from “In the Realm of Motes”

Tree stumps drip with spongy moths, hints of 
gray-green scintillating in the mud. Luxuriance 
intensifies amid decay; charred trunks halfway 
dipped in water, grasses all about. Large masses 
fluctuate leisurely in accordance with the 
accumulating eddies that compose them. Where 
depleted or spent, bubbles burst through the froth.

The streams thin down, fanning out in zigzags until 
they evaporate: then the surface closes up, 
becomes a mosaic of warp and slack: fragments of 
plastic and fabric slowly get covered up, though 
some bits keep jutting out, the largest quite 
conspicuous among the other alluvia. Stones sink 
into sludge, the mixture remains incomplete. 











Water pearls out of the soil—diverse stalks particles 
of dust shards vapors—thick mud buries the 
asperities. Sun and wind absorb water, gaseous 
forms emanating from the ground, and the earth 
gets compact. Always protected—slowness of 
evaporation—the cavities stay fragrant for longer. 
Undersides of stone and sheet metal, rags of 
earthworm and centipede; flattened grass is not as 
green as grass that has been able to breathe, the 
softened parts remaining low and silted.

Corroded objects weighing down the mass, rest 
stops in the quincuncial sequence of puddles. Day 
after day, rain replenishes containers, holes fill to 
the brim, delineating dazzling zones of 
unprecedented shapes. In the sunken part of a 
deflated balloon, water assumes the form of a 
warped sphere. 











Frost grows on ferns, condensation congeals in 
clumps. Water thickens, works in slow motion. Its 
flow becomes a fixed object, an entrail at once 
smooth and irregular, stretched all the way across. 
For a brief moment, when the change is not yet 
complete, different states of matter intermix. Then 
stones and other stuff that used to protrude simply 
come out from under the cover of ice. Textural 
variations, for example in the cliff. 

Flooded zones serve as local reminders of 
distant archipelagoes. Hardening’s a 
constricting mechanism. Lakes appear frozen at dawn as if they 
had always been so; the effect of night, like a 
punctuation mark, makes one forget that it too is a 
duration.

Other thickenings: sap sluggishly circulating in 
trees, thixotropic muds, anything with a heavy flow. 









Stalks covered in hair from root to tip: the visible 
swellings indicate a surplus of sap or scar tissue. 
Leaves retract at night, unfurl by day. When it is 
raining, they tremble upon each impact. Amplitudes 
unfolding from constrained bundles, sensitive 
excrescences that adapt to successive shapes of 
the wind. A mere puff of air occasions an 
abundance of quivering.











Every part of the house creaks, the wood warps, its 
movements audible all night long. Empire of 
water-logged objects. The cracks widen and little by 
little, in peace and quiet, mosses begin to grow; 
little by little, in peace and quiet, forms of small life 
begin to throb. Soft organizations undermine 
established systems. A dynamic of total disorder 
insinuates itself by means of holes. 

Corridors and battered blinds become zones of 
traffic. Butterflies and wasps flit about, looping 
above scraps of food. The amplitude of the buzzing 
is a sign of swarm abundance. Terrific nests grow 
on the beams, meticulous structures made of 
cardboard or digested paste jointed to the edifice. 
The choreography of infinitesimal things takes 
place in an arena where solidity offers support. The 
frame is a crutch. The interior, but a passage of 
pale light between two exteriors.











Grasses and small flowers begin to teem even 
though the spaces from which they protrude are but 
cracks in the heart of stretches and stretches of 
tarmac.










A grave, airless, flat, in forests it remains totally 
pressed in, no recto, only verso.

Versatile traits of aphids: eye movements, fluid 
arrangements of hair and leg, languidness of body 
in pattern and rupture. Every part goes in and out of 
alignment. Spiders pause and watch, immobile, in 
order to lure their prey.

Repetition, a crescendo. Ubiquitous spalling, the 
thrilling of things. 

Animals caught in the glare of headlamps are 
petrified. Insects trapped in webs, paralyzed by a 
single bite and wrapped in layers of glue. Mere 
streetlights suck up the volant life of fields. 











Series of pits and mounds at the construction site; 
destruction synchronous with progression. Two 
concurrent prospects: it could be in the process of 
being built, still in its early stages, or it could be at 
the final stage of demolition. For the moment 
however, because things just seem suspended, 
completely stagnant, it’s a bit of both.

Regardless, there is grass everywhere poking 
through the iron rods of incomplete guardrails.
Generations steeped in rubble, initiating other 
profusions in the calm. In stagnant waters, the 
weight of stuff left unattended produces a peopling 
of unthunk things.

from translator's note

The first note I wrote to myself when I began 
translating Un domaine des corpuscules goes: 
“This is theater.” The principals are dust and mud, 
water, slime, pollen, shreds of plastic, twigs, balls of 
hair, grass, bones, the pulverous wings of 
butterflies, and such like. Minuscule though these 
actors be, their performances—even simply resting 
on the ground, suffering the weather—seem to me 
grand. I have tried to recreate this sense of drama.
 
[...]
 
To borrow from the Swiss edition’s elegant catalog 
copy, Gaillard’s domaine manifests a “dirty 
geometry.” Sentences run on at times; at others, 
they fragment; occasionally, they do both at once. 
Lists are mobile, evolutionary; each has its own 
logic. Syntax mimics whatever’s rotting in the sun 
or swimming in the sea. That odd space where 
disorder isn’t so chaotic as not to bear a touch of 
order—that’s the grammar of the realm. One 
teeters constantly between impasse and epiphany.
 
Lyn Hejinian’s formulation that “Form is not a fixture 
but an activity” annotates well Gaillard’s use of 
syntax and punctuation. The way words cluster into 
phrase or fragment, the atypical uses of the 
semi-colon, and prolific comma splices enact the 
agglomerations and disintegrations narrated in the 
text.
 
It has been important therefore to follow the source 
text’s punctuation and syntax as closely as 
possible, to match its protean, pliable qualities. 
Where I’ve departed from Gaillard’s arrangements, 
the reason was rhythm or clarity or both.
 
[...]