Joyce Mansour (1928-1986) is finally having a moment. Last summer, City Lights published the career-spanning Emerald Wounds, translated by Emilie Moorhouse and edited by Garrett Caples. And today is the publication date for World Poetry’s C. Francis Fisher translation, In the Glittering Maw, the first English edition to focus on Mansour’s later works. That’s two selected poems in less than a year, when the previous English collection, The Essential Poems and Writings of Joyce Mansour (Black Widow), was published in 2008 and preceded by just a few stand-alone English translations in anthologies and periodicals. Not to mention that much of her work is out of print in France.

Born in England to Syrian-Jewish parents, Mansour grew up in Egypt. Exiled as a result of the Suez Crisis of 1956, she and her family settled in Paris, where she moved in surrealist circles. A native English speaker, she published her poetry in French and collaborated with a range of artists and writers. As both Fisher and Moorhouse note, she put her own distinctive stamp on the heavily male surrealist movement, using its tools to fashion spare, subversive poems of startling power.

‍TBR is delighted to publish a selection of poems from Emerald Wounds and In the Glittering Maw, and to bring Caples, Fisher, and Moorhouse into conversation, to discuss the pleasures and difficulties of translating this seductive, bracing poet. -clr

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Garrett Caples: I was turned on to Joyce Mansour through surrealist channels, specifically by Philip Lamantia, when I was a young poet. I met Ted Joans; I knew a couple people who knew Mansour when she was a young poet and she was somewhat present at City Lights. She was well known there and as a result I thought she was better known in France than she turned out to be. I had wanted to do a Joyce Mansour book since I first started editing books, but I didn’t have a translator or a budget to hire one; when I saw Emilie had started doing it, I just reached out directly to her and was like, “Do you want to try and do a book? Let’s do a book.” So I thought I would start by asking you each to briefly recount your first encounter with the work. 

Emilie Moorhouse: Sure. I guess it was in 2017; I was enrolled in an MFA in creative writing and I was going to be taking a literary translation workshop. I’m quite fluent in French so I thought it would be an interesting exploration. But I didn’t have in mind anybody to translate. I was sort of overwhelmed by the choice that was in front of me in terms of the French literary, how do you say...? 

GC: Patrimony? 

EM: Yes. I was stumped as to where to even begin. That’s when #MeToo went viral and like many people I was completely captivated and horrified by it. That really started to inform my mission with respect to this translation workshop. I was like, “Okay, I need to be translating the voice of a woman.” I was also interested in looking at a woman from the past whose voice was controversial, shocking, unsettling, and maybe because of that I’d never heard of her. I found a few blogs that had like one or two poems by Joyce Mansour. I was immediately struck by her poems and also, again, I was surprised — although I shouldn’t have been surprised — having received an education in French and having been exposed to surrealism and French poets, I was like, “I can’t believe this name isn’t familiar to me at all.” I managed to get my hands on probably one of the last copies of the 2014 edition of her now out-of-print collected works and I immediately connected with her work. I started learning about her life, which I also found absolutely fascinating. So, it was a gradual process but I would say it was sparked by the #MeToo Movement.  

GC: Meanwhile, when it seemed like no one was interested in Joyce Mansour, Catherine, you were already working on a translation. So, tell us how you encountered Joyce Mansour. 

C. Francis Fisher: Happily. I first came across her when I was doing my MFA at Columbia and I was in a class with Alan Gilbert, a great poet and great teacher. 

GC: He’s a buddy of mine. I’ve known him twenty, thirty years.

CFF: He’s amazing. I don’t even know if he knows I’m working on this book; I have to tell him. In his class, Avant-Garde Poetry, we read Poems for the Millennium, edited by Pierre Joris and Jerome Rothenberg, and it included just a smattering of poems by Mansour, three or four, I think, translated by Molly Bendall. I read these poems originally in English and I was totally floored by them, similar to Emilie: there’s something about her voice, whether it be in English, or the original, that is just so different from what anybody else is doing. For me, not so much the #MeToo Movement, but this idea that the range of emotion that women have is just so large. She’s somebody who uniquely allows for that; women are not to be put on a pedestal, are not solely givers, or reduced to this role of mother or wife. No, they’re also violent. They have these all-encompassing desires in the same way men do. That idea, that she opens the emotional range possible for women, is what really drew me to her work. And, that she took surrealism, which in certain ways was dominated by men, and she did this totally other thing with it. Conventional surrealism wasn’t interested in the corporeal since it existed in a dreamlike, disembodied state. This was one of the ways she disrupted traditional surrealism — introducing the bodily. She used the tools of surrealism to her own ends. I love that, as well.

GC: She’s far-and-away the most important new surrealist poet of the post-Second World War period. The only other new surrealist poets Breton said were on her level were Jean-Pierre Duprey and Malcolm de Chazal. Duprey hasn’t really had much in the way of English translation, though de Chazal’s Sense Plastique appeared in English in 2021 from Wakefield. But it’s interesting that something that was considered a very sexist, male movement, after the war emerges with its most important new voice as female. It’s evidence that surrealism responded to the times. It wasn’t just a rigid set of dogmas, or what have you. 

About what year roughly did you discover her? 

CFF: That would have been 2021. So, after I fell in love with these translations in English, I went looking for the original French. The library at Columbia has most of her books, and so I dove into the French and I was really, really just so excited by it. I looked at a lot of the translations and decided that first of all, a lot of the later work had not been translated into English at all and that some of the existing volumes in translation, like the Black Widow Essential Poems and Writings, were hard to find — I wanted to bring these poems into English for a larger readership. 

GC: The Black Widow book translated by Serge Gavronsky, his agenda is not necessarily to accurately put forward the poet he picks; it’s like he’s trying to make a new poem and the person he translates is a premise for doing that. I wanted something that was Joyce Mansour, as close as one can get given the limitations of translation.

We know her native language is English and that she only starts to speak in French as an adult, with her second husband, Sam Mansour. Did you find any artifacts of the fact that she was not a native speaker when you were doing the translation? Were there things that seemed peculiar to you because of that? I don’t have anything mind, but I’m curious. 

EM: I’m not sure if this is English coming through in French but one of the things I find very interesting about her French is that she’s very sparse. She’s to the point. That’s not a typical French style of speaking, of writing, so I feel that her English brain is working there in the sparsity of her work. There’s so much weight to every line of her poems, there’s nothing you can cut because every word has so much power behind it. It’s like bare-balls emotion, I guess you could say. And such strong imagery. Is that an influence of English? I personally think so. I think that’s one thing that made it so enjoyable to translate into English.  

CFF: I love this question. I thought about this a lot. I mean, there’s the inescapable fact that if you’re not writing in your native language, the language itself is more estranged from you. I think some of the directness Emilie was picking up on… French style can be quite flowery: long phrases, syntactically complicated. That is not Mansour’s style at all. I think the syntax in particular is sort of English and that adds to the strangeness and yeah, sparsity. 

GC: It seems like when you’re outside of your native language every word automatically has more weight to it. You take the words in isolation more than when you’re speaking like we are speaking now, not even thinking about what we’re going to say; words just come up. But doing it in a different language calls for something more deliberate.  

CFF: I think that’s true. A French friend was telling me that when someone catcalls her in English, it doesn’t bother her as much as when it happens in French. [laughter] Because you don’t have the same level of associations. I wonder if, yes there’s more weight, in that you’re more selective, you’re thinking harder about the language itself, but also there’s maybe a permissiveness that can happen when you’re writing in a language other than your mother tongue. I think that question is very pertinent with the sort of things Mansour was writing about, such as feminine desire and sexuality. It’s a really interesting question.  

EM: She’s very playful. She’ll pick up on French expressions and turn them around. I was looking at some poems just before logging on and one of them — there's an expression in French of a “lead sun” to describe the crushing heat of the sun. The English equivalent is “beating sun.” She seems to combine both expressions when she writes “Soleil sur tambour de plomb,” bringing in the English “beating sun” by inserting the French word for drum, so I translated it to “Sun on beating drum.” Rather than going for a literal translation, I went with translating the expression. I think it goes back to that point of permissiveness — she allowed herself to reinvent expressions, which maybe French language purists would be like, “Oh no.” But she’s given herself permission to do it and that’s what I love about her.

GC: She said something to the effect that when she started writing poetry, she wrote in English and then when she switched to French, she was like, “I don’t even know who that person was.” As bilingual people, do you feel different in different languages? Do you feel like another person almost, inhabiting one language or the other? I don’t really know because I’m not bilingual! 

EM: Yeah. Definitely. I’ve thought about that a lot; mostly I write creatively in English and I’m kind of blocked doing it in French, even though French is my first language. I think it comes from my education. I was educated in French and English and I was taught grammar rules in French, I was not taught grammar in English. So, I feel like I’m allowed to be more playful in English; I don’t have the permission that Joyce Mansour gave herself in French, which I also thought was really cool when I came to her poetry: this is someone who is breaking the rules but it works. There’s many differences in terms of who I am in French and who I am in English, but I do feel I have more freedom in English, whereas perhaps she felt she had more freedom writing in French.  

CFF: There’s no question that one is a different person in whichever language they are speaking. I learned French in a school setting, starting at the age of five, and I lived in different parts of France over the years. I guess the way it felt to me is that I had multiple places to explore in terms of modes of expression. I wonder, thinking about Mansour, whether that was how she felt? She’s coming out of a time where a lot of people were defecting from English to other languages. I’m thinking about Beckett writing in French. When it comes to surrealism we often think the best way to access our subconscious is in our native language — the way she turned that on its head is interesting.  

GC: I talked to a friend of mine named Kit Schluter who has translated Marcel Schwob. Schwob is a late nineteenth-century French symbolist and you don’t just put that into today’s street English. Kit hit on this American writer named Clark Ashton Smith, a late example of an American symbolist who then became a kind of pulp sci-fi/fantasy writer. It was an interesting analogue to Schwob: it was perfectly comprehensible to contemporary English but it had a certain elevation that was from the fantasy genre, a sort of romantic style of speaking, say. Mansour has a very specific sound when I read a translation of her. I was wondering about your overall sense of her sound and if you had any analogue, like, “This reminds me of this thing in English.”

CFF: Related to why Emilie and I were both so excited about her, in some ways I felt free of that because she doesn’t sound like anybody else. This is something I’ve been thinking about a lot because I also write my own poems. What has Mansour taught me as a poet? I think it is that permissiveness. I felt that even in translating her, I had space to make her sound the way she sounds in French, which is not like anyone else. So I wasn’t necessarily looking for an analogue. I don’t know Emilie, if you felt differently?

EM: I was more thinking about what is her voice, and how does that sound? What is the tone? And, it shifts. Sometimes she’s angry, sometimes she’s ironic and funny, and sometimes she’s vulnerable and sad. That was the sound, the sense of her that I had, when I was translating her, and the main thing that inspired my translation even though there were a lot of other things that I was looking at such as her imagery, the various sound devices she uses, the many inversions. In my introduction I talk about how translation is a form of interpretation. It’s like being an actor: you’ve got these lines and you deliver them. In my mind I always had this strong sense of her voice guiding me when I translated her, and I think the best way to describe her voice is revolt.

GC: That’s kind of what I was trying to work my way toward in that question: how do you capture your sense of a writer’s tone in a global sense?

EM: There’s just so much power in her voice. It was that power that I was trying to translate, really.  

GC: Tell me a little bit about selection. When Emilie brought me what she’d already worked on, the things I requested were to fill out the volume, to try to get an arc of the whole career. I was wondering, Catherine, if you had the same desire? You said you were drawn to the late work, which is interesting because it’s more neglected than the earlier work. 

CFF: I knew that there was this lack, basically, in the English of what we had of her and obviously I knew what you all were working on so it mattered to me not necessarily so much that my particular volume had the entire arc of her work but that the entire arc would be available in English. So that was why I was interested in the later work at first. But then as I read more and more of her poetry I became interested in the later work because it gets much wilder, it gets much darker, even. And formally, it gets more experimental. She completely gets rid of all punctuation. It’s devastating that she spent so much of her life writing about the feminine body and feminine desire and lost her life to breast cancer. That, for whatever reason, just touched me as an idea, looking at those later poems within that lens. And within that, selecting poems is a lot about what the poem reveals to you. There were poems I read that I was like, “I can’t translate this.” With Mansour it was usually that I didn’t understand what in her logic was holding the images together. There were some poems where I was like, “This is a beautiful poem, there's a lot going on that I love, but I can’t understand what’s holding it together.” I’d have to let that poem go.  

GC: I wanted to ask both of you: tell me about a moment that was a must have, like “I need this poem because this one really speaks to me and I understand what’s going on with it.”

EM: I like this question… I often go back to “Rhabdomancie”; in English it’s “Dowsing” from Rapaces, or Birds of Prey. There are so many things going on in this poem. It’s an ironic poem that’s making fun of how to be a good wife, these how-to articles that were appearing in the fifties; she turns it on its head and talks about basically poisoning the husband who’s neglecting her. It’s written like an instruction, but she’s also referring to witchcraft, so there’s this touch of dark magic. The first part of this poem she’s angry, but she’s also being funny, and then in the second part she’s still very angry but much more vulnerable. I just love her reference to magic and witchcraft, which punctuates so much of her poetry.

GC: It’s funny seeing all those different things going on at once and seeing their inter-relations.

CFF: Yeah, one of the things that I always love in her work is a juxtaposition of — it’s not exactly high and low, but it’s almost like, the beautiful and the crass. She has amazing images and then she’s also so invested in the body and all of its foibles. It’s as if with these two obsessions the poems almost have to be this way. I’m thinking in particular of a poem that I’ve called “Fragment of a Call”: she had this line about, “my misconstrued phrases and their satin shoes,” which I just love. This idea that you are trying to communicate with somebody and the phrases are all dressed up in satin shoes, they’re doing their best, but they just can’t quite get there. And then the poem ends with this image of a drunkard named Duty vomiting. I feel like that’s just so indicative of what she’s doing in terms of the high-minded and the crass. 

GC: That’s great, that’s great. The whole bodily interest in her work makes for its own issue specifically related to translation. One of the reviews we got for Emerald Wounds, somebody was like this particular slang word would have been the way she referred to penis, or she might have had access to this word from reading the Marquis de Sade. It was all a little specious, to be honest. But, given the very nature of people’s discomfort with being explicit about bodily functions and sexual functions, there ends up being tons of words for these things because they are all euphemisms. How do you make choices in terms of trying to find a specific English word that has the resonance of a particular French word? 

CFF: So, I think that this is a thing that is just as hard when you are writing yourself as when you are translating. I think in particular about an interview I was reading recently with Sharon Olds in The Paris Review where she talks about how in writing about the body we are stuck between two bad choices, the profane and the medical. Neither is the right choice. And that’s when you’re only writing in English. So later, trying to translate from the French and find something — I was talking to Chris Clarke earlier this week about his translation of Raymond Queneau’s novel The Skin of Dreams into English and he was saying you have to find something that pops the same way. People use medical terms in a very common way in French, in a way that we don’t in English. I can’t just take the medical sounding Latinate word from the French and translate it into the English because it has a different valence in the French. So that was something that I definitely ran into in looking for the right words. I think it’s a problem of language itself and our societal discomfort with not just sexuality, but particularly women’s sexuality. That discomfort was something Mansour was particularly fascinated by. And so, it was hard. 

EM: Definitely; this is one of the hardest things to translate because it is true, we do have two bad choices. 

GC: Yeah. And we also don’t have the generic “sex” that French has to refer to either male or female genitalia. That’s a huge difference!

EM: Right, which is also like gender neutral. There’s a lot of things that she can do that we in English are struggling to do. So I chose different words. And again, the thing that dictated my choices was the tone. Like in “Dowsing,” I use the word “cock” because it fits her angry tone. But yeah, it still ends up being a choice between the scientific term or the vulgar term. 

GC: It’s funny to just think of the valences of all these words and then the subtle differences. I didn’t interfere with your translation, Emilie, that much because you know French. I do not know French, but I remember just thinking about tonal things. I remember one exchange we had when you had the word “butt” and I’m like, don’t you think maybe this would be “ass” coming from her? And at first you were like, “Yeah, maybe that’s more it,” but then you went back and said, “No, that’s too strong.” I think you settled on “bum.” It was much more like a good equivalent. 

EM: “Ass” just didn’t feel like it fit there according to the context of the poem. 

GC: It’s amazing that each of these words: “butt,” “ass,” and “bum,” have completely distinct feels to them. 

EM: And probably the word would have been “fesses” in French, which is a relatively neutral term. There is no neutrality in English to the word. It’s either cold and detached or scandalous, vulgar... I guess it’s a reflection of the culture and our attitudes towards our bodies, bodily functions — our, what’s the word, discomfort. 

GC: She very much uses that discomfort toward the reader. I’ve never seen a poet who pees so much in her work. You know what I mean? And it’s often highly sexualized, too. There’s an erotic valence to the way she uses bodily function and that’s certainly not considered an acceptable valence in English.

CFF: I don’t think that in French either it was acceptable, at all. You read some of the old reviews of her work and they’re pretty hilarious. The line about, don’t give her access to the morgue she’ll wake the corpses, it’s so funny. I think we’re using it as a blurb on my book. [laughter] Nobody needs to know that it was said in the most derisive, vindictive, angry sort of way; it’s a great line, and I agree. I’m just coming at it from a different angle. 

GC: It seems like part of her agenda, insofar as she has an overarching agenda, is to complicate those neat categories and, you know, the fact that excretion is also a genital phenomenon for the body as much as sexual. She wants to emphasize rather than deemphasize that, it seems. It’s one of the more striking parts of her oeuvre. 

EM: In one of her biographies, there was an anecdote about how she loved to tell a story from when she lived in Egypt as a child: she had a young friend and they would escape for the afternoon to go hang around the pyramids and she was always talking about “pissing on the pyramid.” [laughter] I think she liked to introduce these unexpected juxtapositions, creating discomfort. Because obviously when she published her first collection of poems in 1953, people in both her Egyptian social life and her French literary reception, they were like, “What is this?” But she found the surrealists, and they embraced her. From then on it was kind of like, “Alright, I’m going to keep confronting these fragile social norms of propriety.” 

GC: Even though there’s a desire to shock, it’s very playful. “Husband neglecting you? … Piss in his soup when he lies down happily next to you” — it’s funny. I’ve never seen any poet quite work with sexuality and the bodily in the same way as Joyce Mansour. 

CFF: I really responded to how honest that felt. Her writing about sexuality and the body is so needed; it feels so lived. I love this line, it’s one of my favorite poems that’s in both of our collections ... “Beneath the Central Tower,” the poem she dedicates to Matta, ends with “It would have been so luxurious/To have the power to piss in the street.” I’ve been there. I’ve been at the side of the bar with my asshole male friend and thought, “Fuck, if only I could pee in the street as easily as you could.” Yes it’s shocking, yes it’s new, but also there’s a resonance that I think is so true to a lot of what is happening around sexuality, around desire, and around the bodily in her work. 

GC: You don’t get the impression that she’s shocking to be cruel; she’s more like, “Loosen up! Get over it!” It’s a kind of therapeutic shock. 

CFF: Right, I don’t think it’s shocking somebody for the sake of shocking them. There’s no other way to write these poems. This is just what had to be written. But there is this larger affect of shock, or disgust, which is to pull the reader out of everyday life and to reanimate the experience of living itself. Estranging daily life reanimates it, forces the reader not to take it for granted — to bring it back to this question of what does it mean for her to write in French? Estrangement. 

EM: Yeah. In an interview she said that the losses of both her mother and first husband that she experienced in her teenage years, the lesson she took from that was that life is not as rosy as one might think. I think she’s kind of bringing that back, the duality of life and death. Beauty and disgust. People can be shocked when they see the ugly side. But for her, it’s just like,“This is what life is.” You can’t just pretend it doesn’t exist. 

GC: So, maybe to wrap it up, let’s just think of what the future for Joyce Mansour is, in English and French. I was a little shocked that most of the main body of her work right now in French is not in print. The Oeuvres complètes that Emilie describes from 2014... I got my hands on the earlier edition from 1991, Prose & poésie, which has a great cover by Roberto Matta. The trim size is too narrow and it’s a thick book, so it’s very hard to manipulate, but I happened to just find it randomly on a table in Saint-Nazaire, France, just walking around. So, it was meant to come to us. Because we had both editions, we saw that the 2014 edition is just a scan of the 1991 edition. And, it’s a bad scan; there are lots of small errors. My hope is that someone’s gonna redo her in French, that people taking notice of her in English will have some effect on her French reception. I don’t know if that’s a foolish thing to hope for or not. What do either of you think about where she’s at right now in French literature? 

EM: I think the European press that has covered our book has been like a radio station, and Shakespeare and Company podcast. I don’t know of any French media coverage of the book. I think the anglophone world is somehow ready for her. France, I’m not sure. They’re quite stubborn in their attitudes and it takes them a while to get up to speed. Right now, I don’t necessarily see that. It would be great if somebody could become her champion in France; I know her family has made a lot of efforts to get people to know her better in France but the fact that her books remain out of print says it all.

GC: In a way it’s more of an uphill climb because there are prejudices against her in France for being, say, a foreigner versus a native-born French poet, and being a woman. It’s not quite the same blockage for an English-language audience. You’re right, we started this project at the beginning of #MeToo and I was in France when some of that hit, “squeal on your pig” [#BalanceTonPorc], as they called it over there. But it feels like it’s come full circle now with this whole defense of Gérard Depardieu, when the guy’s clearly a fucking monster. You know? The equivalent would be if a bunch of people went on record to say, “Leave Harvey Weinstein alone.” 

EM: Or if the president of the United States went on record to say, “He’s a good guy” —

GC: Right. Macron said he was “a great admirer” of Depardieu —

EM: — “he’s an all-American guy, so...leave him alone.” A lot of female artists came out against the #MeToo movement in France when it hit, like, “No, no, this is flirting, what are you talking about?” Like, those are the American Anglo-Saxon, how do you say — ?

GC: Prudery.

EM: — “We are liberated here.” Right? And this is not liberation.

CFF: French feminists and American feminists have always been so different. I do think that this discrepancy has to do with why Mansour is poised for a certain popularity in the U.S. that maybe she’s not in France. And the anglophone world, for better or for worse, is in a time of heavy identity politics. An American, or an English, or a Canadian audience might say, “Oh, a woman of color, I really want to read this.” I don’t know that that plays in exactly the same way in France. I do think we have to be careful. There’s also an over-exotification that can happen, like, “Oh this is so interesting, she’s a Jewish Arab”; these are the terms that we sell things in now. You know, you have to. So there’s a little bit of exotification that plays well with American audiences. I think that’s part of why she’s poised to have this renaissance here that just plays differently than it does in France.

In terms of looking forward, I’m working on her prose, which she had a big body of, as well. She was a prolific writer. So, my hope is that we’ll have a wider range of genres in English in which we can revel in her work. 

GC: Yeah! Yeah. If it’s impossible in France now, it’s maybe possible here. Possible in English. 

EM: We’ve just got to persevere and push forward. If one day they want to get on board, good for them, but in the meantime we have to spread the word about Mansour to those that are interested. I think right now that is the anglophone world. 

GC: I always have an idea when I pick a project for City Lights that it’s something that potentially has a broader appeal, and so, it’s not that I didn’t think it was possible, but I was astonished at just how ready people were for Mansour. It’s been long-listed for the Griffin Poetry Prize, which is a first for anything I’ve edited. The book got a lot of attention in terms of write-ups and we had to reprint it almost immediately, because it did better-than-expected poetry numbers.

CFF: That’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot. Part of it is that surrealism is going through a revival moment. I think it has to do with a political situation similar to the one the first wave of surrealism came up through. We’re living through another kind of totalitarian moment. And I think people are excited about surrealism in general but also in particular a voice in surrealism that maybe they haven’t heard before. 

GC: It’s finding the people who haven’t been done to death. One of the most striking writers to have appeared in this moment is Alice Rahon. That her things are in English now is amazing to me because you have to be pretty deep into surrealism to even know who she is. I turned onto her because of In Wonderland, the surrealist woman painting show that was in LA and Mexico City and Toronto, in 2012. I drove down to LA for that show and that was a total eye-opener. For years she was just a name attached to Wolfgang Paalen in accounts in English of surrealism. There is a lot more still to be done. There’s only been one translation of Valentine Penrose from the seventies... amazing poet! Also very spare, on the Éluard side of surrealism — spare, short lines rather than the Desnos/Char/Peret really thick imagery type of surrealism. There are still more surrealists out there that haven’t come through. 

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