Later that afternoon, I rushed to Marseille’s main library, off the wide Canebiére that leads to the city’s extravagant port, and I translated one of the poems. Monique Ballat? Monique Balmat? The last name is underscored with one bold, confident line, as if Monique’s ownership of this text-and her identity-were firmly resolved.īut who was she, and how did she come into possession of this book? Did she read it as a young girl, or as an older woman, as mother, a grandmother? How did she take these poems, with the destruction of war still so present and reverberating?Īnd more: how long had this book waited in this dusty bookstore, waiting for a new reader? Monique and I: have we been the sole two owners of this book? What drew both of us to it: something about us-our likeness? Her first name is easy to make out: Monique.

Written in graying ink-not on the cover’s inside flap, not on the title page, but on the upper right corner of the first page of poetry-is a woman’s name.

Made of delicate, browned, shaggy-edged paper and wrapped in an old wax paper protector, the book is remarkably preserved and cared for. Just a few months after the end of World War II. The printing date is stamped on the last page: December 20, 1945. The physical book itself struck me as special. In September, in a used bookshop in Marseille, I discovered a book of poetry by Jules Supervielle, a poet well-known in France but little known in America.Īs I first flipped through the book, titled Poems: 1939-1945, Supervielle’s style reminded me a bit of Wallace Stevens, especially in the circular, giving way the poet’s subjects bleed into one another, leaving no firm truths or times, nothing definite to hang on to. With storm and buffeting gusts of wind, and falling snow,īy day thy warning ringing bell to sound its notes,īy night thy silent signal lamps to swing. Type of the modern-emblem of motion and power-pulse of the continent,įor once come serve the Muse and merge in verse, even as here I see thee, Through gale or calm, now swift, now slack, yet steadily careering Thy train of cars behind, obedient, merrily-following, Thy knitted frame, thy springs and valves, the tremulous twinkle of thy wheels, The dense and murky clouds out-belching from thy smoke-stack, Thy long, pale, floating vapor-pennants, tinged with delicate purple, Thy great protruding head-light fix’d in front, Thy metrical, now swelling pant and roar, now tapering in the distance, Thy ponderous side-bars, parallel and connecting rods, gyrating, shuttling at thy sides, Thy black cylindric body, golden brass, and silvery steel, Thee in thy panoply, thy measur’d dual throbbing and thy beat convulsive, Thee in the driving storm, even as now, the snow, the winter-day declining, It makes me think of Whitman’s 1876 poem (shown below in its entirety), ¨To a Locomotive in Winter,¨ which celebrates the American train (and American perspective) of the Industrial Revolution.īut the Swiss train, with its punctuality, cleanliness, quality, precision, and range, seems worthy of its own ecstatic poetic apostrophe. Traveling by train is typically Swiss: in a sweeping way, it says so much about the country and its people, their priorities and preoccupations. The smooth, quiet comfort of its interior! The nearly to-the-second reliability! The gorgeous views, from spire-tipped Zurich to countryside, through winding bridge and tunnel to alpine village, up and up, all the way to the base of those singular, massive peaks!

Tremulous twinkle