Jacques Roubaud: From The Loop

During the night, the mist on the window had turned to ice. I see that it was still night, six-thirty, seven o’clock; wintertime then, and dark outside; no details, only darkness; the windowpane covered with the patterns of the frozen mist; on the lowest pane, on the left-hand side of the window, at eye level, in the light; this light from an electric bulb, yellow against the intense darkness outside, opaque and wintry, clouded by the mist; not a uniform mist, as when it rains, but an almost transparent frost, forming patterns; a web of translucent patterns, with a certain thickness, the slight thickness of frost, but with variations in this thickness, and, because of these miniscule variations, forming patterns on the glass, like a vegetal network, an entire system of veins, a surface vegetation, a cluster of flat ferns; or a flower.

From The Brooklyn Rail, an excerpt from Jacques Roubaud's The Loop forthcoming from Dalkey Archive. This is the second part or branch of the six that make up The Great Fire of London.

The first volume Destruction was published in translation in 1991. Still to come (we hope) are translations of: Mathématique: récit, Poésie: récit, La Bibliothèque de Warburg and La Distraction.