[Death is a daisy sleeping]
translated from the French by Emilie Moorhouse
Death is a daisy sleeping
At the foot of a madonna in heat
And those thousand delicate odors
Dark like an armpit, bloody like a heart
Also sleep in the bodies of naked women
Who bed in the fields or search the streets
For the poorly gilded strawberry of love
La mort est une marguerite qui dort
Aux pieds d’une madone en chaleur
Et les mille délicates puanteurs
Sombres comme une aisselle, saignantes comme un cœur
Dorment elles aussi dans les corps des femmes nues
Qui couchent dans les champs ou qui cherchent dans les rues
La fraise mal dorée de l’amour
“[Death is a daisy sleeping]” from Emerald Wounds: Selected Poems. Copyright © 1953, 1955, 1958, 1959, 1960, 1965, 1967, 1976, 1982, 1985, 1986, 1991, 2014, 2023 by Cyrille Mansour for the Estate of Joyce Mansour. Translations and Introduction copyright © 2023 by Emilie Moorhouse. Reprinted with the permission of City Lights Books. www.citylights.com
Joyce Mansour
Joyce Mansour was born Joyce Patricia Adès in Bowden, England, in 1928 to a Jewish family of Syrian descent. When she was still an infant, her family moved to Egypt. She suffered through the loss of her mother to cancer at fifteen years old and the death of her first husband just six months into their marriage, when she was eighteen. Mansour studied in England, Egypt, and Switzerland. She learned to speak and write in French when she married her second husband, a Francophone Egyptian.
Emilie Moorhouse
Emilie Moorhouse holds an MFA from the University of British Columbia. Raised in a French-speaking household in Toronto, she now lives in Montreal, where she works as a teacher, writer, translator, and environmentalist.