Robert Majzels is a translator and writer of poems, plays and novels, most recently Apikoros Sleuth (Mercury Press, 2004). Born in Montreal, Quebec, Majzels has worked as a lathe operator in a steel plant, a taxi driver, a hospital orderly and an insurance appraiser. In 1986, he graduated with an MA in English Literature from Concordia University where he subsequently taught creative writing for 13 years. From 2000 to 2002, Majzels lived and studied Chinese in Beijing, China. He won a Governor General’s Literary Award for French to English translation for Just Fine, from the French Pas Pire by France Daigle. Majzels’ play This Night the Kapo won first prize in the Dorothy Silver Playwright’s Award in 1991 and first prize in the Canadian Jewish Playwriting Competition in 1994. Robert Majzels currently teaches at the University of Calgary.
Judges’ Citation
Majzels and Moure are not masters but divine servants of the English words they so carefully bring over to us.
Over her four decades of writing and publishing poems and novels and essays-textes, Nicole Brossard has always shone an investigative light on every word that comes to her, and turned a demanding ear to each item of punctuation or notation. She sees the universe in the word for sand, and knows that it could be sable mouvant. So the translators of Nicole Brossard have to make poems we will love to read the way a carpenter loves a finished table. Majzels and Moure are not masters but divine servants of the English words they so carefully bring over to us. Inventive writers themselves, they are practiced translators who have here taken on a daunting project and succeeded beautifully.
Selected poems
by Robert Majzels
winter water blue melt backlit
life suddenly in thin chemise
steadfast
in questions and old silences
in the puzzle of proper nouns
and barking city: February
slow eyelashes that beckon to love
and spinning tops
foliage of word for word
gentleness that evades meaning
plunge into the dark
with metronome
crabs eels intestines
legs and antennae
destiny you said it
from memory
with a single verb
the thousand and one possibilities of the toe, the foot
the ankle
images in the subway glued to each other
faces pressed against the whys
the saliva the fingernails
it all goes beyond
adverbs and bones
the future the future
naked things design
audacity vertical
a woman in panties
half-spoken surrounded
by syntax and paintings
dark eyebrows
a starlet sings
an amphetamine clenched in her teeth
fire close to dying
at the edge of a forest
kiss that counts
someone standing
before an accident
of cars and fiction
under the eyelid:
time’s measuring tape
dust in equilibrium
peoples and their signatures
their faces more alive
than crabs and pigeons in the shade
of cherry trees
poetry drawn back from daring
fiction if you ask me
hazelnut: image of an old
tomb with a squirrel
a photo repeated that sparks a taste
for pleasure with a grain of salt
on the tongue
a photo repeated
a stack of selves archived
big blue armchairs
their cloth arms worn down
by memory and odours
that intoxicate. Retina,
adjust your thoughts
emergency staircase on a slant
with slow blue flung at the sky
window and woman smiling
the rust the steel, broken panes
of America the colour of graffiti
then in slow motion: tulips appear
spinal cord
strange archives
on the iron rails
of a century the mud
of a day the immensity
Sombre: night flower
or calculated shadow
brief flame: hypothesis
Feinte speak reflection
seen through glasses
all words are ribbons
reading lèvres micro
i know the answer
poems that demand we open
the fire the heart: devour me
palace and ice
parentheses ( duvet )
orange, epidermis
pillowcases
i beg of you: answer
birds pepper-coloured
a flight of silence with clouds
distant. I retrace my steps
touch here a woman’s arm
tiny algae that enter
gastronomy
blue water imbued water
always another beginning
the lemon the martini the olive
all that amuses
then came night with its lampshades
describe the light
touch tomorrow
the immense everyday furled in the iris
a morning
of found orchids
Copyright © 2007 by Robert Majzels and Erín Moure (translators), Notebooks of Roses and Civilizations by Nicole Brossard, Coach House Books
Apparition of Objects
the French written by Nicole Brossard
winter water blue melt backlit
life suddenly in thin chemise
steadfast
in questions and old silences
in the puzzle of proper nouns
and barking city: February
slow eyelashes that beckon to love
and spinning tops
foliage of word for word
gentleness that evades meaning
plunge into the dark
with metronome
Copyright © English translation Robert Majzels and Erin Moure, 2007
from Apparition of Objects
the French written by Nicole Brossard
It’s fears slow and fascinating that enter life each morning at coffee time while she wonders if tomorrow there’ll be war and brusquely as she does each morning slices bread and cheese. It’s gestures of uncontrollable avidity that proliferate in the throng and its worldly febrility, its parquet fever on the trading floor and stage. It’s hesitations, heart cries that crisscross broad avenues full of shade and dust that attract and make us think of our legs and elbows, our knees too when desire bumps and bounces words and feelings upward, it’s simple things with prefixes like cyber or bio that hold thoughts fast, float them a moment till we believe them aquatic and marvellous. It’s certainties that in tiny increments of dust and light are soon mixed with our tears. It’s inexplicable feelings made of small hurts strung over long years and vast horizons, it’s blues ideas that settle in where the happiness of existing threatens to take the breath away or to lodge itself in the throat like an instrument of fervour. It’s glimmers of intoxications impossible to look at for long, thoughts so precise that engage us beyond shade and wind, far beyond crude words, so noisy so terribly close to silence that the world all around seems suddenly engulfed in high seas and continual rustling like the music in our heads that in one stroke of the bow dislodges all that resists torment. It’s underlined passages, fragments of happiness that traverse the body and raise bridges all around because elsewhere and in the wild blue yonder they say there’s euphoria. It’s written down with bruises, abundance of life burst to fullness in a world and its niches of worn paths that lick at the shadow of bones.
Copyright © 2007
Soft Link 1
the French written by Nicole Brossard