Clouds, graphite pencil, acrylic and watercolour, 2022 © Genevieve Guetemme (50 x 60cm)

Geneviève Guetemme (France)

Skies Trees Hands and More

Richard and I met in 2015 and immediately discovered a common interest in combining genres while exploring both visuality and languages. He had just completed Notness and we decided to do something together for the launch of the book at the University Library in Cambridge. This resulted in a five-minute silent film that explored the fluidity of water and air. It was our first collaboration and it led to others: a set of poem-cards for the launch of Changing, a video for the Albero Project (*), and black powder drawings for The Blue Butterfly. Each work was studied and discussed at length. I was always given complete freedom while discovering, with great interest, the details of Richard’s vision.

I enjoyed meeting him regularly at home in Cambridge for a coffee and a chat, in his living room and office, where book-covered walls, dotted with carefully chosen images, constantly nourished our conversations on trees, clouds, music, books, art and translation, as well as children, living abroad ...

I remember the compiling of the special issue of the French journal NU(e), dedicated to him in 2018 (**); and I was very pleased to initiate a set of connections, still in progress, with French academics and poets. Seven poems from The Blue Butterfly were published by the French writer and editor Laurine Rousselet in her bilingual and quarterly poetry brochure, Cahiers de l’approche, which she has directed since 2011. And recently, a group of students for the master’s degree at the University of Orléans have been introduced to Richard’s poetic world, providing French translations both of a selection of papers and of his unpublished riddles for children (a bilingual edition of which is under way).

Our collaboration has grown slowly, layer by layer, as we have worked on Richard’s multivocal poetry, intertwining languages and thoughts on translation, memory, and identity in relation to tradition, mythical thought and world literature. My contribution to Richard’s œuvre may perhaps be seen as one of the many still expanding “turns” – “voltas”, ‘walks’, ‘strolls’ (***) – with no beginning and no end, that he is so fond of. I am glad to explore the visual elements of a body of work, whose sound corporality, printed consistency and bodily solidity stand out yet dissolve themselves, so calling into question the limits of the work itself.

I dedicate the cloud-drawing above to Richard’s methodical, constrained yet resolutely free poetry, as it moves steadily towards the limits of our continuously evolving, human and natural landscape.

(*) Involving three versions of Richard’s chant-poem Tree: the English and the Irish (tr. Gabriel Rosenstock) in voiceover dialogue (set by Derek Ball) and the Italian (tr. Silvia Pio) as scrolling-down background. For these three versions, and seventeen others, see also A Forest of Trees.

(**) NU(e) 65, L’œuvre poétique de Richard Berengarten, coordonné par Marie Chabbert, Margaret Rigaud et Anthony Rudolf; direction, Béatrice Bonhomme, Hervé Bosio.

(***) See Volta, A Multilingual Anthology and Richard’s introduction Border/Lines.

Back to introduction here.

Next contribution here.