The Poem :
Dawn rises, grows, settles on the city
We’ve come through the night and not been set free
I hear the buses and the quiet hum
Of social exchange. I’m overcome with presence.
Today will happen. Invisible surfaces
Separate our suffering selves in the air
Then form and harden at a terrible pace;
But the body, still our pact with the body.
We’ve come through strain and desire
Childhood and dreams still pass us by
Not much there in a lifetime of smiling
We’re prisoners in our own clear selves.
Michel Houellebecq
« The Art of Struggle », 1996
Translated by Delphine Grass and Timothy Mathews
” All our words, our all our songs, all our languages, are imperfect translations of our confused thoughts. When an idea forms, always below the level of intelligence, it is an uncertain field of sensations before being announced, or written, like a night sky in which a hoard of indistinct stars are glittering. If reason and grammar manage to extract violently a phrase from this amalgam, it is poetry that despite all succeeds in preserving the fertile profusion of the original idea. Such are the metamorphoses that constitute this exhibition, those transformations that shimmer with an initial sense while dissolving the frontiers. ” Jean de Loisy and Sungwon Kim co-curators of the exhibition