François Turcot Recipient of the Prix Émile Nelligan

Chantal Neveu sent me an email this morning to inform me that François Turcot has received the Prix Émile Nelligan for his last book of poetry, Cette maison n'est pas la mienne (La Peuplade, 2009). I've known of his nomination for the past two or three weeks now and spent the last 7 days with him in trepidation of the news. The Prix Émile Nelligan is a big prize in Québec. I am not surprised that he received it. François is a poet for whom the valence of words matters a lot. In my reading of his work, I find a continuation the work of Jean Daive, Claude Royet-Journoud and Anne-Marie Albiach, among others. FT's project follows the literalism of those formers, but reinstills a sense of marvel and naïveté in the sentence. An opening of the possibility of the word that I find more possible in the Québécois context than in the metropolitan French one (FT had also described francophone Québécois literature as a minor literature, with everything that it entails).

Here is the éloge the jury wrote in praise of Cette maison:

François Turcot's book is caracterized first by the originality of its architecture: more than a collection, this is first a project where an archeological quest fed by old photographs and strips of found texts. In the background of a distant Irish immigration to America, this books keeps inviting the gaze into a hazy, yet very concrete real. At the core: a house torn down and rebuilt, where subsist images, objects, a table and ghostly residents – a true theater of an uncertain existence. In various form, from the narrative poem to the lyrical fragment, this book thus enters into the mystery of memory and generations, of presence and absence, and the intimate universe it makes come forth with an alluring strangeness, tainted by abstraction. With a singular sensibility and a nice sharpness of writing, Cette maison n'est pas la mienne lets a new voice in contemporary Québécois poetry speak.

For the ceremony, I think FT read from the third section of the book, Vingt fois vos mains sur la table, as well as a piece for Daniel Canty (another beautiful poet, translator, editor and multi-disciplinary artist from Montréal). An earlier draft of this section was recently translated by Nathalie Stephens in Aufgabe. And here is an excerpt from the 4th section of the book, Sur le chemin, l'image, with my translation:

Bond 5, case 4



Plombe
derrière je sais
une maison assise
et les vents analogues

loin au-dessus des 10 pierres file
un hydravion                          le vol d’un souvenir
glisse un photon

(songe que je bouge)


je n’entends plus le bimoteur
le ciel cathodique balise aussi le regard
ricoche la pierre

Step 5, Square 4



Sun
behind I know
an occupied house
and analog winds

far above of the 10 stones flies
a hydroplane                          a memory’s flight
slides a photon

(dream that I move)


I stopped hearing the engine
the electronic sky also marks the gaze
bounces the stone

More work by François Turcot can be found here.