Sleep’s Powers
Sleep’s Powers
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About the Book
Sleep is the loam of dreams, the material in which they grow. But it is also something more: something hidden, made obscure by the accumulation of images—a sort of grand dream which, because of its intense and manifold nature, is undecipherable. Compared to sleep, dreams offer us a free, easy, almost anodyne, show. Sleep abides from the start in the interior tissue out of which we are formed. Moments of astonishment, precious passages filled with rapid, disconnected symbols—light birds like late evening swallows—a single swallow still squawking overhead, halfway to sleep. Sleep’s Powers is funded in part by the National Endowment for the Arts.
Author
Jacqueline Risset
Born in Besançon, France in 1936, Jacqueline Risset has published many books of poetry as well as literary essays. She was one of the editors of Tel Quel, and is well-known for her translations of Dante’s Commedia (1985-90, fifth edition 2006). Her most recent book is Traduction et mémoire poétique. Dante, Scève, Rimbaud, Proust, which won the Award of the Académie Française in 2007. She teaches French literature and is President of Centro di Studi Italo-francesi at the Università degli Studi di Roma III. Sleep’s Powers was originally published in French under the title Puissances du Sommeil by Éditions du Seuil in September 1997.
Translator
Jennifer Moxley
Poet Jennifer Moxley’s collections include: Clampdown, The Line, Often Capital, The Sense Record, and Imagination Verses. In addition to her books of poetry, she has published a memoir, a volume of essays, and three books of translation from the French. More info on Moxley here.
Excerpt
SLEEP AND THE SEA
Nothing is more down-to-earth, more grounded in appearance, than a sleeping body: a breathing shard of primordial clay. Yet respiration recalls the sea, and the regular motion of the waves.
“At day’s end it wasn’t just the sea that lived for me in Albertine, but, at times, the drowsiness of the sea as it looked on the beach under a full moon … ”
“In that light her sleep became, to a certain degree, the possibility of love … She was hidden, enveloped, returned into her body … her life … exhaling her light breath toward me. I listened to the mysterious murmuring emanation, soft like an ocean zephyr, enchanted like moonlight, that was her sleep.”
Sleep, which encloses this being in her body, is moonlight on the sea, interior and exterior both. It will return in adjacent pages in different locales and forms, the way moonlight moves across summer nights creating different sky-scapes. Language imperceptibly changes: “I embarked on the sleep of Albertine.” A lightly grazed exchange, encounter.