Though it is far more extravagant in its use of language, the work of the French poet Valérie Rouzeau, as represented in Cold Spring in Winter, has an affinity with that of Menashe in the poet's ear for interplays of meaning, for the words hidden inside other words and the like. Cold Spring in Winter is a bilingual text (like all of Arc's excellent Visible Poets series), Rouzeau's French opposite an impressive translation by Susan Wicks. Unlike that of Menashe, Rouzeau's work appears to be full of quasi-confessional intensity of emotion, the work translated being a lament for the poet's dead father (originally published as pas revoir in 1988). In expression her writing has a kind of linguistic fluidity, full of puns and childish gabble, coinages and colloquialisms, ambiguities and elisions, phrases that aren't quite clichés or proverbs, etc. Susan Wicks says in her Translator's Preface that when she first read it the sequence struck her as a translator's dream or a translator's nightmare. It is as if at least two voices - that of the sophisticated adult poet and that of the child she was - are simultaneously occupying the text. Whether in Rouzeau's French:

Or in Wicks' English:

- the results are fascinating and striking.