Documentation Swiss literatures

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[ book tip by Literatur Schweiz ] Compiled from two separate works (Nos voix seulement dormaient and Si vivre est tel, the latter named after the line of a poem by Saint-John Perse), this collection of poems is the crowning achievement of Monique Laederach's (1938-2004) poetic oeuvre, which began with L’étain, la source in 1970. The themes of the Neuchâtel-born writer and translator's work glow white-hot through her cascades of highly rhythmic, almost epic verse, peopled with the proud voices of women standing up to an inbuilt age-old oppression.

« Sur chaque mot la blessure d’un caillou sur lequel / la langue a buté, et non seulement la langue  : / toute raison – / couloirs rouges du dedans, viscères, froissements / de lymphes et de muscles, / seule mémoire d’ailleurs, et d’avant, dans le spasme / de l’interdit (…) ».
(On each word the wound left by a stone on which/ the tongue has tripped, and not just the tongue: / all reason – / red corridors of within, viscera, wrinkles / of lymph and muscle, / the only memory of elsewhere, and before, in the spasm, of the forbidden (…).)

(Pierre Lepori, transl. by Andrea Mason Willfratt)

[ Favourite quote ] « Seulement, dit-elle : moi, j’étais méchante.

Déjà dans le ventre de ma mère
une petite graine volubile et méchante… »

[ book info ] Laederach, Monique: Si vivre est tel. . (original language: French) If Life is Such. L’Age d’Homme, Lausanne, 1997 . ISBN: 2-8251-1088-4.