WHITE PINE PRESS
an independent literary publisher
In Search of a Face - Aurélia Lassaque, translated by Madeleine Campbell
$18.00, ISBN 978-1-945680-81-6 Library of Congress Control Number: 2024939693
Originally written in French and Occitan, this narrative poem unfolds at a time that precedes Homer’s tale. Explaining why She has no name, author Aurélia Lassaque tells us “her name is unknown, for her story has been subsumed in his story and the rewritings of history”. But although ‘She’ has no name, Aurélia gives her a voice in Occitan, through which we re-encounter perennial themes of love and abandonment, war and separation, and the loss of identity they engender. An echo of formal Greek poïesis, at a time before drama, song and poetry were separated, this text was conceived as much for the stage as for the page. It comprises eight Cantos with prose poems in Occitan, while a third voice adopts in French the role of the chorus in ancient classical drama.
While Ulysses roams the seas, ‘She’ roams the territory of her memory, grapples with its impostor nostalgia, is driven to the brink of madness by the relentless materiality of absence, age and regret. Time is stretched by waiting in perpetuum for her lover’s return in the rarefied echo chamber of Elle/Ela’s memory, while elements of space are sparsely sketched out, as in a dream. This poignant rewrite of an archetypal story, at once highly intimate and universal in its reach, explores the toll that war and separation take on those who leave and those who are left behind: “Give me a name, Ulysses/give me a name so that I can wait for you”.
“Aurélia Lassaque’s wonderfully spare and potent stanzas prove to be the perfect form for a feminist reimagining of a time right before the events described in The Odyssey. Like Emily Wilson’s recent translation of Homer’s great epic, the poems of In Search of a Face create space for a woman, for a woman’s experiences of love and of longing, thereby creating space in ancient history and myth for all women. Here, through the voice of this unnamed woman (“She”), the voice of Ulysses, and a choral voice, we learn truths about the intimate, human costs of war. As dramatic as it is poetic, In Search of a Face is a necessary book for our present historical moment.”
—Gail Wronsky
“In Search of a Face, Aurélia Lassaque’s inventive narrative poem, both modern and timeless, revisits Homer’s ancient myth through dialogues like intertwined songs between Ulysses and the nameless She, where they echo and haunt one another. Originally composed in French and Occitan and unfolding across eight cantos, these poignant, remarkable poems explore themes of identity, memory, abandonment, love, war, and loss. Beautifully translated by Madeleine Campbell, at once earthy and otherworldly, In Search of a Face ushers the reader into a liminal world, “on the edge of memory / at the blue hour / in the fold of a wave.””
–Hélène Cardona, author of Life in Suspension
“A shape-shifting, life-reflecting triple-take on Ulysses by a brilliantly bilingual performance artist and her equally brilliant English translator, one that provides a time-worthy addition to the splendid gallery of modernist and postmodernist reworkings of this ever influential Homeric epic. Poetry rises from these pages like a potpourri of rare herbs and spices from some secret garden of delight, dismay, and abandonment planted centuries ago.”
—Steve Bradbury, translator of Hsia Yü's Salsa
Aurélia Lassaque (b. 1983) is a bilingual poet who composes in French and Occitan, the language of the medieval troubadours. She is a leading contemporary voice in Occitan and her work had been translated into a dozen languages. She is the author of several collections including: Dawn of Wolves, Solstice, the Call of Janus and For the Salamanders to Sing. A previous book of her work in English, Solstice and Other Poems was published in 2012. She lives in the village of Autoire in the south of France.
Madeleine Campbell is a freelance translator and transdisciplinary researcher at Edinburgh University (Scotland). Her translations of Francophone Maghrebi poets have been published in several magazines. Her translations from this collection have appeared in Poetry at Sangam, on the Poetry International Festival website (Rotterdam), in Poems from the Edge of Extinction and The Arkansas International (2020). Her translation of Lassaque’s short story ‘Whalesong’ appeared in Asymptote (2020). Madeleine’s edited books on intersemiotic and experiential translation challenge traditional notions of literary translation through the embodied perspective of practitioners working in a range of media.