Published first in 1967 in Jacques Dupin’s poetry volume Proximité du murmure (The Encroaching Murmur), Agrafes de l’idylle is constituted of slow, breathless, fragmentary sentences. Its title in the original French sounds a radical negation of writing: a cognate of graphein, the Greek for to write, is preceded by a-, the Greek prefix of contradiction.

Approaching the unconscious and inhabiting the very boundaries of writing, the 14 short lines of the poem announce themselves as a disintegrating, lethal idyll. Dupin’s posthuman sonnet performs acts of unwriting and continues what the German post-Kantian writer Novalis declared to be the only remaining task of poetry: “to represent the impossibility of representation” (Undarstellbarkeit darstellen).

A series of past participles (exténuée, anéantie) indicates not only passivity and an irreversible loss of spontaneity, but exhaustion, obliteration, and annihilation, laconically tempered by the hope of a nomadic “almost” (presque).

Far from being autonomous, selfhood is staged as mournful spectatorship and autopsy; and the lyrical “I” is immersed in, or rather has irreversibly become, a retrospective and self-consuming “theater.”

Consisting of multiple layers of lucid dream segments, Dupin’s poem sketches the continued supply of replaceable dead bodies. “Memory” appears as a series of desperate and impossible attempts at return and recovery, a heterotopian movement that still remains encapsulated in—and as—transitory visual effects.

An unassuming sculpture of sounds and images and one of the most haunting and beautiful poems available in the French language, Agrafes de l’idylle offers and embodies a poetics that overcomes ossified notions of supposedly irreconcilable commitments to art and to politics. Dupin’s poem provides soundings of the remains of writing as vulnerable acts and breathing intervals between, and within, modernity’s anonymous, self-replicating murders.

A careful English translation is available in Paul Auster’s excellent bilingual edition (Jacques Dupin, Selected Poems. Winston-Salem, N.C.: Wake Forest University Press, 1992, 63).

Categories: British Literature, French Literature, Literature

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