Synopsis
Poetry. Translated from the French by Kathleen McGookey. WE'LL SEE, originally published in France in 1995 as On verra bien by le dé bleu, is Georges L. Godeau's first book translated into English. This is a collection of ninety brief prose poems, most of which focus on ordinary people and events. Godeau's prose poems are disarmingly and deceptively simple, yet resonate with each other. Godeau has said, "A poem should not last longer than its emotion." Still, his prose poems capture, almost photographically, moments of everyday life. Jacques Reda has said that Godeau's poetry is poetry of "what happens when nothing happens." In his account of a day spent with Godeau, Xavier Person observed that his poems were a lot like his modest house in Magné, France—a little cold, excessively clean, very tidy, and without a lot of furniture—poems that contained only the most straightforward and impassioned elements.
"In Georges Godeau's WE'LL SEE, the ordinary, quotidian details of everyday life reveal the miraculous lurking there, and each poem becomes a window on the absolute. These poems are quiet, efficient, but unsettling in their deep resonances. Although little happens in Godeau's poems, each is filled with lucent, telling particulars. His poems, so calm on the surface, accrue enormous power. Like frames in a movie, each poem appears almost static, but in congress, they span immense psychic and spiritual geographies. Godeau exposes a world in which the marvelous is all around us, a world in which 'Providence has blue eyes.' Godeau's terse prose poems are the perfect vehicle for his modest, unassuming voice, and Kathleen McGookey has rendered Godeau's laconic utterances in colloquial American English that is true to the original, and absolutely convincing in translation."—Gary Young
About the Author
Georges L. Godeau was born in 1921 in Villiers-en-Plaine, France, and worked as an engineer, specializing in rural areas. He also devoted himself to writing; his first book was published in 1962 and he published fifteen more books before his death in 1999. Several more volumes have appeared posthumously. His work won the Prix du Livre in Poitou- Charentes in 1991. While his work has been widely translated into Japanese and Russian, English translations, aside from a few in the early seventies, have appeared only since 2001.
"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.
