Phantomb

Translation from French to English by Eléna Rivera, of Isabella Baladine Howard’s PHANTOMB.

Translator’s Note: hantome (here translated as phantomb) is a word the author made up out of two words hante meaning haunted and fantome meaning phantom. In French, fantome carries an additional meaning; it can mean a card that is left on a library shelf to show that a book has been borrowed (see the Larousse definition that Howald uses as an epigraph.) Wanting to give some of the flavor of these various meanings in English, I combined the word phantom and the word tomb to make the word phantomb.

Poetry.