Honor to the vié mèss
To th’ol mores
Honor to the priceless to the salutary
Tokens of posterity
To them my infinite piety
To us, watching the world In “striking shorthand” Headless
Escaped with h’ head Like so in full-mid’dee sun he says
In full-mid’dee madness As expected
Lost lòss consciousness th’ big-big zange dèkdèk th’ great good-angel gone coocoo
Th’ mid’dee espritheaves
The first translation of Martinican poet Monchoachi’s work into English, Liberamerica presents a world full of ancestors and other creatures, a liminal space between languages, life and death, male and female, land and water, body and spirit. A territory of rituals and relations brought into being within the dynamic linguistic multiverse for which Monchoachi is best known. Liberamerica — an excerpt from part one of Monchoachi’s two-volume collection, Lémistè (Partition noire et bleue) [‘Mistry (Black and Blue Partition)] — is an archipelago of throats powering a flood of voices, sonically saturating and bursting through limitations of standard language.
Liberamerica is #14 in the Señal series for contemporary Latin American poetry in bilingual editions.
Writer, poet, and translator Monchoachi was born in 1946 on the island of Martinique. He is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Prix Carbet de la Caraïbe et du Tout-Monde and the Prix Max Jacob. In 2007 he founded the Lakouzémi project, an annual gathering of writers, dancers, performers, and activists—together they vivify history and generate meaningful, actioned community. Martinican creole works include Dissidans (1980), Bèl-bèl zobèl (1983), and translations of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot and Endgame (2002). His French works include L’espère-geste (2002) and Lémistè (2012). Liberamerica (UDP, 2020) is his first collection of poems in English translation.
Hartland asserts that what resides on the page is not static but something plural, “polyglossic chant-songs.” They translate, then, with ears attuned to the sonic and cultural tensions between Kreyol, French and English—and eyes ready to enact the poem’s play with orthography and experimentation alike. What balances on the page—a kind of music—is poetry at its most fluid, situated dynamically on the axes of life and death, humanity and divinity, masculinity and femininity.
AM Ringwalt
[Monchoachi] has completely renewed our vision of the Creole language—the way we read it, practice it, defend it. He has reshaped the relationship of this language to French, and has explored the blossoming of an unheard speech, its explosion into life, which we become witness to in [‘Mistry].
Patrick Chamoiseau
Patricia Hartland is a poet and translator. Their translations of Monchoachi’s BLACK AND BLUE PARTITION and Liberamerica are forthcoming from The Operating System and Ugly Duckling Presse, respectively, in 2020.
ISBN: 978-1-946433-68-8
Chapbook
Saddle-stitched. 40 pp, 5.25 x 8.25 in
Publication Date: December 15 2020
Distribution: Asterism Books (US)
Series: Señal #14