Yoann Thommerel

Translated from French to English by Conor Bracken

Home made hard knock fast food
1 dish = 1 full meal

- Sliced turkey breast
- Powdered sugar

Valentina, 24 years old, telemarketer with Free and DJ at night

This is for when you don't have time and you need to eat quick
You take two slices of turkey breast
The kind that's sliced like ham
Slice
                 Slice
You sprinkle some sugar in the middle as you do
You close it up
You roll it up
And you eat it up
Like a crepe, actually
But instead of a crepe it's turkey breast

Turkey breast / sugar
Dinner and dessert
A FULL MEAL

I make this all the time
When I don't have time
It works really well

When I don't have time
I like to have dinner and dessert at the same time
Saves time

There's Nesquik pasta, too
You make your pasta
No salt in the water
Afterwards you keep a little of the water to the side
Afterwards, you dump a little heap of Nesquik in
And you mix it up

Nesquik pasta
Dinner and dessert
A FULL MEAL

There's plenty of others like this too
But I don't have the time to tell you about them

Bissarra
You can reheat it!

- 1/2 pound of dried plentils or peas (soaked in water overnight)
- 2 or 3 garlic cloves
- 2 tablespoons of oil
- 1 teaspoon of cumin (kemmoun)
- 1/2 tsp. red pepper
- Salt

Tarik, 29 years old, information systems engineer

It's really good
Everyone back home knows it
Everyone back home eats it
Because you can reheat it and there's lots of protein in it
You can eat it on the street
A bowl of it with bread
It's cheap and it's nutritious

Back home we eat a lot of bread
Kind of like you all here

Back home we mostly eat this in the Nort
Though when I think about it, we eat it everywhere

I've never actually made it myself
But you can find the recipe online easy enough

1. Shell the lentils or peas (after soaking them in water overnight).
Rinse well.

2. Put them in a casserole dish with the garlic (peeled) and salt (one teaspoon).
Cover with about a quart of water. Put on heat, stirring occasionally.

3. Once the lentils are cooked through, drain then puree them in a food mill until
smooth. Add oil, cumin, red pepper, and mix.

4. If the mixture is too thick, add a little water.

5. Serve hot.

I've never actually made it myself
I don't really cook that much here
But I'm starting to learn
Bit by bit

I really like it
You can reheat it

Come to my place
If you want

              And I do: we end up making it together

Fast food de la Hess home made
1 plat = 1 repas complet

- Blanc de dinde en tranche
- Sucre en poudre

Valentina, 24 ans, téléopératrice chez Free et DJ la nuit

C'est quand t'as pas le temps et qu'il faut manger vite
Tu prends deux tranches de blanc de dinde
Le blanc de dinde façon jambon
Tranche
	         Tranche
Tu mets de la cassonade bien comme il faut au milieu
Tu refermes
Tu roules
Et tu manges
Comme un crêpe, en fait
Mais au lieu de la crêpe, c'est du blanc de dinde

Blanc de dinde / sucre
Plat-dessert
REPAS COMPLET

Je fais ça tout le temps
Quand j'ai pas le temps
Ça passe en vrai
Moi, j'ai pas le temps
J'aime bien tout le temps mixer plat-dessert
Gagner du temps

Y a pâtes / Nesquik aussi
Tu fais des pâtes
Pas de sel dans l'eau
Après, tu gardes un peu d'eau au fond
Après, balle de Nesquik
Tu mélanges

Pâtes au Nesquik
Plat-dessert
REPAS COMPLET

Y en a plein d'autres des comme ça
Mais j'as pas le temps de te les raconter

Yoann Thommerel,  Manger low cost,  éditions nous, 2025.  
© éditions nous, all rights reserved.  

Baisar
Ça réchauffe!

- 500g de fèves sèches ou de petits pois (mis à tremper la veille)
- 2 ou 3 gousses d'ail
- 2 cuillerées à soupe d'huile
- 1 c.à.c rase de cumin (kemmoun)
- 1/2 c.à.s. de poivre rouge
- Sel

Tarik, 29 ans, ingénieur support réseau

C'est très bon
C'est connu chez nous
Tout le monde en mange
Parce que ça réchauffe et qu'il y a des protéines dedans
Tu peux manger ça dans la rue
Un bol avec du pain
C'est pas cher et c'est nourrissant

On mange beaucoup de pain, chez nous
Un peu comme chez vous

On mange ça surtout dans le Nord
Mais en fait un peu partout, au final

Moi, je ne l'ai jamais faite
Mais t'as la recette sur internet

1. Décortiquez les fèves ou les petits pois (mis à tremper la veille).
Lavez-les bien.

2. Mettez-les dans une cocotte avec l'ail épluché et une cuillerée à café rase de sel. 
Couvrez d'un litre d'eau environ. Mettez sur le feu en remuant de temps à autre.

3. Une fois les fèves bien cuites, égouttez-les et passez-les au moulin à légumes pour 
les réduire en purée. Ajoutez l'huile, le cumin, le poivre rouge et mélangez le tout.

4. Ajoutez un peu d'eau si la purée est trop épaisse.

5. Servez bien chaud.

Moi, je ne l'ai jamais faite
Ici, je ne cuisine pas trop
Mais maintenant, j'apprends
Un peu

J'aime bien
Ça réchauffe

Viens chez moi
Si tu veux

	On la fait ensemble

Yoann Thommerel,  Manger low cost,  éditions nous, 2025.  
© éditions nous, all rights reserved.  

Translator’s Note


These two translations come from a book by the French poet Yoann Thommerel, called  manger low cost  and published by editions nous in 2025. Thommerel is a polymathic creator, as interested and engaged in poetry as he is in theater, performance, community organizing, and, even more so, what happens at the intersection of these supposedly distinct sets of practices. These two “poems” are a great demonstration of what emerges from Thommerel’s exploration of the overlap of writing, performance, and community. Having decided to make a go of being a full-time writer, as he says in opening the book, he moves to a banlieu outside Paris and begins living frugally. Since the banlieus are areas occupied almost exclusively by marginalized communities in France—refugees, migrants, folks from the diasporas of nations France colonized in the past, such as Algeria, Morocco, Senegal, Martinique, to name a few—Thommerel is not the only one living frugally. (The banlieus—bahn-l’yuh—are serially neglected environments politicians, especially right-wing politicians, love to revile and many other French folks tend to fear, for their depiction as hotbeds of crime and fantasias of urban blight, though there is much more nuance to the reality on the ground than movies like  La Haine  or events like Sarkozy and the karcher might suggest.) So, in a bid for self-preservation as much as becoming a part of the social fabric, Thommerel began asking his neighbors what their “systems” were for “not spending too much.”

What came out of these were several dozen “recipes” that are recipes in the way Edgar Lee Masters’s  Spoon River Anthology  is a census: you get some helpful basic info (ingredients, community roles, some directions), but you also get more than you bargained for, and much more than you can slim down into, say, a straightforward answer to “How long do you boil the lentils?” Though Thommerel was asking his neighbors for recipes, what he was getting, and what he gives us, is a record of his being with them. You don’t emerge knowing how to cook foul or conduct a ten-day fast, but you do learn more about the person for whom this recipe is a constitutive part of their identity. And as you spend time among the recipes, you get a prismatic sense of what it is to live among these folks, the various places they have called home, the ingredients that are more talisman than calorie-conveyance, the flavors that refresh and humanize them, the stories these dishes, penurious as they may be, emerge from and make possible.                        

One of the things I enjoy about the collection, and about each of the poems in it, is how they don’t showcase the poet as a singular voice or consciousness, but as a convener of the various rich threads that weave the social fabric of which he is a part. In translating it, the main knots I found myself picking most were voice and idiom—how to make, as he does, each recipe feel like it comes from a distinct person with a distinct cadence and dictional repertoire—as well as slang, particularly the term “la Hess,” which comes to French via Arabic, and which means, colloquially, something like “down at heel” or “hand to mouth”, and which I’ve chosen to translate as “hard knock”, for its plenitude of hard fricatives, even though it doesn’t make the same gesture at the foreign-become-local aspect, which feels like such an essential part of this collection. Part Svetlana Alexievich, part MFK Fisher, Thommerel offers us polyvocal, plainspoken snapshots of what metropolitan France sounds, smells, and is like. What it has become and how it continues to make itself, despite the French state’s neglect and contempt. Not only is it a healthy antidote to the neoliberalizing tendency among contemporary US poets to present the self as a commodified set of traumas and epiphanies, but it is a reminder that that it’s our connections, not just our selves, that compose our identity and constitute our wellbeing.

Yoann Thommerel is an author and a playwright. An editor at Nous publishing house, he is the founder of  Grumeaux—a review of poetry and experimental literature. He co-founded the Groupe Parallèle with Sonia Chiambretto.

Conor Bracken is a US-based poet and translator of francophone literature. Find out more at  conorbracken.com.