Translator’s Note

I should say something briefly about some quirks that arise when attempting/failing to translate Christophe Tarkos. A longer critical essay, discussing some of his key themes and their significance (to me), appears in Tripwire Journal of Poetics (issue 22, 2025), along with three further translations. A French poet friend with a doctorate on Tarkos and Quintane told me Tarkos couldn’t be translated, and he was right. Tarkos deforms language, translating him involves deforming both English and his texts, and if deformation entails mutilation, it also necessitates invention.

“Does n’t” near the start of “Relations” is not a typo but an attempt to find an equivalent for Tarkos’s non-grammatical declining to contract “de le” into “du” earlier in the same text. This occurs various times in Le Signe =. Elsewhere I have things like “of the some” (for “du des”), and “do don’t not” for “à au le”, “au” being the (mandatory) contraction of “à le”, and the whole together therefore being categorically in excess of grammar. There’s no way to deform or overload the equivalent passages in English, as French and English contract different words, so I deform appropriate contractions nearby.

Much more likely to bring tears to the translator’s eyes are passages where a single word, such as “pousser” and its cognates in “Le conscient” (and in other texts not printed here) are exploited for all their various meanings. They are not just alluded to: the text changes course according to them and their associations, a movement that is essential to the whole book. Among other things, “pousser” means to sprout or grow (as in a plant), to let out or emit (a cry), to push (a pram, a door, but also someone), to drive or direct (people), and to urge or encourage; “poussée”, in addition to being the feminine past participle of “pousser”, means a push or thrust, but also thrust (the concept) or momentum, as well as a spike or spurt (in the level of something); meanwhile “poussé” means not driven but advanced. Language is the object, which, as Tarkos repeatedly notes, drives (and sprouts, cries, etc.) rather than means, and it does so in as many senses as can be extracted from “pousser” and its cognates, senses not necessarily linked by anything but that word itself. Attempting to translate such accumulations means trying to select another word and allowing a text to change course according to its meanings, which are not the same as those of the French term; one is obligated to diverge from the source text in attempting to remain faithful to it, to replicate what it does rather than means. Similarly in “La Pisse”, we (let) piss on the “tables basses” and “bas” various other things; “bas” means “low” but “table basse” means coffee table, so in English we piss on the coffee tables and coffee various other things. Fail on.

For a text like “The conscious (one)”, you can probably tell, a real difficulty is how to not skip a sentence, as one’s eyes switch back and forth between source and target so much that mind almost dissolves into nonsense. I tried to rule out the possibility by programming my text editor to highlight every second sentence, creating a checkerboard effect. Elsewhere, I highlighted extremely repetitive modulating clauses in the same way.

Bracketed terms such as in “The conscious (one)” and “all (the) breadth” are not parenthetical in the French but are (to me) undecidable expressions. “Le conscient” means “the conscious” (as in psychoanalysis), while “conscient” is an adjective meaning “aware” or “conscious”, but in French you can nominalise an(y) adjective and make it a descriptive name of a person, ergo “the one who is conscious”, the poem’s subject-object, “he/it”. “Il est conscient”: “he is conscious”, but also “it is conscious” (the sentence is repeated: one for each reading). But what is the “it” here? It is the impersonal subject, as in “it is raining”, and it’s “the conscious”, i.e.: the conscious is conscious. The idea perhaps being that there is an indistinction between these meanings. At (not much of) a stretch, “le conscient” could also mean “the conscious part (of something larger)”, or “what’s conscious (in something else)”, and typically for Tarkos, this would have to be conceived as a(n infinite) solid stuff.

Banal as they seem, “the bag” and “mixes” in “The conscious (one)”, you’ll have to take my word for it, allude to (contradictory) key constellations in Le signe =, namely language as a (rubbish) bag you can put everything into, and language as an infinitely supple (“elastic”) dough that you mix and knead to make anything out of but can never get out of. Tarkos uses these ideas, especially the second, to reject the theory that words have two aspects, signifier and signified, and instead affirm a (pseudo-)monist, indivisible conception of language (“signifier = signified”, and sign = world). I discuss the contradictory relation between bag and dough in the essay in Tripwire.

Finally, if we combine the (new to us) verb phrase “to let piss”, a way of doing (and writing: pissing is writing, as shitting is in “Relations”) that requires no effort or desire and almost no consciousness, with the doggedly conscious, driving but useless naming-being of “The conscious (one)”, we probably get pretty close to something like a first image of Tarkos’s poetics.