Some Thing Black

In 1983 Jacques Roubaud's wife Alix Cleo died at the age of 31 of a pulmonary embolism. The grief-stricken author responded with one brief poem ("Nothing"), then fell silent for thirty months.

In subsequent years, Roubaud—poet, novelist, mathematician—composed a series of prose poems, a collection that is a profound mediation on the experience of death, the devastation it brings to the lover who goes on living, and the love that remains. Despite the universality of this experience, no other writer has so devoted himself to exploring and recording the many-edged forms of grief, mourning, bewilderment, emptiness, and loneliness that attend death. No other writer has provided a kind of solace while facing with honesty and hardness the intricate ways in which the living are affected by such a loss.

Some Thing Black is an ongoing monologue from Roubaud to his wife, as death assaults the mind's failure to comprehend absence. Roubaud both refuses to and cannot surrender his wife to the past ("I always wake up in your voice, your hand, your smell"). The death, having occurred in an instant of time, goes on in him ("But inside me your death proceeds slowly, incomprehensibly"). While acknowledging "death calls for a poetry of meditation," Roubaud is enraged at the limitations of language and words to affect the biological reality. Rather, all that language can do is clarify the exactness of his grief and to recall precisely the image of her life and death. But such recollection—the sight of her dead body, her photographs, her things, the rooms they lived in—becomes a "memory infinitely torturous." And his most anguished recollection is of their making love ("These memories are the darkest of all"), and a sense of guilt for somehow not having prevented her death ("I did not save you from that difficult night").

This is a brave and honest book that does not disguise that pain of loss. Its nobility, grace, and humanity rest in its refusal to falsify death's harsh presence ("This dirty rotten life to be mixed up with death") and in its acceptance of the mind's limitations ("I do not understand"). This moving, compassionate, uncompromising book is one of the most significant works of our time. Included in this edition is a portfolio of photographs made by Roubaud's wife in 1980 entitled "If Some Thing Black."

Details

Title Some Thing Black

Author Jacques Roubaud

Translated by Rosmarie Waldrop

Title First Published 1990

Format Paperback

Nb of pages 112 p.

ISBN-10 1-56478-206-9

ISBN-13 9781564782069

Publication Date 1990

Nb of pages 112

Dimensions 5.5 x 8.5 in.

List Price $12.50

Onix Version 2.1

Reviews

Press Reviews

Times Literary Supplement

"This is a harrowing book, about the death of Jacques Roubaud's wife . . . It expresses the emotions of a real-life 'I' in a way which Roubaud's earlier poetry has not led one to expect. Even the

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blanks in the phrasing, which before served metric or rhythmic functions, suggest difficulties in breathing, perhaps sobs. Roubaud manages to write the book partly by refusing poetry, and observing its inadequacy. The starkness of a personal experience renders unacceptable the lyrical, elegiac tone, and the dignified things that one might say in such circumstances; it also makes poetry itself, the 'rhythmic register of speech,' seem a grotesque lie. The very refusal is restrained: there is no blatant mockery or angry satire, merely a desire to write verse as poor and unpleasant as the coffee Roubaud chooses to drink . . . Writing here is a physical and unwilling business, in which he learns a kind of vanity in language, as in the world. The death of the lover, as of the friend—that event so cruelly conventional in poetry—gives access to the mortality and 'emptiness' of a world, so that the title Some Thing Black names the world as well as the book. In writing about death, he also comes to accept that death is already involved in writing. To repeat his wife's name when she was alive was erotic and meaningful, whereas her name in a book is a designation as rigid as a corpse. In confronting death he realizes that the world, being mortal, is not obedient to his linguistic constructions, that the simple existence of death undermines the writer's claim to impose an order and to control reality by his 'reasons of language.' . . . It also includes the fact that, as the woman concentrates the world, so the silence of her dead body concentrates the inarticulate silence of the world. Yet, if one can speak in such terms in the face of grief, it is also the death of the loved woman that makes poetry possible . . . It is an elegy for our time, in that it rejects the heaven which opens for Beatrice and the ghosts which survive in the atheism of Hardy, and in that it explores overtly the relation between poetry and death. Roubaud asks in effect how one can write about a dead lover, how one can 'say' her—how one can get from the silence or groanings, which alone seem proper, to a work of poetry. By pursuing his hostility to poetry he discovers a language which is usable, and by continuously facing death he descends progressively further into the meaning of poetry. He has written a thoroughly modern 'love poem.'"

Library Journal

"Waldrop's fine translation is a tribute to Roubaud's rich and often lyrical meditation on death . . . [A] bold self-portrait in which the poet exposes his psyche and the struggle he endures to make the language he uses in his craft transcend its inherent limitations. Fine reading."

Asylum

"No work of recent French poetry, indeed of recent French literature, is more moving than Some Thing Black . . . [O]ne reads Some Thing Black from the first sentence on with breath

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