To invade pacifically

For Salah Stétié, the poetic word reigns supreme, but the mystical word-intranslation is capable of poetic miracle: a translingual pacifist invasion. Stétié's complex oeuvre is imbued with the history of nineteenth- and twentieth-century French poetic modernism, which has witnessed the onslaught of one consecutive call for radical rupture after another, but he has always reminded the reader of continuity instead—of evolution over revolution, resurrection over insurrection. Following the massive swell of Tristan Tzara, Gérasim Luca, Isidoure Isou, Eugène Ionesco, and Henri Michaux, whom he calls poetic ‘destructeurs prophétiques’ [prophetic destructors] of language, and in the wake of André Breton, Antonin Artaud, and Aimé Césaire, ‘des barbares […] issus du coeur même, splendide, de la langue’ [barbarians […] issuing forth from the very heart, splendid, of language] (Le Français, l'autre langue 22), Stétié tacitly acknowledges and concurs with Jean-Paul Sartre's estimation that the ‘but profond’ [profound goal] of French-language poetry since Mallarmé, the Surrealists, and the Négritude poets has been ‘cette autodestruction du langage’ [this autodestruction of language] (‘Orphée noir’ xx). As a poet and translator invested in transmissions and continuities, and especially in connecting the episodes or links (Ar. ḥalaqāt) of Arabic poetic antecedents to their modern French iterations, Stétié takes care throughout his oeuvre to nuance what may otherwise appear to be yet another aspiration for radical rupture or poetic revolution. He clarifies, for instance, in a concise summary within the context of a personal account of his long relationship with language, that not all can or should be lost: ‘Tu casses, dit la langue, ce qui est cassable, mais pas l'irremplaçable qui est l’âme et la lumière de cristal’ [You break, says language, all that is breakable, but not the irreplaceable which is the soul and light of crystal] (Le Français 22). The semantic refractions and transformations expressed through the metaphor of crystal form an apt description of the translingual affinities and differences that Stétié seeks to link together as ḥalaqāt, as part of the same chain, by means of his translations, critical essays, and poetry.

Stétié complements his intellectual formation as a contemporary French poet with his Arabic and Islamic backgrounds. In this light, Stétié's life and oeuvre go hand in hand.