I was reading the Durand handouts tonight, and I realized we don’t have any of her own poetry. I thought it might be interesting to listen to/read what Durand wrote herself and see what connections I could find between that and her translations for Michéle Métail. One thing I noticed was her heavy use of assonance in both works, especially to bridge enjambed lines. In the Métail piece, I noticed phrases like “careful verification”, “keys abbreviated”, “revision into positions”, and “variants of a numeric”. When listening to the second poem she read, I noticed “places…spaces…basics…shapeless”.

Do you all notice any other connections to her translation work, or maybe some ways she compares to the other poets we’ve read? (If you go to 4:56 on the video, that’s where she comes on.)