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Helene Cardona
Author, Translator
Life in Suspension

Adult; Poetry; (Market)

A tour de force of language and phonetics; a deeply felt and deeply spiritual collection which explores the universal human experience from a very personal point of view. This is intimate poetry, and yet it transcends the mundane through its lyricism and its glory in language. Hélène Cardona's pen moves from the human to the divine and back in a single sentence, and the result is uplifting and magical. In this bilingual edition of her poems, Cardona is our contemporary ecstatic, time-traveler, and shape-shifter. Behind the dreamlike atmosphere of her poems lies a fierce will to discover beauty, to resurrect ancient enchantments, and to defend enigmas of the spirit. Her luminous poems celebrate the imagination's power to dignify and exalt our highest yearnings.
Reviews
The Brooklyn Rail

A Poet is a Mood  by J. C. Hallman

Hélène Cardona
Life in Suspension / La Vie Suspendue 
(Salmon Poetry, 2016)

Generally speaking, poems are monolingual. That is, what a poem has to say is generally held to be specific enough to be fixed to a singular language event. If it’s lucky, it will get translated into another language, perhaps even by the poet, but the translation will be understood to be an approximation of the original, and if you’re a Frosty bent (he of the claim that the essence of poetry perishes in even the smoothest of transits from one language to the next) you’ll read these translated poems with an awareness that even a great poem would be better still if you could read it in the original Russian (most of the time).

Surely one of the most prominent features of Hélène Cardona’s latest, Life in Suspension, is the way it denies us this all-too-simple assumption, the way it leaves us, as it were, suspended between languages. I’m at a bit of a loss as to how to describe this, because while it would be easy to say that each poem in the volume has a French and an English version, with one language on the left side of the book and one on the right, as is typical of facing page translations, that’s not entirely accurate because in facing page translations you know which was the original and which the translation. But here, a “bilingual collection” in which both appear for the first time together, how would you determine which is which? Who’s to say they’re not actually separate poems? Technically speaking, a note at the front tells us the English came first, but Cardona was born in Paris, so perhaps even their original composition was a sort of translation.

All this creates a particular dilemma for a reader, but a pleasant one, it turns out, because I found myself toggling back and forth between the French (of which I have juste un peu) and the English (a little better) much more than I normally would, not to second guess the translations (which I suppose is the whole purpose of those facing page deals), but because my eye kept catching peripherally on moments when the translation—if we can even still call it that—wasn’t perfect. That is, moments when the poet decided that a line break in one language wasn’t the right line break for the other. If you’d told me about this in advance, I would have thought that this bouncing back and forth would have totally screwed up the poems for me, breaking their flow and all that, but it turned out to be an added joy because of course it was the poet who was making these decisions too, and therefore even the dual-language aspect of this surprising volume, which just as often will have you thinking of Rumi and Rilke and Neruda, offers a unique archaeology-style pleasure of penetrating a psychic poetic cavity that generally remains undisturbed.

To make matters worse—by which I mean better—Cardona is one of those writers, one of those people really, who are better described as being talented rather than having a talent because their unlikely lives seem suspended between talents, nations, cultures, media. What can you really say about a poet who holds three passports, speaks god knows how many languages, and appears to have mastered a number of arts? In addition to the two books of poetry, Cardona produced a thesis on Henry James, published translated works by Gabriel Arnou-Laujeac and Dorianne Laux, and, most prominently, has an extensive acting career that includes speaking roles in Chocolat and Jurassic World.

To be sure, I generally don’t go in for this sort of thing. I’m not dying for the next Ethan Hawke novel. Or James Franco. Or Aragorn, or the woman from Weeds and The West Wing. And to be honest, when I hear about these people, part of me wants to say come on, man, enough is enough. Too much limelight burns as surely does a summer sun. Even Dylan thought his Nobel was weird.

But Cardona is different, I think, and that dissertation on James is the clue. In both letters and fiction, James asserted that all the arts are one, and what he meant was that a novel can aspire to do what the gigantic Tintorettos in the Louvre do. In short, we should no sooner segregate media than people.

Anyway, any reservations one might have about a poet spread too thin across the culture dissolve at once in the experience of Cardona’s poems, which often, like James’s sentences, withhold their core image until the final word, when it crystallizes like something flash frozen, caught in motion. This might be critical to Cardona’s macro mission of suspension, in that the poems compile to form the chronicle of a traveler, without fixed language, without fixed nationality or profession, moving physically from Bar Harbor to Chalkidiki (it’s Greece), and emotionally from the calm of floating alone on a lake to the inner hurricane of watching a loved one slip from this world to the next. En route, there are these poetic hesitations, the vibrancy of life trapped in amber.

As well, Cardona surprises with jarring aphorisms. Quoting aphorisms is dangerous, I know, because a poem’s stirring phrase is like the flower of its plant, and while you can yank the flower up and admire its beauty, it will, yanked, wither and die, and you might just as well have chosen to leave it alone. Nevertheless, here is a bouquet plucked from Cardona’s flowerbed of a book:

To live is to persist in pain

Life works out better later/like a cactus eventually blooms

We have the same ear for reading/the bones in the wind/and breaking down the sun.

I dream for a living —

Every wall is a beginning.

I want/to die remarkably

Art is perpetual rebirth/…the way we receive counsel from God.

These simple blooms will stay with you for a time. But then they will fade, because ultimately a poet is not a voice or an image or a phrase. A poet is a mood. And what you will recall of this book at a distance—like the aphorism from Whitman, epigraphically borrowed here—is that though you’ve lost the rest, you remember being with the poet for these moments stolen from an unlikely life. 

J.C. HALLMAN's most recent book is B & ME: A True Story of Literary Arousal, a work of "creative criticism." He sort of lives in New York City.

The Los Angeles Review

Life in Suspension / La Vie Suspendue
Poems by Hélène Cardona

Reviewed by Anthony DiMatteo

Life in Suspension / La Vie Suspendue is Hélène Cardona’s fecund title for envisioning, in two languages, a poetry afloat in life and life in poetry—pendulous, pensive, spontaneous, in suspense and suspension. This third of her bilingual lyrical collections implicitly reveals how so much of our thinking and feeling depends upon the Indo-European root of “(s)pen-.” Much weight has been hung upon it by poets ancient and modern. One thinks of Coleridge’s description of the imagination, “that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment which constitutes poetic faith.” Or Ovid’s description of the newly created earth in the opening of his Metamorphoses, “pendebat in aere tellus,” that is, “the pendulous round Earth with balance’t air in counterpoise,” to use Milton’s translation of Ovid’s phrasing, inserted into Book 4 of Paradise Lost to remind us what’s at stake should angels make war. Cardona’s first poem in the collection, “To Kitty, Who Loved the Sea and Somerset Maugham,” also summons angels who weigh upon human life, in this case, “The angel who smells of my childhood / my mother” (“L’ange aux senteurs de mon enfance / ma mère”). The deceased mother Kitty appears to the speaker as a vivid memory conspicuously constructed out of the speaker’s experiences with art, music and nature associated with her absent mother, who also somehow continues as a living being inside the speaker:

Whose warm breath I breathed
This morning as I woke
The scent of gardenias whispering
I never left you

Son souffle chaud que je respire encore
Et ce matin au réveil
Le parfum des gardénias qui murmurent
Je ne t’ai jamais quittée

This inaugural poem, the only one lacking a period in the collection, initiates the reader into the between-world of the senses and the imagination that arises out of their interplay in the life within. The poems throughout the book explore various poetic and artistic legacies, from Welsh medieval legend to Klimt, Cocteau and Spielberg, that comprise something like an ages-old enterprise in the pursuit of rapture or a hyper-mode of being.

States of suspension abound in the poet’s vision of art, poetry and life. Consider the stellar phrasing in the last poem in the book “Spellbound” (“Envoûtée”) offered as a description of being under the influence of dream: “lumière / défiant la pesanteur” (“light / defying gravity”). Or the poem “Low Altitude” (“Basse Altitude”) in which the speaker identifies the course she sets her sights on, where her spirit both elevates and is weighed down: “Je vole à une altitude vertigineusement basse” (“I fly at a delicately-low altitude”). This state of flying low induces metamorphoses both exhilarating and dangerous as recognized by the poem “A Mind Like Lightning” (“Un Esprit Comme l’Éclair”) whose phrasing recalls the earlier poem “Low Altitude:”

Sans pesanteur
….Je vole en éclats,
En mille morceaux scintillants

Without gravity,
……I fly into a thousand pieces,
……….Add sparkle to various reflections

Suspended vision turns the poet into a miraculous kind of creature, “A Winter Horse” as a later poem has it, whose rambles are guided by an imagined maternal rider:

My mother blows directions in my ear
from the other side.
The spokes of the wheel loosen
amidst thoughts like wind
storms containing all humanity.

These whirlwind, global rides that take over the speaker’s mind, “un tourbillon de pensées,” are rooted, weighted or suspended by the supportive, beloved figure of the mother as the title poem “Life in Suspension” makes clear. This poem tells the story of the speaker’s developing biological and artistic life that also looks out to all human life in its love for and bond with a fostering mother figure. The speaker exists somewhere between the mythical and the all-too-human. She claims allegorical status—“I am the Memory Collector” (Je suis la Collectionneuse de souvenirs”)—but she also longs for her own life:

I’m in my mother’s womb in Paris.
She’s scared. I want to get out.

Je suis dans le ventre de ma mère à Paris.
Elle a peur, je veux sortir de là.

One’s origin is forever set but the journey ahead is ever unclear. Thrust into the world, the poet as growing child encounters a widening terrain, from France to Italy, Germany, Geneva, Spain, Wales, and America:

I’m sixteen years old, off to San Diego.
My mother cries at the Paris airport.
She breaks my heart but the pull is stronger.

The English “pull” in the last line the poet renders into French by “l’appel”—more properly translated as “the call:”  “Elle me brise le coeur mais l’appel est plus fort.” This sentient and imaginary experience, where the pull of absence can make the call of presence stronger, is a liminal one that Cardona returns to again and again. “Je me suspends dans le vide” (“I hang in the void”) declares the poet-speaker in “Galactic Architect,” the sonnet-like poem found near the mid-point in the collection. A subsequent poem, in fourteen lines of free verse, echoes this non-position. Entitled “Dans le néant” (“In the Nothingness”), it offers view of an imaginary non-site, a utopia perhaps, necessary for the verbal suspension of poetry:

I count
….the years of my life,
………..plucking daisy petals.
I count
….the losses of my life,
……….blowing kisses in the air.

Simulating existence suspended in a pulse of being and nothingness, the book alternates free and formal poetry, with pantoums, sonnets and sonnet-like forms interspersed among the predominantly free verse. Involving more than a translation of one language into another, Cardona’s ability to write or fly low, in French and English poetry, creates semantic nuances that light up in multiple directions, while her writing pays close heed to the base level of syntax, rhythm, line and sentence. Her work presents a tender, pensile world that merits repeated line by line explorations.

 

Anthony DiMatteo’s recent poetry collection is In Defense of Puppets (Future Cycle Press, 2016). He is a professor of English at the New York Institute of Technology.

 

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