© Maurice Haas
On January 16, 2019, José-Flore Tappy’s Trás-os-montes (Éditions La Dogana, 2018), from which these poems have been selected and translated (by John Taylor), was awarded the highest Swiss literary distinction, the Prix Suisse de la Littérature. This intricately constructed sequence of poems depicts a village woman living in the remote Trás-os-montes region of northern Portugal. The isolated area of Trás-os-montes is known for its primitive nature, its poverty and its sparse population.
Amid pungent wool and deadwood,
when the tiles are misted up,
at the back of the kitchen, she's already dressed,
starts warming the milk,
attentive to those who are missing,
gone off without saying where
(or why)
as well as to those slumbering
in the upper rooms
Servant of the smoky fireplace,
she stoops down, straightens back up,
sweeps the walls
with her own smoke
*****
I cross the threshold and slip outside,
long splinter in the black night
first the street with its dirty papers
lying about, then the trail
with its sinuous course, more sinuous
than my peeled sentences
clutching to the page
trail so spindly between the stones,
I reassure it with my feet
José-Flore Tappy is a Swiss poet born in Lausanne in 1954. Her first six books were translated by John Taylor and collected as Sheds / Hangars: Collected Poems 1983–2013.
Apart from Trás-os-Montes (The MadHat Press) John Taylor has also recently translated Franca Mancinelli’s The Butterfly Cemetery: Selected Prose 2008-2021 (The Bitter Oleander Press) – of which three pieces originally appeared in One Hand Clapping. His most recent book of poems is Transizioni, a bilingual volume published in Italy by LYRIKS Editore and illustrated by the Greek artist Alekos Fassianos.