The Hiddenness of the World

Gerard Martin
90 pages (2003); 542KB download
BOA Editions; ISBN: 1-929918-33-X

DESCRIPTION

Poems by Gerard Martin translated with an introduction by Bertrand Mathieu. The title of Martin's book — La Derobee du Monde — offers a clue, albeit an ambivalent one. I found his use of the word derobee virtually untranslatable, as difficult to render as some of the most abstrruse words in Rimbaud's works which I'd translated years earlier. The word "derobee" is one of those French words fraught with shadings of meaning. Its first is cognate with our English infinitive to rob. A derobee could thus be a theft — the robbing or robbery of the world. But when a thief steals something, that things disappears from the sight of its rightful owner. It becomes invisible, as it were. Hidden. Consequently, derobee came to mean hiddenness...