Christina Cook’s interview with a French poet became a friendship
In 2005, Christina Cook was working on her MFA thesis. Her subject was the French poet Marie-Claire Bancquart (1932-2019), who had been a professor at several French universities, including the Sorbonne. Cook was able to arrange an interview with Bancquart at her home in Paris, where she lived with her husband, composer Alain Bancquart (1934-2022).
The interview extended to lunch and then further extended to spending a day with the Bancquarts as they showed her some of their favorite parts of Paris. The day became a friendship, one lasting until Marie-Claire’s death in 2019 and Alain’s in 2022.
Marie-Claire Bancquart
The story of that day and that friendship has become Roaming the Labyrinth, written by Cook as part memoir, part diary, part tribute, part Bancquart’s poems and Cook’s translations, and part Cook’s own poems. For me, reading the work became getting acquainted with an unfamiliar poet as well as experiencing a wonderfully creative way to tell a story. And Cook is telling a story here — a story of poetry, a story of friendship, and the story of a woman, perhaps two women, Bancquart and Cook herself.
As Cook explains, Bancquart championed the theory of atomism, the belief that the human body is composed of atoms and that, at death, it disperses and no longer exists on its own. The poet insisted that poets should use concrete images only; expressing ideas and images in obscure language becomes sentimentality and falsehood. Cook discovers that translating Bancquart’s poems is best done at the point where the poet began writing them – the beginning. Here’s how Cook translates the poem “S’eclate”:
Revels
With death an orange slice between our teeth
we traveled asleep
suddenly its juice
spurted into our mouth
the summer
revels in alchemy
the sun shoots a fruit-colored glance
at our time which comes.
Roaming the Labyrinth does more than translate poems from one language to another. Cook intersperses the poems with discussion of Bancquart’s beliefs and observations, as well as poems written by Cook in response to her subject’s writings, conversations, philosophy, and life.
As you read, you realize tbat a poet’s life is not only her poems. It is also her home, her joint compositions with her composer husband, the restaurants and shops she visits, what she’s taught in her classes, the people she’s surrounded herself with, and that spectacular view of the Eiffel Tower from her balcony window. And so much more. Cook can’t capture it all; no one can, but she captures enough to provide insight, understanding, and deep admiration.
Christina Cook
Cook is a poet, translator, book critic, and writer. She has previously published two chapbooks, Ricochet and Lake Effect, and a full collection, A Strange Insomnia. Her work has been published in numerous literary journals in the United States, Europe, and Australia, and she’s written speeches for the presidents of Dartmouth College and University of Pennsylvania. She lives in State College, Pa.
Bancquart, who is also listed as a co-author, was a poet, novelist, essayist, literary scholar, and professor. She published dozens of books and received numerous awards for her work. She also served as president of the French arts council, La Maison de la Poesie.
Roaming the Labyrinth is one of the most creative ways to tell the story of a poet and her poetry that I’ve come across. Cook’s combination of her subject’s poems, a continuing narrative, and her own poems written in response is wonderfully done and beautifully written. Two stories have become one here, and it’s a joy to read.
Photo by Emily Gould, Creative Commons, via Flickr. Post by Glynn Young.
How to Read a Poem uses images like the mouse, the hive, the switch (from the Billy Collins poem)—to guide readers into new ways of understanding poems. Anthology included.
“I require all our incoming poetry students—in the MFA I direct—to buy and read this book.”
—Jeanetta Calhoun Mish
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