Lodestar Quarterly

Lodestar Quarterly
Figure reaching for a star Issue 14 • Summer 2005 • Featured Lodestar Writer • Poetry

Love's Rights

Jean Sénac,
translated from the French by David Bergman and Katia Sainson

Hatred, you are the zinc-faced beauty
I never knew I concoct
evidence to drown you

Tomorrow makes its way across your cheeks
Long morning
sad
oxidized
tomorrow there will be cries
which will burn the tree of tears
growing even in our own yard

A child will search for seashells
in the sand

He will give us back the solution and
after that language

After the fire.

Jean Sénac was a teacher, soldier, and writer. He was the author of numerous collections of poems, including Citoyens de beauté and Jubilation, and one novel, Ébauche du père: pour en finir avec l'enfance. Following the Algerian revolution, he worked in the Ministry of Education in Algeria and for Radio-Algiers with a daily program, Poésie sur tous les fronts. He was the founder of the magazines Soleil, Terrasses, and cofounder of Galery 54. He was murdered, possibly because of his political beliefs, in August 1973 in Algiers. More information (in French): French Wikipedia: Jean Sénac.

David Bergman is a professor of English at Towson State University, the author of Gaiety Transfigured: Gay Representation in American Literature, and the editor of Camp Grounds: Style and Homosexuality. Bergman has published poetry in The Paris Review, The New Criterion, and The New Republic. He has edited a collection of Edmund White's essays entitled The Burning Library. His latest book is The Violet Hour: The Violet Quill and the Making of Gay Culture (Columbia University Press, 2004). He lives in Baltimore, Maryland.

David Bergman and Katia Sainson are preparing an edition of Jean Sénac's Selected Poems. They teach at Towson University.

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