the Caribbean, China, or Europe.” - Prof. Anke Birkenmaier, Columbia University

“When [a work is translated] well, the reader comes to think that the poem, novel, or short story that he or she is reading was originally written in that language. For that to take place, the translator has to paradoxically disappear, so that if the reader thinks, for example, that Dostoyevsky wrote his novels in English, the translator has succeeded. I believe this to be the case with Prof. Santos’ translation of Orizet.” - Prof. Rolando Perez, Hunter College

Foreword by Roberto González Echevarría
Acknowledgments
1. Introducción
Un parisino en América; la traducción de Hombres constantes, de Jean Orizet
El viaje en la poética de Orizet; en la estela de Segalen
El tiempo en la poética de Orizet; entre tanto, el entretemps
2. Hombres constantes
Bibliography