The Dogs

Hedi Kaddour: The Dogs


"He loved us, with our muzzles and our fangs,

How we'd surge at the slightest footsteps, creak

Of a door: truncheon and trough, enough

To gather your strength, but never a foretaste

Of dog paradise, sugar for pleasure,

An instant for itself. Fine food was all

For him: partied, snag his heart out,

Round as spade handle in the moonlight, doubled

His fat by the bellyful, gobbled up meat

And potatoes in sauce, gobbled up all

The cheeses between two shots of Calvados,

And then the caramel-crisp masterpiece,

Kirsch-flavored meringue, cream like eternal

Sea foam: one night, when he came home, we wolfed him down."

- The Dogs (Les Chiens) by Hedi Kaddour, translated from the French by Marilyn Hacker
from Treason published by Yale University Press, New Haven: 2010.


In sonnet-shaped poems of smiling bitterness, Hedi Kaddour introduces himself to English-speaking readers. With the fluent assistance of an American living in Paris, poet Marilyn Hacker, who relates in her preface her first encounter with Kaddour's poems in Passage au Luxembourg (2000). As a poet, Kaddour is a flanuer, a walker of the streets who loses himself in the spectacles of daily life and finds a combination of wisdom and lightness. We may recall the haiku-influenced vignettes of another flaneur, Felix Feneon, but Kaddour's favorite poets are Anna Ahkmatova, Joseph Brodsky , and other non-French influences. What he shares with them is life lived in tumultuous circumstances.


Hedi Kaddour was born in Tunis (1945) to a Tunisian father and a French-Algerian mother. The family moved to France when Kaddour was eight years old. Although French was his native language, Kaddour studied German at school and has earned a doctorate in Arabic. After many travels abroad, Kaddour now teaches literature at L'Ecole Normale Superieure in Lyon.