In French, Tombeau de Lou. At its origin, the death of the childhood friend, the chosen sister, swept away by a sudden cancer. She was fifty-three years old. Like the poet. The one who remains, the survivor, the inconsolable woman. That” the anecdote. Afterwards “if an afterwards is possible, the urgency presses, the need to find words for the pain and questions that death raises, strewn at random in revolt, in violence, in memory, in mourning and in dread. To translate the hasty metamorphosis of the ever-so-living into the ever-so-dead. To give meaning, albeit fragile, albeit mortal, to the meaningless. To relate this little story of intimate suffering “all in all, banal “to the great history of international proportions. In this literary tomb of eleven songs, the need to attempt a utopian reconciliation: embrace all at once the immensity of the emptiness, the chaos, our fragile humanity, and our ardent desire for resistance.

Denise Desautels was born in Montreal. She won the Prix de la Fondation Les Forges for Leçons de Venice(1990), the Governor General's Award and the Prix de la revue Estuaire for Le saut de l'ange (1992), the Prix de la Société des écrivains canadiens and the Prix de la Société Radio-Canada for Tombeau de Lou(2000). In 1999 she received La Médaille Échelon vermeil, the highest honour given by the city of Paris.

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Alisa Belanger is an Assistant Professor of French at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey. She holds a doctorate in French and Francophone Studies from the University of California, Los Angeles. In addition to translations of fiction and academic texts, she has published articles on Quebec poetry in the U.S. and Canada.

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Thanks to Denise Desautels, “he book-tomb is no longer just a monument, another stone in the cemetery of literary time. It is the tearing apart of the present.??Catherine Mavrikakis