Jean Fanchette is more than a celebrated poet. Born on the island of Mauritius (in fact one of the smallest states in the world), he took on the daring fantasy of addressing all of humanity, expressing the urge of communication from people little heard from, and the genuine openness of his heart. When he founded the review Two Cities with the support of Anaïs Nin, an open field for English and French literature but also for all creation, he defined it as a “bridge” between cultures. The review has been the source of all Fanchette’s creation, and kept the flame ablaze—and so it was, so it is today, for everyone to venture to unknown beauty, to the living celebration of poetry. 
—J. M. G. Le Clézio, winner of the 2008 Nobel Prize in Literature    

Hassan Melehy has succeeded in a translation that is as poetic as it is worldly: Jean Fanchette’s poetry is reinvented in English by Melehy to bring the reader its exilic, oceanic, archipelagiac consciousness while at the same time highlighting its dedication to, and play with, form that are deeply aware of the history of French poetics; this erudite and sensitively creative translation reminds us of other Mauritians such as Malcolm de Chazal or Edouard Maunick, who along with Fanchette also belong to a repertoire of twentieth-century poetic thinkers including those giants from another archipelago (Fanon, Glissant, or Césaire) that theorized the planet's rapid evolution while drawing urgent lessons for humanity. 
—Anjali Prabhu, Edward Said Chair in Comparative Literature, University of California, Los Angeles    

Fanchette celebrates a “life embraced / As a perspective of escapes and returns.” These lines suggest that exile, that indelible watchword in Fanchette’s work, has more than a negative valence; errancy is “embraced” and welcomed. He remains “Open to the wind that comes from elsewhere.” So is his translator Hassan Melehy, who demonstrates exquisite sensitivity to the vocabulary of Fanchette’s Mauritian landscapes. I imagine Jean Fanchette on a boat or an island, sensing that wind on his skin and in his hair, or else with his ear to the ground, listening for the primeval thrum of some buried ancient engine, and transcribing the imperceptible sound that makes all things to move. All his senses are keen: he can see “The dodge and the leap of the primal tree,” imperceptible to most. He knows the slow drift of change in which we sweetly die. 
—Alexander Dickow, author of The Distance, and You In It    

Equinox Island, Hassan Melehy’s new translation of Mauritanian poet Jean Fanchette’s L’Île Équinoxe, makes powerful, enigmatic gestures toward that vast ungraspable archive of entwined apprehensions: exile, memory, the endless morph of time/space choreography—so many incommensurabilities disguised in plain but evocative language:    

Autumn divided between gold and fire 
September’s oar shoves farther off the island 
Over there the sea in motionless time 
Scatters the fire of memory’s sun    

Reminiscent of Edmond Jabès, but refracting his meditations on time, space/place and absence through the trope of the island rather than the desert, Fanchette via Melehy opens to the English-speaking world a new, shimmering poetics of displacement. Others may be reminded of Edouard Glissant’s slides (glisser) into ambiguity and opacity as positive values, where the unknown provides room for re(dis)covery of alternate forms of understanding: through beauty, through language. Yet others may think of both Countee Cullen’s “What is Africa to Me?” and Arthur Rimbaud in the phantasmagoric origin story of “The Poem of the Child’s Tree.”  A marvel of revelation and lineage, this book is a synesthetic multiverse, rich in every sense. 
—Maria Damon, Professor of Humanities and Media Studies, Pratt Institute