Ruptures and Windows: A Review of Tereza Riedlbauchová's Paris Notebook (2020, The Visible Spectrum)

I stood on the threshold
below me lay a dead woman
in the shape of the day before
beetles, flies and maggots crawled over her
suddenly from her navel emerged
a huge multicolored butterfly

When I picked up “Paris Notebook,” a bilingual volume from contemporary Czech poet Tereza Riedlbauchová, translated by Stephan Delbos and published as part of “The Visible Spectrum,” an eclectic multi-genre series intending to offer a book a month throughout 2021, my most immediate question was “what exactly makes this a ‘notebook?’” When I put it down again, head-spinning pleasantly, I discovered the answer on the desk beside it—in my own notebook.

No, the answer wasn’t anything I had written down; it was the way my impressions now appeared as scattered snippets of language, scrawled phrases like “images allowed to float,” “no flashy line breaks,” and “window=everything glassy/freestanding/subjective?” with broad white spaces between them and only my memory of the reading experience as their tenuous tether, waiting to be run together into a coherent reading of the book I had been tasked with reviewing. But Riedlbauchová’s new English-language volume is the notebook of a poet, not a critic, and perhaps of the kind of poet who creates by writing down individual lines, each of which contains within itself the whole of a future poem.

“Contains” is wrong, though. The effect is closer to what a great undergraduate poetry professor of mine was betting on when he would circle a single successful line in a page-long poem I had turned in and instruct me to “write a new poem around them.” Revising poetry—and especially bad poetry like what I was inflicting on my longsuffering professor—is often a practice akin to using disinfected “medical maggots” to clean a wound. They eat only the necrotic flesh, letting what remains heal cleanly so that the body can regain its original shape. If an undergraduate poet’s attempt to build a body consists entirely of deadwood and scaffolding, nothing alive apart from her bleary eyes and aching knees, far better to let them exist in amputated isolation in the hope that the connective tissue of a finished poem will grow up around them. But what if a poet were so good that she didn’t need any connective tissue?

In her best moments, Tereza Riedlbauchová is that good. Most of the poems are untitled, her use of punctuation is kept to the absolute minimum, and the lyrical heights of this book come in the form of lines dominated by individual, devastatingly powerful images. On these lines, in particular, she seems to deliberately eschew prepositions, and those that do appear tend to only refer to words within the same line, allowing each of them to exist as freestanding cognitive units. If what Wolfgang Iser called the “reading frame,” the amount of text a reader can actively keep in their conscious mind in any given moment, were reduced to a single line, her poems could still be understood surprisingly accurately. The effect is almost like something out of visual art—and, indeed, several poems in this book are ekphrastic—or single frames from a captivating movie:

Landscape of the oppressive past
children lost in it examine
silently the shape of a leaf
the inner beauty of radiant beings
springs from suffering
wet landscape of burdens and sadness
as if there were still reason to cry

Riedlbauchová situates the wet landscape within the rest of the poem without resorting to a comma to mark it as existing in apposition to the “landscape of the oppressive past,” or a verb to make it part of a logical sequence. The association is so self-evidently revelatory that the poet need not exhort readers to draw it and can rely on our minds to be the connective tissue she has cut away. This same effect is apparent in how sparingly the poet employs enjambments, which is a breath of fresh air considering how often they are overused as an easy magic trick in the contemporary English-language poetry scene. When enjambments are deployed, however, she most decidedly earns them:

I pull pieces of meat from my body and lay them
still warm beneath the soles of people’s feet

For all the flesh this book rips apart, it does so as part of a subtler project of fragmentation. As the translator puts it in his thoughtful afterword, “Tereza Riedlbauchová’s intensely passionate poems explore the thresholds and ruptures of bodies and the borders between the physical world and the imagination.” This is a world where Van Gogh carrying his severed ear or the speaker’s dead grandfather can enter a scene without passing through customs first, where her lovers are always drifting from city to city, and where perspective and geographical location shift freely and unapologetically.

The most essential gesture of fragmentation, however, can be found in the book’s repeated invocation of windows. In one particularly memorable poem, the speaker looks through a window that functions like one of the poet’s lines, enabling the reader to encounter an almost-surrealistic sight by presenting it in isolation:

people mixing something in a pan
only their hands visible

By enclosing a limited field of view and thus making an unimaginable sight gloriously imaginable, the recurring window enacts the cognitive enclosure of subjectivity and the linguistic enclosure of Riedlbauchová’s lines. Related imagery, such as fish inside an aquarium, a male figure battling against androgyny appearing imprisoned behind thick glass, or a suicide standing on a glass table in order to hang herself, haunts the book, to the point that its entire structure is built around two mirrored halves, “Black Sawn in the Mirror” and “White Swan.” This is the unifying conceit of a project that is profoundly skeptical of any attempt at unification, the fault line that paradoxically holds “Paris Notebook” together.

In addition to the virtuosity of the poet, this sense of wholeness discovered in the ruptured and incomplete owes a great deal to the skill of the translator, Stephan Delbos. As a practicing translator of poetry, I know firsthand that one of the greatest challenges such work entails is resisting the temptation to “overdesign” our sentences. Different languages make logical connections differently. A relationship between two ideas that can be expressed in a straightforward and unmarked way in one language may often sound convoluted way in another, which means that translators of poetry constantly run the risk of producing overly elaborate sentences in a misguided attempt to imitate the grammar of the original. That risk is compounded when working with Czech, which, as Delbos notes in his afterword, offers freer word order than English, and a lesser translator might have clogged the text with unnecessary logical-connector words prepositions in an attempt to make up for that lost syntactical freedom. Since the aesthetic value of Riedlbauchová’s poetry depends so heavily on her distinctively uncluttered “freestanding” lines, this would have been a tragic mistake, and the translator deserves to be commended for avoiding it. Furthermore, this translation is remarkably successful at reproducing the sound of the original, including subtle devices like consonance and assonance.

The end result is a truly striking book that will have great value both for English-language readers who wish to experience its unique “severed lyricism” for themselves and for those who will be able to take advantage of the bilingual presentation. In short, “Paris Notebook” is eminently worth your time. Given the strength of this offering, I for one will be watching “The Visible Spectrum” eagerly to see what else they publish in the months to come.

Reviewed by Isaac Stackhouse Wheeler