from “Common Life”

Excerpt
Written By Stéphane Bouquet, Translated By Lindsay Turner

Stéphane Bouquet, transl. Lindsay Turner | Common Life | Nightboat Books | 2023 | 128 Pages

Monsters
Play for eleven actors or more, or fewer

Characters

- CLÉMENT
- MÉLISSA
- VLADILEN
- AMINE
- MANON (THE GOVERNMENT EMPLOYEE)
- COCO
- AURÉLIE
- KEVIN (THE BARE-CHESTED GUY)
- FRANCK PROJOT
- VÉRA
- HÉLENE

NEIGHBORS, COLLEAGUES, FRIENDS

- AN INTELLECTUAL COUPLE (A WOMAN, A MAN)
- MYRTILLE
- THE CLOTHED GUY
- THE WRITER
- THE WOMAN IN THE PINK JACKET
- THE WOMAN IN THE BLUE CARDIGAN
- THE HOUSEKEEPER
- MARK (ONLINE VOICE 1)
- TANGUY (ONLINE VOICE 2)

THE DISTANT

- THE SAFARI COUPLE (A WOMAN, A MAN)
- THE OTHER HOUSEKEEPER
- THE VOICES OF WORK
- THE ORDINARY CITIZEN

12.

A woman at her desk. Around her, the characters from her novel.

THE WRITER: In the novel I’m writing, the storm seems like it really wants to arrive. It’s dying to start. A group of young people run to take shelter beneath a corrugated metal roof. The rain comes. Rain everywhere, instantly making rivers on the ground, which form deltas.

MANON: We could play a game,

THE WRITER: says Manon, five minutes later, opening a chocolate bar. She breaks apart the squares and passes them out.

AMINE: A game where all you have to do to keep playing is to play—something that happens over time, like being survivors on a raft.

MANON: If this keeps up,

THE WRITER: says Manon, who looks at the sky, which is not letting up at all, not lightening anywhere,

MANON: Because it looks like it’s going to keep this up.

AMINE: We’re floating through time on this raft. The animals seem tame and watch us from the welcoming banks. We spin through rapids in the gentle water like in a water park. Like

HÉLENE: Shit!

THE WRITER: says Hélène, because the gutter’s just col- lapsed on her. Soaked, she undresses, wrings out her clothes, and dries her hair. Everyone covers her with a piece of their own clothing. It’s not cold and not frightening. These are the new storms of global warming.

CLÉMENT: The game I’m Thinking Of?

VLADILEN: In Indonesian, one kid is anak and more kids are anak-anak. Ngala boeah means to pick fruit by yourself. Ngalara boeah to pick fruit with other people.

AURÉLIE: We could pick raspberries, all of us. We could make jam, then eat the jam, memories of today in every spoonful.

HÉLÈNE: New definition of jam: preserved time.

CLÉMENT: In Indonesian, first person singular is “he” or “she.” Third person singular is “I.” Imagine a world in which I am the third person, never the first.

THE WRITER: Clément and Vladilen had traveled across Indonesia together the summer before. In Jakarta, whites and westerners and Christians or people from Christiandom party in shopping malls surrounded by electrified fencing. The cars go through explosive detectors before they enter.

AURÉLIE: In Jakarta, where men and women dancing
can’t touch either, they come towards each other, moving their hips delicately, and then retreat. Then advance. Then retreat. If the women are prostitutes, you have to give them a dollar bill each time.

THE WRITER: Aurélie wasn’t on the trip but Vladilen told her. Vladilen taught her to dance that dance and now they all dance beneath the roof of corrugated metal vibrating in the storm. While advancing-retreating Mélissa says,

MÉLISSA: People think that sailboats are pushed by the wind. But it’s actually the opposite: the wind accumulates on one side of the sail and creates a vacuum on the other side, and the sailboat advances to fill it.

MANON: Because sailboats are like everything else. They’re afraid of loss. What are you afraid of?

THE WRITER: Manon asks Vladilen, with whom she is dancing. Vladilen makes an advance-retreat then answers her like he’s holding out a dollar.

VLADILEN: I’m afraid of nights where I dream I’m not sleeping and the whole of the dream is the whole of the night I’m not sleeping and it’s interminable.

MANON: Because it’s night and because it’s loss.

AMINE: Since we’re all together on the raft, there’s nothing to be afraid of. In Indonesian, sugar is gula and candy is gula- gula, I think.

HÉLÈNE: I think maybe I found a house for our squat. I didn’t want to say anything yet because I’m superstitious. I’m going to keep an eye on it for two or three weeks, and then I’ll take you there to see it. It’s really big, just right for us I think. Very quiet. We’ll finally be able to live together. Maybe. Meanwhile I think you should keep looking too. I’ll know in three weeks.

CLÉMENT: Where is it?

HÉLÈNE: I’m not saying anything else. I’m superstitious.

From Common Life by Stéphane Bouquet, translated by Lindsay Turner.
Copyright © 2016 by Editions Champ Vallon.
Translation Copyright © 2023 by Lindsay Turner.
Reprinted with permission of Nightboat Books.

Stéphane Bouquet, Translated By Lindsay Turner

Stéphane Bouquet is the author of eight collections of poetry, as well as essays on poetry. He has published books on filmmakers such as Sergei Eisenstein and Gus Van Sant, as well as screenplays for feature films, nonfiction films, and short films, and has translated poets including Paul Blackburn, James Schuyler, and Peter Gizzi into French. He’s also interested in performance arts and has given workshops for choreographers at the Centre National de la danse in Paris and for actors and stage directors at La Manufacture in Lausanne, Switzerland. Bouquet is a recipient of a 2003 Prix de Rome and a 2007 Mission Stendhal Award, and has been featured in France and internationally at festivals, residencies, and events, including the 2017 Frankfurt Book Fair and the 2018 Toronto Festival of Authors. He holds an MA in economics from Université Panthéon-Sorbonne.

Lindsay Turner is the author of Songs & Ballads (2018) and the poetry chapbook A Fortnight. Her translations from the French include books of poetry and philosophy by Stéphane Bouquet, Éric Baratay, Souleymane Bachir Diagne, Anne Dufourmantelle, Frédéric Neyrat, Ryoko Sekiguchi, and Richard Rechtman. She has twice received French Voices Grants for her translations. Originally from northeast Tennessee, she holds an AB from Harvard College, a Masters in cinema from the Université Paris III Sorbonne-Nouvelle, an MFA in poetry from New York University, and a PhD in English from the University of Virginia. She lives in Cleveland, where she is Assistant Professor in the English Department at Case Western University.

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