Near Belchatev

by Geneviève Huttin

translated by Bradford Gray Telford

An image soothing
as in a poem by Hölderlin
the one mirrored in a lake

as Trakl and his sister
  who met and kissed in that mirror
    you and I will meet up on a road

you bearing the lute of our fathers
  and someone will offer us food
    and someone else will open a book

and cut out black letters for each one of the lost
and we will, together, devour each tiny black letter

straight ahead our destination:
  a field, golden-yellow, engulfs the small
    Polish church
      on the road where, at twilight, your father was born.

 

A producer for France-Culture, poet and essayist Geneviève Huttin is the author of L’histoire de ma voix (2004); Paris, litanie des cafés (1991), and Seigneur! (1981). In America her work has most recently appeared in Lyric Review and Poetry.

Bradford Gray Telford, educated at Princeton and Columbia, has published poems, translations, and essays in many journals, with new work forthcoming in American Literary Review, Diner, and Eclipse. He is currently translating Geneviève Huttin’s The Story of My Voice and is poetry editor of Gulf Coast. (5/2005)