Tag: Heather McHugh

Event

On By PGR NairIn PoetryLeave a comment

“Event”

by Jean Follain

Translated by Heather McHugh

Everything is an event

for those who know how to tremble

the droplet that falls

carrying reflections

of barns and stables

the sound of a pin

falling on marble

milk boiling

at day’s end

the moments that drag

in colorless rooms

when the woman falls asleep.

Jean Follain (1903–1971) was a French poet known for his minimalist lyricism, evoking ordinary moments charged with quiet transcendence. “Event” encapsulates his recurring theme: the extraordinary hidden within the everyday, seen through the lens of acute awareness and emotional sensitivity.

The poem’s central idea is contained in its opening line:

“Everything is an event / for those who know how to tremble.”

Follain suggests that true perception requires vulnerability—to “tremble” is to feel deeply, to be open to the smallest details of existence. For such people, even the mundane becomes momentous: a drop of water, falling, carries within in it the image of whole landscape . “The sound of a pin / falling on marble” evokes both fragility and precision—a moment so delicate it becomes monumental in stillness.

“Milk boiling / at day’s end” places us in a domestic setting, ordinary yet intimate, contrasting with the metaphysical scope of the opening lines.

The poem democratizes experience—no hierarchy exists between great historical events and the quiet gestures of domestic life. Everything matters, provided we are capable of sensing it.

“Event” captures Follain’s belief that poetry resides in perception, not in the magnitude of what is perceived. The poem is almost a moral statement: to live fully, one must remain sensitive enough to tremble at life’s smallest occurrences.

THE BEAUTIFUL DAY

On By PGR NairIn Poetry, Uncategorized2 Comments

THE BEAUTIFUL DAY

By Jean Follain ( French Minimalist poet)
Translated by Heather McHugh

Insects and fish
move from the shade to the light
the fruit hangs still on the tree
brushed by the fine wing
of a flamboyant bird
then a dull one.
The blind man hardly thinks
of his missing eyes
in the garden of wine-red flowers.
Suddenly the sun in the drawing room
lights a large painting that shows
rioters surging wildly into sight.

A delicate and layered poem, “The Beautiful Day” uses serene imagery and subtle shifts in tone to reflect on how easily tranquility can be shadowed by unseen violence or remembered suffering. It unfolds with a deep awareness of contrast—between serenity and disturbance, the visible and the hidden, nature and human turmoil. It’s a meditation on the fragility of peace and the haunting presence of what lies beyond the beautiful moment.

By moving from a garden’s quiet details to a painting of rioters lit up indoors, the poem subtly asks us about what we see, what we miss, and how sudden revelations (of violence, of reality) change the character of a peaceful day. It’s a poem about beauty and disturbance, perception and ignorance, outer calm and inner turmoil.

Heather McHugh in her introduction says the following about the poem:

“And in “The Beautiful Day,” the aristocratic idleness of the garden (appearing for all the world—*brushed,” posed—like the subject of a more romantic art) is disturbed by the image of the insurgent mob in a living-room painting. Which is more alive, more real? We feel we know. We know we feel. Still, the man in the garden is blind. The seer is present in these poems not as the fashionably poetic first person but rather as the subverted designer of the seen. We, the readers, have a place here too. Is it we who lull, senseless, in the garden of the decorative, blind to the blood in the living room? The poem s both subject and object here.”

Source : D’Apres Tout: Poems by Jean Follain. Image created using AI)