First published in French, Exactitudes (Paris: Bernard Grasset, 1930)

Diane Josefowicz

Literary Translation

Spring in the Forum

One day I wandered along the Via Sacra…—HORACE

A warm poppy from which fled a yellow butterfly like a frozen bit of honey on the wing; a dark rose, shriveled and odorless, torn from the pure basin of the Vestals; a green fig, taut with rounded sides, with its jasper jet of milk and fuzzy leaf, picked from just the spot where Antony harangued the people after the death of Caesar, this is what Rome recumbent has deposited — O nature, O eternal life! — in my hands today.

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The Star of Venus

Is it to die, then, that I sought you out?

The star of Venus burns so bright as to seem a narrow silver sun, a closed hand sending diamond arrows through the indigo of Roman nights. Below me, on the terrace, a palm tree dies of indolence; some roses, some little palms in clay pots appear to grow slowly, without purpose, in the shade. The street drowses; a plane tree scents the feeble, near-motionless wind. The silence is itself surprised to meet nothing that breaks it; a mysterious desire pervades all things, irritated, tensed in expectation of sensuality and death. In the harsh glow of a lamppost, a low house shines, white, with the whiteness of lightning inside a storm cloud. 

I would like a man to pass by and kill the woman he loves in the street…

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Anna de Noailles (1876-1933), a friend and confidante of Marcel Proust, was a poet and novelist associated with La Nouvelle Revue Française, founded in 1908, which, in association with Gallimard, became one of the leading publishers of fin-de-siècle French literature.

Diane Josefowicz is a novelist, editor, and historian. Her debut novel, Ready, Set, Oh, was published in 2022 by Flexible Press; a novella, L’Air du Temps (1985), is coming next year from Regal House. With Jed Z. Buchwald, she is the author of two histories of French Egyptology, The Zodiac of Paris (2010) and The Riddle of the Rosetta (2020), both published by Princeton University Press. She translated “On Religious Systems,” a lost manuscript by Jean-François Champollion; the translation appears in The Allure of the Ancient (Brill, 2022). Her fiction has appeared most recently in Conjunctions, Fence, Sou’wester, The Saint Ann’s Review, and Litro. She also serves as Reviews Editor at Necessary Fiction, Associate Fiction Editor at West Trade Review, and Managing Editor of The Victorian Web, the internet’s oldest and largest website devoted to Victoriana.