Julien Burri

Jusqu'à la transparence

« Les mots étrécissent comme les jours d'hiver chuchotés, il n'y a plus que leurs formes sur les lèvres »

The young writer Julien Burri (born in 1980) mostly focuses on narrative prose. His collections of poetry are short and few and far between. «Jusqu'à la transparence» is made up of short and very pure poems in verse, which, like ice are also very dense. And cold. They are animated by a reserved, aching lyricism through which a complicated love is expressed and simultaneously broken down by its impossible roots, an unfathomable emptiness and renewed desire that provides the energy to go on living. To give expression to one’s body or words is to expose them to the fact that they will eventually - quickly or slowly, in a more or less bitter way - be broken down. The poet nevertheless wants to «sew winter with spring». To this end he places only a moderate amount of confidence in language which suffers from the same finite quality as the body.

With its unadorned style, the book appears dark and defeatist upon first glance, but is ultimately perhaps an ode to love and to poetry once one carefully untwists the threads of tenderness and derision, the sense of belonging to the world and the biting irony. The strength of this terse and lucid collection lies in the energy it draws from the tension between hope and discouragement, and feeds into a sort of rebirth of the self.

(Françoise Delorme, transl. by Andrea Mason Willfratt)

Translation of title: To Transparency

Editions de l'Aire, Vevey 2004

ISBN: 978-2-88108-678-0