On Translating Stéphane Bouquet
Lindsay Turner
Writers fall into two categories: the living and the dead. Translators, too, tend to fall into to two categories: those who translate living writers, and those who translate dead ones. I am mostly a translator of living writers. Sometimes other translators, or readers of translation, ask me about the difficulties of translating when the writer is still around to read or object, and I usually respond that I think it’s the easier way: if the person you’re translating is alive, they can answer your questions. They can tell you if they think you’re wrong, or they can tell you that they trust you, and to do what you will. Translation becomes a conversation, even if it’s not an equal one (you’re the translator and they’re the writer, still).
When the French poet Stéphane Bouquet died last year, at age 57, of cancer, I lost a dear friend and gained a hard task. I’ve translated two of Stéphane’s books of poems, The Next Loves and Common Life. I started working on Stéphane’s last book, All That Holds, before he died. He knew I was doing it; I’m grateful that I got to tell him I would. I’m finishing it now and reckoning hard with what the death of an author does, in a real sense, to his translator’s work.
Until now, the only book I’ve translated by someone dead was Anne Dufourmantelle’s In Defense of Secrets. I didn’t know Dufourmantelle, although I was moved by her story: after writing a book on risk (In Praise of Risk), Dufourmantelle drowned in 2017 at the age of 53 trying to rescue two children from the ocean. (The children, not her own, survived.) It felt strange not to be able to write to her, especially since she should have been alive, but the book itself offered a way to think about the gap between us. In Defense of Secrets holds that the secret is a sort of necessary and generative space, a space for possibility to foment and out of which it might unfurl, and I began to see the secrecy of death as just that kind of space. I didn’t know, and I couldn’t know, exactly what Dufourmantelle meant. From this withholding, though, it was up to me to bring forth the new living thing.
The silence and secrecy of death in Stéphane’s case felt very different. I sat down to translate and found I could not think, only feel. I was simply very sad. My father died a couple months after Stéphane did, and between the loss of the two of them, the world’s gone muted, like when the sound at a concert gives out. I’ve lost half of two of the most important conversations in my life: the near daily back-and-forth with a parent, and the occasional flash of joyful understanding with a translation partner and friend, someone I felt as a deeply kindred spirit in poetry. Sitting down to translate Stéphane is slow going because I am sometimes overwhelmed with grief. In Paris this summer, when the heat finally broke and I went back to the Belleville café where I’d worked in great quick gusts last summer in my intervals of childcare, I sat there on the perfect red leather banquette in tears. Stéphane had lived in the neighborhood; I could imagine walking to his building and climbing the narrow staircase to his airy top-floor book-lined apartment. It was impossible but it was true: I was in Paris, where I’d gone to work with Stéphane many times over the years, and he was not there.
When I did start working, I was surprised that I also felt no small amount of anger—not at Stéphane for dying, but at death for taking him and at the world for letting him go. This was anger I felt as a translator in specific. I know a certain passage is about an unnamed Pasolini poem, for example, but there’s no way to tell which one. Stéphane’s the only one who knew. That shade of light here, is it a morning light or an evening one? Stéphane would have known and maybe he would’ve told me. Of course Stéphane was always liable to say in response to a query that he didn’t know what in the world he meant, and was always generous in telling me that I should do what I thought best in English—sometimes it was even, you got this wrong but I like it better your way—but now there’s no permission to be granted. Death gulped it all down and shut its maw tight. No access that way. Translation feels a little now like getting up close and knocking: just for a second, let me in.
Lindsay Turner
Writers fall into two categories: the living and the dead. Translators, too, tend to fall into to two categories: those who translate living writers, and those who translate dead ones. I am mostly a translator of living writers. Sometimes other translators, or readers of translation, ask me about the difficulties of translating when the writer is still around to read or object, and I usually respond that I think it’s the easier way: if the person you’re translating is alive, they can answer your questions. They can tell you if they think you’re wrong, or they can tell you that they trust you, and to do what you will. Translation becomes a conversation, even if it’s not an equal one (you’re the translator and they’re the writer, still).
When the French poet Stéphane Bouquet died last year, at age 57, of cancer, I lost a dear friend and gained a hard task. I’ve translated two of Stéphane’s books of poems, The Next Loves and Common Life. I started working on Stéphane’s last book, All That Holds, before he died. He knew I was doing it; I’m grateful that I got to tell him I would. I’m finishing it now and reckoning hard with what the death of an author does, in a real sense, to his translator’s work.
Until now, the only book I’ve translated by someone dead was Anne Dufourmantelle’s In Defense of Secrets. I didn’t know Dufourmantelle, although I was moved by her story: after writing a book on risk (In Praise of Risk), Dufourmantelle drowned in 2017 at the age of 53 trying to rescue two children from the ocean. (The children, not her own, survived.) It felt strange not to be able to write to her, especially since she should have been alive, but the book itself offered a way to think about the gap between us. In Defense of Secrets holds that the secret is a sort of necessary and generative space, a space for possibility to foment and out of which it might unfurl, and I began to see the secrecy of death as just that kind of space. I didn’t know, and I couldn’t know, exactly what Dufourmantelle meant. From this withholding, though, it was up to me to bring forth the new living thing.
The silence and secrecy of death in Stéphane’s case felt very different. I sat down to translate and found I could not think, only feel. I was simply very sad. My father died a couple months after Stéphane did, and between the loss of the two of them, the world’s gone muted, like when the sound at a concert gives out. I’ve lost half of two of the most important conversations in my life: the near daily back-and-forth with a parent, and the occasional flash of joyful understanding with a translation partner and friend, someone I felt as a deeply kindred spirit in poetry. Sitting down to translate Stéphane is slow going because I am sometimes overwhelmed with grief. In Paris this summer, when the heat finally broke and I went back to the Belleville café where I’d worked in great quick gusts last summer in my intervals of childcare, I sat there on the perfect red leather banquette in tears. Stéphane had lived in the neighborhood; I could imagine walking to his building and climbing the narrow staircase to his airy top-floor book-lined apartment. It was impossible but it was true: I was in Paris, where I’d gone to work with Stéphane many times over the years, and he was not there.
When I did start working, I was surprised that I also felt no small amount of anger—not at Stéphane for dying, but at death for taking him and at the world for letting him go. This was anger I felt as a translator in specific. I know a certain passage is about an unnamed Pasolini poem, for example, but there’s no way to tell which one. Stéphane’s the only one who knew. That shade of light here, is it a morning light or an evening one? Stéphane would have known and maybe he would’ve told me. Of course Stéphane was always liable to say in response to a query that he didn’t know what in the world he meant, and was always generous in telling me that I should do what I thought best in English—sometimes it was even, you got this wrong but I like it better your way—but now there’s no permission to be granted. Death gulped it all down and shut its maw tight. No access that way. Translation feels a little now like getting up close and knocking: just for a second, let me in.
❧
from “Tales and Legends,” from
ALL THAT HOLDS (Forthcoming, Nightboat Books)
Stéphane Bouquet, trans. Lindsay Turner
2. Tale of the fern and the waves and the rest
For the child of November 26
First Thursday
The child was walking in the forest. He had no name. Or rather: he did not like the name he had been given, so he called himself the child of October 31. Come eat, they said to him. Come wipe your face, they said, come on, hurry up. A hand approached his face and rubbed soap all around his lips. A hand wet his neck with freezing water and his skin reacted-resisted: everywhere, goosebumps in little mounds. Hon-hon-honk went the goose-child, for laughter. Calm down, they told him.
Then the meal was over. The child had put on his Superman t-shirt and was walking in the forest. On his arms, scratches from the brambles, three of them. Three gashes, from swords or lasers. Three assailants from whom he had escaped by the dint of his cunning and bravery. Probably these adversaries had since died of their wounds, and now the foxes were eating their tender flesh mmm mmm.
The child grimaced thinking about it.
The child sang:
Right now this time
I’m not afraid
Oh oh bad robber
Give back my heart
In the forest he arrived beside his favorite tree. Why this one, out of all the trees? Who knows. October 31 wasn’t tall enough to reach even the bottom branches. His father—yes, it would seem, so they said. If only his father had carried him just once on his shoulders, he would not only have been taller than the tree but he would have seen beyond the forest and beyond the fields and behind the cliffs, all the way to the sea, to the sea where there are waves and children in bathing suits throwing themselves into the splash of the foam. Some waves, it would seem, are at times so violent that you have to keep your mouth closed so you don’t choke and at the end everyone laughs except the one whose too-loose swimsuit has slipped down around his ankles. A kid at school told that story once, after coming back from the beach. But for now the child is at the base of the tree. He kneels close to the solitary fern growing in its shade and says hello to it in fern language.
Then he says, don’t worry.
Of what would the fern be afraid? That he might pick it. That animals might devour its leaves or its roots. That it might be drowned by the rain. That it might get sick, and there are no doctors for ferns.
Don’t worry.
And at that moment the fern shakes, because a light wind crosses it and because it is happy beneath the child’s hand, and it stretches itself like cats stretch with pleasure or people do, in bed in the mornings. And the child bends towards the fern and lets its fronds caress his face and lets arrive the world where a large gentle welcoming protecting hand would set itself on him and he too would find himself consoled. From what? Why should the child be consoled?
Stéphane Bouquet, trans. Lindsay Turner
2. Tale of the fern and the waves and the rest
For the child of November 26
First Thursday
The child was walking in the forest. He had no name. Or rather: he did not like the name he had been given, so he called himself the child of October 31. Come eat, they said to him. Come wipe your face, they said, come on, hurry up. A hand approached his face and rubbed soap all around his lips. A hand wet his neck with freezing water and his skin reacted-resisted: everywhere, goosebumps in little mounds. Hon-hon-honk went the goose-child, for laughter. Calm down, they told him.
Then the meal was over. The child had put on his Superman t-shirt and was walking in the forest. On his arms, scratches from the brambles, three of them. Three gashes, from swords or lasers. Three assailants from whom he had escaped by the dint of his cunning and bravery. Probably these adversaries had since died of their wounds, and now the foxes were eating their tender flesh mmm mmm.
The child grimaced thinking about it.
The child sang:
Right now this time
I’m not afraid
Oh oh bad robber
Give back my heart
In the forest he arrived beside his favorite tree. Why this one, out of all the trees? Who knows. October 31 wasn’t tall enough to reach even the bottom branches. His father—yes, it would seem, so they said. If only his father had carried him just once on his shoulders, he would not only have been taller than the tree but he would have seen beyond the forest and beyond the fields and behind the cliffs, all the way to the sea, to the sea where there are waves and children in bathing suits throwing themselves into the splash of the foam. Some waves, it would seem, are at times so violent that you have to keep your mouth closed so you don’t choke and at the end everyone laughs except the one whose too-loose swimsuit has slipped down around his ankles. A kid at school told that story once, after coming back from the beach. But for now the child is at the base of the tree. He kneels close to the solitary fern growing in its shade and says hello to it in fern language.
Then he says, don’t worry.
Of what would the fern be afraid? That he might pick it. That animals might devour its leaves or its roots. That it might be drowned by the rain. That it might get sick, and there are no doctors for ferns.
Don’t worry.
And at that moment the fern shakes, because a light wind crosses it and because it is happy beneath the child’s hand, and it stretches itself like cats stretch with pleasure or people do, in bed in the mornings. And the child bends towards the fern and lets its fronds caress his face and lets arrive the world where a large gentle welcoming protecting hand would set itself on him and he too would find himself consoled. From what? Why should the child be consoled?
Stéphane Bouquet was born in Paris in 1967, the son of a French nurse and an American GI who returned to the US before Bouquet’s birth. He was the author of nine collections of poetry, the most recent of which (Tout se tient / All That Holds) was published by P.O.L in 2025. Two of his books, The Next Loves and Common Life, have been published in English in Lindsay Turner's translation by Nightboat Books. He died of cancer on August 24, 2025, in Paris.
Lindsay Turner's third poetry collection, Middle Slope, is forthcoming from Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2026. Her previous books are The Upstate (University of Chicago Press, 2023) and Songs & Ballads (Prelude Books, 2018). Her translations from the French include books of poetry and philosophy by Souleymane Bachir Diagne, Anne Dufourmantelle, Stéphane Bouquet, and others, as well as several children's books. Originally from northeast Tennessee, she lives in Shaker Heights, Ohio, with her husband and son.
Lindsay Turner's third poetry collection, Middle Slope, is forthcoming from Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2026. Her previous books are The Upstate (University of Chicago Press, 2023) and Songs & Ballads (Prelude Books, 2018). Her translations from the French include books of poetry and philosophy by Souleymane Bachir Diagne, Anne Dufourmantelle, Stéphane Bouquet, and others, as well as several children's books. Originally from northeast Tennessee, she lives in Shaker Heights, Ohio, with her husband and son.