Roland Giguère, whose book L’Age de la Parole has just received the Grand Prix littéraire of the City of Montreal, ought to be introduced to English readers. But how does one introduce a poet whose work is not yet available in English? Perhaps by making a few translations and talking about them.

Roland Giguere

The jury for the Grand Prix discussed the possibility of recommending a translation for the prizewinning book, as they had done in the past, but decided to leave the matter open. Translating poetry is a labour of love and cannot be done on order. There are several good translators working now on French poetry in Canada—Peter Miller in Toronto, F. R. Scott in Montreal, John Glassco in the Eastern Townships. Glassco is preparing an anthology with the cooperation of other poets; and Miller has translated Grandbois, Anne Hébert and Gaston Miron (the last unpublished as yet) in their entire books. There is a plan under way to translate Gilles Vigneault. So that a good deal is being done.

Roland Giguère is still a young poet (born in 1929), but he has already won a considerable reputation, standing with Gilles Hénault, Jean‑Guy Pilon, and Paul‑Marie Lapointe in his own generation. His poetry has moved through several styles, sometimes exploring the very long line, or relaxing altogether into poetic‑prose paragraphs. “Before all this variety,” writes Alain Bosquet in La Poésie Canadienne, “one might ask whether he has really found his own way.” I think that at his best he has, in the tight aesthetic poem packed with symbolic reference. It rings out with incredible music, even in phrases and single lines:

“Les lustres de décadence au ciel abimé . . .”

“et le jour vient avec sa fontaine neuve . . .”

His images are extremely rich and symbolic:

At the quarter‑moon or at hollyhock bloom

on clubs or on hearts

the wheel of fortune will fall

and the sword in the midst of the emerald plate

will share in the blood of the earth

the black pearl will fix on the day‑to‑be

rondure of hours or instants of pain

and the tiger will leap all fours into reality

the tiger, or the sacred snake,

all claws bared or poison pure

for the return to transparent origins.

This kind of thing deals with fallen man, in a world of despair and illusion, aspiring to primal innocence. A kind of return to Eden is the goal. And the present is a prison. I believe this visionary idealism becomes political, at least by implication, in some of the later poems. This is the title poem of L’Age de la parole.

An ancient wind sweeps away the hoardings

on a pot‑holed plain the buffalo is reborn

the ritual of life takes up its iron ornaments

its white arms its blades of gold

for loyal combat

The flint waits within the rock

and we lack the words

to give names to these dying suns

Tomorrow we eat the serpent head

The forked tongue and the poison swallowed

what new song will come then to enchant us?

In a poem written in 1956 Roland Giguère projected his idealism in the image of a woman of the snows, in the following poem:

Woman of everness

naked in the fields of desire

woman of love’s first gestures

in a bed of anonymity

a white night under a new moon

woman whom I haunt and nourish

woman of all my days

I write your name in great letters

on the doorways wherever I dwell.

Later, this image became the subject of his apocalyptic political poem “Adorable femme des neiges” in twelve sections. The opening reads:

We are far from here

on the roads of snow we are far

from the vigil without a morn

we are alone

and silence readies the perfect flame

in the very shadow of our wish

we belong to futures of every kind

because your reality is possible

because you are real

at the heart of eternal snows

I leave my last book

on the borders of your beauty.

This ideal image is analogous to Hubert Aquin’s rhapsodic love‑theme in the novel Prochain Episode. It has affinities with Dante, entering the Paradiso hand‑in‑hand with Beatrice; with Romantic idealism in general; and perhaps with religious idealism (e.g. Mariolatry and the poetry of the Virgin), but here it seems entirely secular.

Personally I distrust all visionary poetry that descends to action. Intense idealism is like the mirage in the desert, a banquet dream of impossible delights, the paradise of hunger. In action it may well be destructive, since it rejects reality for the sake of unreal vision. In any case, it is the poetry of crisis; and the only way to palliate it is to increase human happiness. One learns even from poetry that there are real problems around us. But the poetry is the thing, and Roland Giguère is certainly one among the chosen.