The Vitals, written by Marie de Quatrebarbes and translated from the French by Aiden Farrell, examines the chasm of loss and desire to “conjugate the moments outside of me, spent so far from you, with this distance that is ‘I see’ and you who are ‘so far from me.’” Written in lyrical, diaristic fragments that take place between July and December, the poems certify de Quatrebarbes as a master of the short prose poetry form, which she imagines as nestled matryoshka dolls. Each poem is titled with the day of the month as the speaker lives her life and thoughts intrude. “Say again, do mourners have a singular?” asks de Quatrebarbes, as she lives and re-lives: “The day of his departure–the eye simply wanted to take stock.”
Farrell’s English translation is a deft reflection of the poet’s angular and defamiliarizing experiments with syntax, discontinuity, and memory; in this interview, I spoke with him on the ongoing process of translational work, its intersections with his personal writing, and the ways in which de Quartrebarbes subverts language.
Tiffany Troy (TT): What is the act of literary translation to you?
Aiden Farrell (AF): I like that you’ve framed literary translation as an act, because that’s exactly what it is, and any definition that tries to go beyond the action of translation has to be taken with a grain of salt—which is to say that translation is nothing if not a process, necessarily changing from project to project and from translator to translator.
A writing practice necessitates a reading practice; translation is both at the same time, and also not exactly, because when I’m reading to translate I’m not reading as I otherwise would, and when I’m writing my translation I’m not writing as I otherwise would, but I’m still doing both. To varying degrees, every poem I read asks me to reinvent the way I read poetry, and calls attention to my standards for reading, and then also for writing. The same goes for translating—I have to reinvent, surrender just enough of my instincts that I can be open to receiving what the original poem is giving me, but also hold on just enough that I can respond accordingly. I have to disappear so as to appear, only a second later.
The act of literary translation celebrates the impossibility of purity, at least in how I experience it. I have to accept imperfection, and then also take advantage of it, embody it. When I think like this, I start to get the idea that all writing is translation—it’s just translating something other than another text. Words are imperfect translations of their referents, so literary translation is translating one system of imperfect translations into another such system. It’s kind of impossible, and two languages start to become two entirely different mediums, as distinct from one another as sculpture is from painting.
Translation shows me that I’m limited, and within the realization of limitation is where completely new action and understanding can take on some form. Translation asks me to think of myself as both a medium and a caretaker—a medium in that I filter and a caretaker in that I filter attentively. Translation takes great care and listening, and a thesaurus.
That’s what the act of translation is in its private practice to me, right now. On a more public level, the act of translation very simply connects us in space, time, and concept, reverberating out from the fact that we are already connected. Translation is also what’s happening when I retell a story that someone told me. It’s almost about the fact that we are translations of each other, imperfect communicators, finishing each other’s sentences all the time.
TT: In the afterword to The Vitals you wrote:
What might be primarily looked for in The Vitals is not coherence but the manipulation of sound as the form coherence takes—everything about how coherence registers instead of why or what it registers. It becomes clear then, that this poetry is not entirely disinterested in coherence or definition.
How did you go about surrendering and reinventing these diary entries in their English translation?
AF: Well, I’m not really surrendering and reinventing de Quatrebarbes’s diary entries so much as surrendering my reading of them, allowing my reading to be as open as possible to all the things they’re doing. How this happens is with attention and practice; what it looks like is reading and then writing an adjacent version. What I’d draw from my answer to the first question is that the process of surrendering and reinventing differed from sentence to sentence of Marie’s text, which is just as much a result of the reconstructed, fragmentary, and disjunctive nature of the text as it is my reading of it. In terms of what I did not do, or hope I didn’t do, was to translate each sentence as if there was only one way to do so. I tried not to translate each sentence in a way that would explain it or make it somehow more palatable than it is in the French, while also acknowledging that not every French reader is the same.
Beyond the fact that it is my translation, I hope not to have claimed the text any more than is necessary to adapt it into English. I first asked how the words sound, then asked about what they mean—even though I doubt my ability to treat them separately, or that it is valuable to do so. I think The Vitals is a text that prioritizes material before meaning, and I was constantly asking myself how I could treat my translation that way. Trial and error. Making gut decisions. Asking for help. Thesaurus.
TT: What is one example of a challenge you’ve encountered in translating this work?
AF: The Vitals is filled with modifications of colloquial gestures and expressions. That was a consistently difficult aspect of translating. The mix of registers and associations, carried simply by the language itself as opposed to the narrative, is a big part of the text’s play between intimacy and distance, in my mind.
In the poem “17” of the September section, Marie modifies a French expression: “Les bras m’en tombent.” In the book, she modifies it as “Bras (ponctuations) : m’en tombent.” I was unfamiliar with the expression before reading its modification in Les vivres, and I think my first draft of the translation was pretty direct: “Arms (punctuations): fall from me,” or something like that. I later asked Marie what was going on there, did some research, and found that it’s an expression used when one is faced with an event, situation, a sight that’s difficult to believe. Expressions like this I feel are particularly challenging to translate for a number of reasons: units of meaning that are often deeply evocative of surreal images (“my arms fall from me” is logistically odd, though a more accurate translation might be “my arms fall to my sides”—the sense of being “disarmed”) and feelings that are seen and felt in common. Even more than that, though, is that expressions can transcend context and carry their connotations with them. The expression in English I ended up with is “My eyes fail me.” Keeping the subject of the sentence focused on the body, while not the same body part, pleased me, and the idea of one’s senses failing them is consistent with the attitude of incredulity. It reduces the body to a kind of tool, in the same way that Marie brings focus to the material of the body, and so its impermanence, its flimsiness. The translation became “Eyes (punctuations): they fail me.”
This is also one moment of many that Marie associates and combines conventions of language with conventions of spatial perception, and in so doing, subverts them. The parenthetical does a lot of that work, linking a body part (“arms”) to punctuation. Associating structures of the body, as they relate to space, with structures of writing, as they relate to textual meaning, orients them both as more than they appear, especially when they are used as vehicles to convey the senses as untrustworthy. The text is a body and the body is a text. The text is as bodily as the body is textual, their respective functions included.
TT: What was the collaborative process like, from translating and exchanging drafts of translation with the author to its final publication? Structurally, were there any choices in terms of what to include or exclude from the chronology’s diaristic poems, to allow for recurring motifs to be more pronounced?
AF: The first collaborative part of the process was in translation workshops, and I’m indebted to those translators for helping me find a language for the translation. Beyond that, collaborating with Marie was fantastic, The Vitals being the first book of hers that I’ve translated. From our conversations, she’s very much of the mind that what a translator does, first and foremost, is compose a text, which is to say that the translation necessarily takes on its own character, in various respects. She trusted me with the text and felt that for the translation to be successful, I had to inhabit it and make it my own. I’m tempted to feel that our conversations outside of the text have been just as important in how the translation came to be; I don’t think they can be clearly separated from the conversations we had directly about the text, and I find that very important. When we collaborated directly, I sent her documents with questions and thoughts on sometimes broader, sometimes more particular aspects of the text that I was having trouble with, options for what I was thinking, and asked what her intentions were for gestures that were appearing opaque to me. She responded with her thoughts, and we went back and forth until I felt comfortable making a decision.
Matvei Yankelevich, editor at World Poetry, has been an incredible steward for the book, editorially as well as promotionally. There were a number of other readers who looked over the final draft before I submitted the final manuscript, and the text did go through a number of changes once we entered production, but none of them were structural. On a structural level, I felt strongly about preserving all elements of the original text that were possible to preserve. Those changes did not feel necessary, and making them would’ve been fixing something that wasn’t broken. For example, we decided to retain the lack of ordinal numbers in the titles of the poems, except for the 1st of each section, i.e., 1st, followed by 2, 3, 4, instead of 2nd, 3rd, and 4th, which is a French stylistic convention, not an English one.
TT: You are a poet, translator, editor, and curator. How has your translation practice influenced your own work in the literary field?
AF: Translation has most markedly affected my writing practice. It’s now roughly split fifty-fifty between the two. It’s opened up my writing practice; both writing and translation involve different degrees of listening, but I think translation has really helped develop my listening muscle. It changes how I relate to the medium and to reading, as well as to the concept of authorship.
As an editor and curator, committing to translation has also opened me up to a literary scene outside of English-speaking countries. Slowly getting up to date on contemporary French poetry, seeing what people are doing today, is incredibly liberating. I’m inspired by the publishing, curatorial, and even public and collective funding models in the literary landscape in France, along with Europe and elsewhere. Seeing what’s happening in literary work globally gives me a lot of ideas about how and where I want to take publishing and editorial practices.
TT: What are you working on today?
AF: Today I’m shopping around two of my own completed manuscripts, and working on two more. I’m also sending around my translation of a different book by Marie and working on a third. I’m working on translations of the French poet Christophe Tarkos, as well as a hybrid novel by Théo Robine-Langlois. I have new publishing projects brewing, and two chapbooks coming in 2026.
Aiden Farrell is a poet and translator living in Brooklyn, NY. His translation of The Vitals by Marie de Quatrebarbes was published by World Poetry Books in May 2025, de Quatrebarbes’s first full-length appearance in English translation. His work has appeared in SPAMzine, Black Sun Lit, Asymptote Journal, and Denver Quarterly, among others. He is the author of lilac lilac (Portable Press @ Yo-Yo Labs, 2023), and the books control and good witch are forthcoming in 2026. With Ryan Cook, he co-curates the Unnamed Reading Series.
Tiffany Troy is the author of Dominus (BlazeVOX [books]) and the chapbook When Ilium Burns (Bottlecap Press). She translated Catalina Vergara’s diamonds & rust (Toad Press International Chapbook Series). She is Managing Editor at Tupelo Quarterly, Associate Editor of Tupelo Press, Book Review Co-Editor at The Los Angeles Review, and Co-Editor of Matter.
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