The latest issue of the Winning Writers (https://winningwriters.com/) newsletter is out today, and it features my comics adaptation of nineteenth-century Montreal poet Émile Nelligan’s “Déraison” and “Le fou”, now accompanied with my English translation of the two poems. I am reproducing the translations here. They are very literal, as the objective was simply to give English readers of the newsletter the sense of what Nelligan was going on about (as much as can be discerned in these brilliant but clearly rather mad ravings) in the reproduced original French text in my  comics adaptations. You can read the comic here: https://julianpeterscomics.com/deraison-and-le-fou-by-emile-nelligan/

Insanity

Yet now I have the vision of bleeding shadows
And of spirited horses stamping,
And it’s like the shouts of hobos, hiccupping of children,
Wheezing of slow exhalations.

Tell me, from where do they come to me, all these hoarse hurricanes,
Furies of fifes or drums?
One might think it dragoons galloping through the village,
With helmets of a radiant murkiness…

The Madman

Gondolar! Gondolar!
You are no longer out on the road till very late.

They murdered the poor idiot,
They crushed him underneath a cart,
And then, after the idiot, the dog.

They made a big, big hole for them there.
Dies irae, dies illa
On your knees before that hole there!