Tanella Boni

from 'The Future Has an Appointment with the Dawn'

Translated from the French by Todd Fredson

from The Future Has an Appointment with the Dawn, from the first of two sections, titled “Land of Hope”

Miraculous constructions: Todd Fredson on Ivorian oral traditions

Building in the Côte d'Ivoire. Photo by Todd Fredson
Building in the Côte d'Ivoire. Photo by Todd Fredson

Todd Fredson's award-winning poetry collection, The Crucifix-Blocks, offers an epigraph by Cecília Meireles: "And Babel's workmen, dead by suicide." It's a line from Meireles' poem: "Speech," and it's been much in mind not only because of Todd's gorgeous and generous dispatch, but because I was recently in an airplane, peering out a small oval window into high-altitude blue over clouds, imagining what that fabled city might have looked like completed.

Would a person be able to spot its heavenward tower from a window seat at 500 miles per hour? Would its collaborative architecture be recognizable — spiral, terraced, trapezoidal? Would the clang of weights and pulleys ring from its walls?

Maybe such a structure can be perceived only by listening for a shared language buried inside a collective rubble of memory.

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