Last stop before insomnia / Dernier arrêt avant l'insomnie
Marlene Tissot translated by Anna Jackson and Geneviève Chevallier
Seraph Press Translation Series No. 3, 2017
Marlene Tissot writes about chance encounters with people in the street, or people observed from a distance; about sleeplessness (a recurring theme); about feelings of emptiness, dispossession, anxiety, dread; about make-up, public transport, construction sites, film festivals, plastic bags; moving with astonishing speed and sleight of hand from one topic to another, often driven by associations between words, or through the combination of one saying with another, combining clichés or turns of phrase to come up with startling new combinations of images and ideas.
Anna Jackson worked with Genevieve Chevallier over one happy month in France, translating together line by line, throwing out dozens of various possible ways to translate particular phrases before finding what would come to seem the perfect, only possible solution.
Buy Last stop before Insomnia
Marlene Tissot writes about chance encounters with people in the street, or people observed from a distance; about sleeplessness (a recurring theme); about feelings of emptiness, dispossession, anxiety, dread; about make-up, public transport, construction sites, film festivals, plastic bags; moving with astonishing speed and sleight of hand from one topic to another, often driven by associations between words, or through the combination of one saying with another, combining clichés or turns of phrase to come up with startling new combinations of images and ideas.
Anna Jackson worked with Genevieve Chevallier over one happy month in France, translating together line by line, throwing out dozens of various possible ways to translate particular phrases before finding what would come to seem the perfect, only possible solution.
Buy Last stop before Insomnia
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"“the recurrent lines spreading like an infection from poem to poem … reinforce the sense that the poem is coming from the space Eliot always said was where the imagination was most free and unpredictable, the gap between sleeping and waking, even if sleep never quite takes hold (does waking)?” Michael Schmidt
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“I imagined a red carpet, a camera / modestly pulling the sheet up over my bum / lying curled up like the trigger of a gun / about to go off, acting out the scene, bang! / never been very good at playing dead / or playing alive, either"
