Jean Fanchette’s poems often treat the subject of exile from a distant homeland and dwelling in a metropole that confers outsider status. Filled with murmurs, dimly lit landscapes, and seaside expanses, his verse grasps at receding memories through sensory detail.
Hassan Melehy has succeeded in a translation that is as poetic as it is worldly: Jean Fanchette’s poetry is reinvented in English by Melehy to bring the reader its exilic, oceanic, archipelagiac consciousness while at the same time highlighting its dedication to, and play with, form that are deeply aware of the history of French poetics. —Anjali Prabhu, Edward Said Chair in Comparative Literature, University of California, Los Angeles
Fanchette celebrates a “life embraced / As a perspective of escapes and returns.” These lines suggest that exile, that indelible watchword in Fanchette’s work, has more than a negative valence; errancy is “embraced” and welcomed. He remains “Open to the wind that comes from elsewhere.” So is his translator Hassan Melehy, who demonstrates exquisite sensitivity to the vocabulary of Fanchette’s Mauritian landscapes. —Alexander Dickow, author of The Distance, and You In It
Originally from New England, Hassan Melehy lived all over the USA before settling in North Carolina in 2004, where he lives with his wife, Dorothea Heitsch. His first poetry collection, A Modest Apocalypse, was published by Eyewear in 2017. In addition to his creative writing he has written three books of criticism, most recently Kerouac: Language, Poetics, and Territory (Bloomsbury, 2016). He has translated works of criticism, philosophy, and social science from French, including Jacques Rancière’s The Names of History (University of Minnesota Press, 1994). He teaches at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.
Born on the Indian Ocean island of Mauritius, Jean Fanchette (1932–92) was a psychiatrist, writer, and editor who spent his adult life in Paris. While still in medical school he won several French national poetry prizes. In 1959, with the support of Anaïs Nin, he founded the French-English bilingual review Two Cities, which featured the work of many future notables, including Michel Deguy, Lawrence Durrell, and Octavio Paz. Under the Two Cities imprint, Fanchette published Minutes to Go (1959), the first “cut-up” experiments of William Burroughs, Brion Gysin, Sinclair Beiles, and Gregory Corso. In his region of origin Fanchette is highly celebrated: every two years since 1992, the Jean Fanchette Prize has been awarded to a writer from the islands of Mauritius, Rodrigues, Réunion, Madagascar, the Comoros, and Seychelles.
