Gilles Ortlieb’s The Day's Ration: A Reading and Conversation with the Poet and his Translators
It seems appropriate that several years should elapse between the original idea to translate a selection of poems by French writer and translator Gilles Ortlieb and its recent fruition in the publication of The Day’s Ration earlier this year (Arc: Visible Poets 48). Appropriate because Ortlieb’s poems work by a process of sedimentation, and of accretion, two simultaneous processes, in which very little within the poet’s purview is overlooked. Jacques Réda has said of Ortlieb: ‘He is possessed of an eye that can discern, within the thicket of the real, the unnoticed, which may be its accessory or its reject’. Reviewing the collection in The High Window, David Cooke found what is instantly ortliebian: how the poet’s vision goes ‘beyond mere observation to create an atmosphere of isolation and rootlessness that is redolent of Edward Hopper or film noir’. He goes on: ‘It is Ortlieb’s achievement that in these finely wrought and haunting poems he has given such memorable expression to seemingly intractable material. Remaining true to the spirit and letter of the French, [the translators] have an unfailing sense of le mot juste and have produced versions that are worthy of the originals and which are authentic poems in their own right’.
And as a distinguished translator himself (of Cavafy, Seferis and other Greek writers), Ortlieb has plenty to say about the challenges and rewards of translation, and he will be present along with his translators, Patrick McGuinness and Stephen Romer, to discuss, among other things, tone, ‘le mot juste’, poetry and the prosaic, the ordinary and the everyday, and how best to transpose the ortliebian—that tenacious adjective again—into something which is equally alive in a different language.
Register via Eventbrite, here.
Gilles Ortlieb was born in Morocco in 1953. He studied Classics at the Sorbonne, and after a period in which he was variously employed, interspersed by trips to Greece and the Mediterranean, he spent many years in Luxembourg where he worked as a translator for the European Union. He has published some twenty books in a wide range of genres, including poems, stories, essays and notebooks; these include Soldats et autres récits, Et tout le tremblement (Le Bruit du Temps, 2014 and 2016), Place au cirque, Au Grand Miroir, Tombeau des anges (Gallimard, 2002, 2005 and 2011) and Sous le crible, Le Train des jours, Ângelo (Finitude, 2008, 2010, 2018). He has made a number of translations into French, including, from the Greek, works by Constantin Cavafy, George Seferis and Thanassis Valtinos, and from the English, by Patrick McGuinness and Stephen Romer.
Patrick McGuinness is a poet and novelist. His first novel, The Last Hundred Days (Random House, 2011), was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, shortlisted for the Costa First Novel Award, the Writers Club First Novel Award, and winner of the Writers Guild Award for Fiction and the Wales Book of the Year. His second novel, Throw Me to the Wolves (Bloomsbury, 2019), won the Royal Society of Literature's Encore Award and was longlisted for the CWA Golden Dagger Award. He is the author of the poetry collections The Canals of Mars (Carcanet, 2004), Jilted City (Carcanet, 2010), and Blood Feather (Cape, 2024). He is also a translator and editor, notably of The Penguin Book of French Short Stories (2022).
Stephen Romer is a poet, critic and translator, and a specialist in Franco-British Modernism. Among his translations are The Day’s Ration: Selected Poems by Gilles Ortlieb (Arc Publications, 2024) and The Arrière-pays by Yves Bonnefoy (Seagull Books, 2012); he is also a co-editor (with John Naughton and Anthony Rudolf) of the Yves Bonnefoy Reader (Volume 1: Poems, Carcanet, 2017). The most recent collection of his own poetry is Set Thy Love in Order: New & Selected Poems (Carcanet, 2017). He is currently Stipendiary Lecturer in French at Brasenose College, Oxford.
