On Translating Hélène Dorion

I first encountered Hélène Dorion’s work when Bruno Doucey, a Parisian editor I’d already worked with, published Mes forêts (My Forests) in 2021. 
I was very moved by the poems, which explore our complex relationship with the forest and the natural world at a moment of crisis, and I asked if Dorion would work with me. It has been a very fruitful collaboration over the last five years.

Dorion was born in the city of Quebec in 1958, and still lives in that province, though now in the midst of the forest. She has published more than twenty books of poetry and fifteen artist’s books, in addition to works of fiction and memoir. In 2024, she won the Grand Prix de Poésie from the Académie française and was named Chevalière de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres de la République française. These are singular honors for a writer who is not French, as is the inclusion of Mes forêts in the curriculum for the baccalaureate in France, a first for a living woman and for a Canadian writer. These recognitions from quintessentially French institutions illustrate her prominence in francophone literature, as it is unusual for a Canadian writer to be accepted into the French literary world.

The translations in this issue come from the collection Cœurs, comme livres d’amour (Hearts, Books of Love). The book is a meditation on love, sometimes addressed to the beloved, sometimes to the speaker’s own heart. Dorion is talking not only about romantic love, but also about love as the way we relate to the world beyond us. In her own words, she is “searching for the center,” among the ruin and loss of our time.

The “you” in these love poems is gender-neutral, a difficult feat in a 
gendered language like French. Dorion and I talked about gender in these translations. In the poem that begins “We pass through,—flocks of white geese,” the last line, “l’enfant au milieu de ses larmes,” made me see this child, still weeping but beginning to move toward sleep. My poetry defaults to the feminine, so I ended with “the child in the midst of her tears” as if the tears were a blankie she clutched for comfort. Dorion refused the explicit gender, so I pivoted to the less visual “child still in tears.” Choices around gender are central for Dorion, and I felt it was important as a translator to respect her choices.

Dorion’s poems often raise a question without prescribing the answer. In the poem that begins “Le monde, comme l’île enserrée/par l’horizon, est seul” (“The world, like that island enclosed/by the horizon, is alone”) I first translated “enserrée” as “confined.” She said that wasn’t what she meant, but offered no additional information. I think that “enclosed,” which she accepted without further comment, is a more neutral, and more physical, embodiment of the simile, without adding overtones of imprisonment. 

Though Dorion studied philosophy before turning to literature, and though her writing is still imbued with metaphysics, she remains grounded in the natural world, as in the extended description of geese in the poem evoking the passage of the seasons. My translation of her book My Forests, forthcoming this year from Book*Hug, examines the ways in which our destruction of the natural world has also degraded our human language, and our relationships with each other. In Hearts, Books of Love, Dorion centers the relationship with the beloved within the relationship to the world, a complex tension between holding on and letting go.