Differentials: Poetry, Poetics, Pedagogy

of miracles is three, that is, Father, Son and Holy Ghost, who are three

and one, then this lady was accompanied by the number nine to convey

that she was a nine, that is, a miracle, of which the root, that is, of the

miracle, is nothing other than the miraculous Trinity itself. Perhaps a

more subtle mind could ¤nd a still more subtle reason for it, but this

is the one which I perceive and which pleases me the most.

Roubaud’s 9 × 9 × 9 structure at once pays homage to and inverts the Dan-
tean cosmos. Like the Vita Nuova, Quelque chose noir memorializes the be-
loved dead woman, but Roubaud’s love is not an idealized image of female
perfection but his actual wife, whose body he knows intimately and whose
photographic representations, both her own and those of others, are all too
“real.” In Roubaud’s secular cycle, there is no afterlife for “you,” no vision
beyond material death. Accordingly, the number nine shifts from referent to
hidden formal principle, the two-year cycle moving to the near silence of the
coda Rien (“Nothing,” 147–48), whose page is all but blank, its nineteen mini-
malist lines, justi¤ed at the right margin, representing a short-circuiting of
speech itself:

Ce morceau de ciel

désormais

t’est dévolu

où la face aveugle

de l’église

s’incurve

compliquée

d’un marrionnier,

le soleil, là

hésite

laisse

du rouge

encore,

avant que la terre

émette

Wittgenstein on Translation 75