For five decades, poet Irving Layton has attempted to bear witness to the unspeakable and untranslatable obscenity of the Shoah. Like Isaiah, he will never give up his quest, although it's all too clear that impurity and cowardice make the poet's voice ring with a cracked sound like that of a broken bell. From the creative word comes redemption. The French translation of ten poems tries to convey in a different idiom this voice, which in English was already a translation of an internal foreign language, the language of the obliterated name. This absence of a name, this stifled language is in turn a challenge for the translator.