Ma Langue est Poetique -- Selected Work
Christophe Tarkos
publisher: Roof Books, 2001
isbn: 0-937-804-88-6
price: $12.95
Tarkos was born in Marseilles in 1964, and published his first book of poetry, Morceaux Choisis, in 1995; he has published over 25 books since then, all while maintaining a hectic touring schedule of performances all over Europe and remaining active as a publisher and collaborator with many French artists, writers, and composers.
Judging by this slender selection from his work so far, there is no doubt Tarkos will begin to turn his sites to the States, as his poetry -- unlike that of many French writers since the days of Tel Quel, with the exception of Olivier Cadiot -- translates incredibly well into the American idiom. It is neither spare nor precious, but rather has an abundance and a sure-fire comedic bent, coupled with a hallucinatory sense of history and the myriad false plays of language, that place him somewhere in the line of Rimbaud, Beckett and Stein.
In the collage of linked paragraphs, "Process" -- which rambles from documentary history to visionary episodes at the drop of a colon -- he even takes on some of the breadth of Pound, though with Bjorn Borg in place of Malatesta, and with a tendency to use Asian languages not to illustrate ideogrammic principles but to create babble lists such as the following:
He was called Ngo, they were called Ngo, Ngo Han and Hen, they were called Ngo Hao Hoa Hui Huy Hun Hou Hue Hyen Heu Huong Hang Heng Tan Tin Than Thin Thang...
[34]
"Hurt: a libretto" is a little minimalist comedy in which a voice 2 tries to talk a voice 2 -- which repeatedly expresses "ouch, I hurt" -- into an out-of-body experience to divorce his/her self from the pain, a venture loaded with implications about truth and language that is clearly indebted to Wittgenstein, but with the metaphysical frenzy of the Brothers Quay.
"Toto" is a run-on paragaph of 9 pages, and, at parts, is something like Toy Story for William Burroughs fans (Ashbery's Girls on the Run, with its threatening cubist landscapes, also comes to mind), as many of the once-passive objects of the drug trade eventually become protagonists:
Toto's back brews. Just seeing Toto is enough to see that he is a doser, watch him and you are better dosed, just by watching him. It's contagious. He's a beer drinker. Truck is, Pictured is, Tourniquet is, Robot is. Meanwhile everyone talks. In the meantime Toto doses. Toto lasts as long as his dosage lasts. Toto lasts indefinitely in the sky. The forces and the methods are the same. Tourniquet smiles, is smiling. He smiles for tray cupboard, to place opposite, cement, take a glass and a fork. Tourniquet smiles daily.
[67]
Jonathan Skinner's deft translation conveys the weird overlapping sense of time and space that is both full of hurried activity and yet, like a perpetual "meanwhile," goes nowhere, as if each moment doesn't seem to replace the last but just washes over it, never entirely erasing its trace.
If there is an over-riding concern with Tarkos' work -- which can be both overtly political (the list of Vietnamese sounding names, for instance, suggests a relationship to Godard's radio in Weekend) and very private -- it is with the way language can be shaped and stretched, placed in all sorts of containers, duplicated, erased and made to reoriente the mind. Tarkos calls this concept "worddoh," as if language were as sweet and malleable as uncooked Betty Crocker's.
The book, edited by the American poets Stacy Doris and Chester Wiener, includes an introduction by Wiener, and counts among its translators Fiona Templeton, Norma Cole, the Montreal Anglophone poet Erin Mouré, and Geneva Chao, who translated the inverview with Tarkos included as an appendix.
Ma Langue signals the presence of an exciting and unpredictable new French voice in America.
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