A Long-Gone Sun: A Poem

An English-to-French translator who was awarded the French Legion of Honor for her work on Emily Dickinson, Malroux resurfaces on these shores with this book-length autobiographical poem set in France before and during WWII. Germany, in a child's impulsive perception, is largely obviated by the more immediate particulars of Mother and Father, sister, village square and classroom. ""My first death,"" she writes, ""is the rabbit's."" The larger, war-torn world increasingly encroaches as the narrator ages--moving from a ""she"" to an ""I""--and intensifies during Occupation. Malroux's father, a district official and devout Socialist, became involved in the Resistance and was sent to a concentration camp, where he died of dysentery. From the start, the speaker confronts the futility of locating her child self in the larger forces that shaped her youth, ""History/ brutally carrying out/ Time's orders."" Such clich s aren't helped by Marilyn Hacker's translation, which privileges sense over music, but the French on facing pages lets readers hear the more engaging lines: ""Ma soeur mon enfant tu t'enchantes/ de comptines sacr es."" (Hacker also provides an introduction.) Bilingual selections from Malroux's shorter poems were published by Wake Forest in 1996 to little notice, and this volume is unlikely to fare much better, but it furthers Sheep Meadow's commitment to examining WWII and its aftermath from as many angles as possible. (Mar.)