By Meredith Grace Thompson
Marie-Andrée Gill’s poetry collection Spawn, available to my English eyes only through the 2020 translation by Kristen Renee Miller, is miraculous. It is sparse and poignant. Each poem sits on the page as an individual presence as well as a distinct movement between the sections of the collection as a whole. Imagery of water and splitting and towering run back and forth throughout the collection.
Gill’s speaker is tied tightly to the life cycle of the ouananiche. Filled with imagery of a nostalgic 90s childhood, of a finding and seeking, of a coming together, and of a moving farther apart, Gill’s speaker moves through the sections of the poetry collection as the ouananiche move from the lake to the river. Birth, growth, spawning and eventually death. The ouananiche are everything. And we are spawning, and we are falling.
“Timushum says: Only thunderstorms still tell it / like it is.”
“I am a village that doesn’t have a choice,” Gill writes, and I can’t stop focusing on the language. “And the lake, a luck, the lake.” I think of poetry as the building of words, the specific choosing and holding of individuals, linking to create lines and forming together in the culmination of image, tension, and that strange sense of sound in which words exist as muted silences on the page. A silence which sound is somehow filled in for, sitting at the back of our ears, inside the bones of our skulls. Gathered consonants create staccato rhythms inside themselves. But here—but here—I feel as if I am standing on one side of a waterfall, and Marie-Andrée Gill is standing on the other, speaking clearly and firmly, but I can’t hear her. I keep screaming what??, but I can’t hear her, and there is someone running back and forth telling me what was said, but everything feels staggered and lost, its resonance lingering and reverberating in the afterbeat, but the potency is diluted. The poetry itself is lost somewhat to me, and the translator is ever-present. But I want the poet.
Incredibly aware of her presence as translator, Miller writes a beautiful translator’s note towards the end of the book in which she discusses her own connection to Gill’s work as well as the deeply rooted and problematized nature of language throughout the collection in and of itself. Miller is clearly incredibly aware of the role of the translator as bearer and caregiver of their translations. And Gill’s work is twice removed. Written in the colonizer language of French, Gill’s speaker is deeply connected to the world of her Ilnu ancestors but also ripped from that connectedness by the violence of colonization.
“To lick the skin of the water / with a tongue I don’t speak” as the language that should have been the speaker’s birthright has been denied over and over again. Removed from ancestry through something as fundamentally vicious as the forced loss of the ability to understand and to speak. Forced conformity with European imperialistic standards. And what do we lose in the translation? And here I read the colonized words translated for the ease of another colonizer. And I wonder if these words are for me at all.
I stand still on the edge of the lake and I wait. The words of each poem float up towards me, and I want to get closer to them. Can’t quite get close enough.