Poetry

Two Francophone Poems

by Alain Mabanckou

translated by Nancy Naomi Carlson

A photograph of rocks, mostly submerged in the tide — Photo: Glenn Ruben Berg / Unsplash

[draw your strength]

draw your strength from the lifeless leaf
break all bonds until you can tie your fate
to the baobab trunk
don’t hold within yourself any dream discounted
on the public square
don’t look at the will-o’-the-wisp
constantly climb back up the slope
even if steep
the voices arriving from the other hill
are only echoes

[let’s ask the stone]

let’s ask the stone where to find Truth
it will tell us it’s in this earthly world
and only here
it’s in this earthly world where wind stirs
oceans twist and turn
waterways split
it’s in this earthly world where dreams
straddle borders
pierce invisible walls

Translations from the French

Photo by Shevaun Williams

Alain Mabanckou is a prolific francophone Congolese poet and novelist who currently lives in LA, where he teaches at UCLA. The author of six volumes of poetry and six novels, he is the winner of the Grand Prix de la Littérature, the Sub-Saharan African Literature Prize, and the Prix Renaudot. He was named WLT’s Puterbaugh Fellow in 2016 (see WLT, Sept. 2016, 62–71).

Nancy Naomi Carlson won the 2022 Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize. She serves as the translations editor for On the Seawall. Translator of eleven books and author of five others, her poems and translations have been reviewed in the New York Times. Her translation of Gestuary (Seagull Books, 2026), from where “Scraps of a Portrait” is drawn, arrives in spring 2026.

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