France | Greece | Hybrid Fiction | Modern Greek
October, 2020“λ” (for λιβελούλα, “libellula” or dragonfly) is one of the 24 chapters of Insect Alphabet (Αλφαβητάρι Εντόμων), each corresponding to a letter of the Greek alphabet and the initial of the name of an insect. Originally published in Greek (Patakis Publishers, 2018), this work cuts across the genres of novel and short story, and provides a glimpse into Europe from the Second World War to the present time, exploring violence, isolation, and the challenge of European identity. Famous or anonymous, no matter whether placed in a picturesque Greek island or in the Calais Jungle, in Paris, Vienna, Jerusalem, or Edinburgh, each of the main characters has an important encounter with an insect. Homeric heroines, Sappho, Rimbaud, Alban Berg, Jung, Pasolini, as well as anthropological material (“telling the bees” when the beekeeper dies, or the presumed affiliation between snakes and dragonflies), children’s questions (“Why don’t insects live in the sea?”), medical discoveries, the story of the loss and the resurfacing of a pioneer lepidopterist’s work that curiously unites the United States and the Soviet Union, have jointly contributed to forming the cocoon of this entomological alphabet that is inspired by the many faces of Europe, those enchanting and those disenchanting, and those that are both at once.
I translated “λ” into English, along with a few other chapters, after the book was awarded two prizes in Greece: the 2019 State Literary Award and the 2019 Anagnostis literary prize.
- Dimitra Kolliakou
Pierre Reverdy (1889–1960) was a widely influential French poet and critic. Born in Narbonne, he moved to Paris in 1910 and began his life as a working poet, publishing his first book, Poems en prose, five years later. His subsequent works included La Lucarne ovale (1916), Les Jockeys camoufles (1918), La Guitare endormie (1919), Coeur de chene (1921), and Cravates de chanvre (1922), but it was his 1924 collection Les Epaves du ciel that brought him greater recognition. During this time he was a key figure in the avant-garde circles that developed Surrealism, Cubism, and Dada, and that included writers and artists such as Guillaume Apollinaire, Max Jacob, Louis Aragon, André Breton, Pablo Picasso, Juan Gris, and Georges Braque. With Jacob, Apollinaire, and Vicente Huidobro, he founded the journal Nord-Sud in 1917.
Over time his writing became more mystical, and in 1926 he converted to Catholicism and retreated with his wife to a house near a Benedictine monastery in Solesmes. He lived there for the remainder of this life, writing poetry and criticism, and participating in the French resistance during the German occupation.
The poem featured here, “Locked Away,” is taken from the collection Le Chant des morts [The Song of the Dead], a sequence of broody philosophical poems which Reverdy wrote during some of the worst moments of World War II, and which were accompanied by original illustrations by Picasso when originally published in 1948.
- André Naffis-Sahely
France | French | Novel (excerpt)
October, 2020Eugène Sue owed his immense popularity to the series of sensational novels of Parisian low life he began in 1842 with Les Mystères de Paris (The Mysteries of Paris). The book appeared as a serial novel, or feuilleton, in the conservative newspaper Le Journal des Débats. It provided readers with an examination of working-class and criminal Paris that no novel had until then portrayed. With its portraits of prostitutes, criminals, and villains of all stripes, who speak in their own language and move about in their own milieu, the book caused a scandal upon its release. Unlike his contemporaries, Sue abandoned the drawing rooms of the beau monde for the dive bars and cabarets of central Paris, the Ile de la Cité, where the story is set.
There had, of course, been fictional descriptions of urban life before, but their focus had been on the Parisian bourgeoisie and its interaction with the remnants of the French aristocracy. Sue upset the codes of contemporary action and introduced a dark, violent underworld, a secret Paris as exotic, as foreign as any city portrayed in Sue’s popular maritime novels. Although colorful characters and cunning criminals were not unknown in French fiction, Sue’s brand of insistent realism was more in keeping with the methods of a social worker or journalist. His gritty depictions of the poor and the criminal classes eschew the elements of the fabulous and the burlesque to portray characters in their natural setting. There are elements of Dickens in his work, but without the latter’s good-natured bonhomie and humor. And while our attitudes of what is acceptable or appropriate in literature have broadened considerably since the 1840s, there was nothing picturesque about the book at the time of its appearance. The scandal was real, and Sue was reviled by conservative literary critics of his day for having shoved their noses into the gutters of Paris. He was also accused of literary speculation and said to have profited from a depiction of the poor and the downtrodden. This was to be expected. Elements of the socialist press took Sue at his word, however, and championed the book as a denunciation of poverty and a plea in favor of the common man, those who were referred to as les classes populaires.
- Robert Bononno
The entire translator's note can be found at the beginning of the post, before the excerpt from the novel.
France | French | Novel (excerpt)
July, 2020Eugène Sue owed his immense popularity to the series of sensational novels of Parisian low life he began in 1842 with Les Mystères de Paris (The Mysteries of Paris). The book appeared as a serial novel, or feuilleton, in the conservative newspaper Le Journal des Débats. It provided readers with an examination of working-class and criminal Paris that no novel had until then portrayed. With its portraits of prostitutes, criminals, and villains of all stripes, who speak in their own language and move about in their own milieu, the book caused a scandal upon its release. Unlike his contemporaries, Sue abandoned the drawing rooms of the beau monde for the dive bars and cabarets of central Paris, the Ile de la Cité, where the story is set.
There had, of course, been fictional descriptions of urban life before, but their focus had been on the Parisian bourgeoisie and its interaction with the remnants of the French aristocracy. Sue upset the codes of contemporary action and introduced a dark, violent underworld, a secret Paris as exotic, as foreign as any city portrayed in Sue’s popular maritime novels. Although colorful characters and cunning criminals were not unknown in French fiction, Sue’s brand of insistent realism was more in keeping with the methods of a social worker or journalist. His gritty depictions of the poor and the criminal classes eschew the elements of the fabulous and the burlesque to portray characters in their natural setting. There are elements of Dickens in his work, but without the latter’s good-natured bonhomie and humor. And while our attitudes of what is acceptable or appropriate in literature have broadened considerably since the 1840s, there was nothing picturesque about the book at the time of its appearance. The scandal was real, and Sue was reviled by conservative literary critics of his day for having shoved their noses into the gutters of Paris. He was also accused of literary speculation and said to have profited from a depiction of the poor and the downtrodden. This was to be expected. Elements of the socialist press took Sue at his word, however, and championed the book as a denunciation of poverty and a plea in favor of the common man, those who were referred to as les classes populaires.
- Robert Bononno
The entire translator's note can be found at the beginning of the post, before the excerpt from the novel.
The translations featured here are the result of a collaboration between a poet (Don Boes) and a translator (Gaby Bedetti). Our project has been to translate a few poems from each of Meschonnic’s nineteen collections for a Selected Poems of Henri Meschonnic. We chose this sampling from that manuscript. These poems represent four of his nineteen collections: Puisque je suis ce buisson (Since I Am This Bush, Arfuyen, 2001); Tout entier visage (Whole Face, Arfuyen, 2005); De monde en monde (From World to World, Arfuyen, 2009); and L’obscur travaille (The Dark Works, Arfuyen, 2012). These four poems only suggest the richness, range, and intensity of his poetic output.
Until recently, only six poems from Voyageurs de la voix (Voyagers of the Voice) were translated in “Jewish Poets of France,” Shirim: A Jewish Poetry Journal, vol. 7, no. 2, Oct. 1988. Our English translations seem to be the first since then of Meschonnic’s diaphanous, stripped-down voice. As with the poems of Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jacques Réda, the rhythm of Meschonnic’s poems exposes the subject. He follows Montaigne’s practice: “I do not describe being. I describe the passage . . . from minute to minute.” Untitled and unpunctuated, his poems are kin to W. S. Merwin’s “climbing out of myself/all my life.” Meschonnic writes, “I am not in what/I seek but in what escapes me.”
Our challenge as translators was to capture the continuous movement of the poems, a movement that suggests the possibility of passing energeia from subject to subject, of inventing within language new ways of being with oneself, others, and the world. Replicating this movement in English texts was difficult. We could hear and feel the rhythm of the French. We thought Meschonnic’s minimal vocabulary and relative lack of poetic features, such as images and metaphors (his poems are nearly adjective-free), suggested a somewhat clear path from French to English. We soon realized, however, that his rhythms and condensed language were in the service of mapping voices, not poems. His use of enjambment and only the most colloquial verbs and nouns made us take a hard look at individual words (no matter their simplicity), and therefore the world. In translating these poems, like Meschonnic, that accomplished innovator, we became “patients of life.”
- Gabriella Bedetti and Don Boes
France | French | Novel (excerpt)
January, 2020The premise of Dual Nationality is nonconformist: take the (im)migrant’s identity crisis, but make it . . . funny. It’s a rare approach. Displacement, whether willing or unwilling, is usually handled soberly as a literary topic, in strains of melancholy, drama, or even bitterness. Nina Yargekov is unusual in that she brings no small amount of irreverence to her narrative. The quest for identity in the novel is rendered satirically literal: our protagonist is an amnesiac who wakes up in an airport with two passports, two wallets, two phones, two sets of keys, no memory of who she is or where she’s going, and the suspicion that she’s dolled up like the walking stereotype of a prostitute. What she sees is what she knows. Thankfully, she’s blessed with excellent reasoning skills, and what emerges is a sort of choose-your-own-adventure story, a mental escape room, as our protagonist gropes for clues about her life and her belonging.
Her name, we discover at the same time as she does, is Rkvaa Nnoyeig. She’s thirty-one years old. She works as (what else?) a translator. She’s the dual national of two countries that may or may not be real, depending on where she’s quite literally standing. Rkvaa’s world is a barely exaggerated caricature of a global order revolving around the split between West and East, between winners and losers, between first-world countries and immigrant underdogs. She, as a child of political refugees, as a bilingual translator-interpreter, uneasily has a foot in each camp. She spends the novel trying to meticulously reject one in favor of the other–striving, naturally, to solve her identity crisis, to feel uncomplicated and whole.
Despite the novel’s sustained tone of irony, I read it as coming from a place of deep empathy. There is great and genuine concern at the novel’s core: how does one act like an engaged, empathetic global citizen in a world that’s coming apart at the seams, complicating identities all around and making the concept of belonging a much more tenuous one? It’s not surprising that the Algerian War of Independence weaves in and out of the plot like a leitmotif, and that, towards the end of the book, we get a scene of the 2015 migrant impasse in Budapest’s train station. Perhaps the most troubling question the novel raises is how to reconcile your love for your country with the wrongs your country has committed–and whether it’s even possible to do so.
Dual Nationality grasps the big things in a completely subversive and comical way. As a Russian-American, I find lots to cackle at. Perhaps, in these times, it’s essential to not only empathize and worry, but also to be able to laugh a little–at ourselves, at the world’s absurdities, at our deepest questions and searches for meaning, and of course at our mortal inability to arrive at definite answers.
- Daria Chernysheva
France | French | Italy | Poetry (excerpt)
January, 2020Monstres tièdes, Benoît Gréan's second volume of poems, was published in 2003 and has since been translated into Italian, Greek, and German. Behind the book's "splendidly oxymoronic" title, observes poet Valerio Magrelli in his introduction to the Italian translation, lurks "a direct heir of Lautréamont"; an heir sired on a matrix of characteristically French rigor and concision of form, in a book of 60--four groups of 15--very short, unpunctuated poems.
The cultural matrix for these four sequences is palpably Mediterranean, the two millennia of tension between pagan and Christian moralities, with their resultant space between "imperious desire" and its "cleavers," the "slight distance" between "desire and horror": the futile desires of the "tail-chasing" subject, of youthful beauty and the aging body's "well assigned wrongs."
In the long view the poet's long residency in Rome affords, the desiring subject "mammals on," in "high time to come late." The vignettes range between recognizably current urban realities and phantasmagoria under the "blue-green sun," told in the light of a "radiant doubt" that seeks to root out the vain fictions "chatty cadavers" tell well into the Beyond.
Just as this gallery of miniature grotesques ends with an emblematic "drunken widow," the dense verses themselves often ring changes on French words and phrases that survive in a single form. Thus, from the book's first poem, "à perte de": "à perte de vue" means as far as the eye can see; Gréan's final phrase, "à perte de mémoire" extends the phrase to mean as far as memory spans--or, simply, amnesia. "Peaux amères" is the title of the first group of poems, and the poet's method is also to scratch at, flay, stock expressions: to "strip the dead/ to dwell in words."
- David Jacobson
Philippe Delerm’s writings have been referred to as récits, snapshots, and essays. Sixty-one brief essays—ranging from one to three pages each—comprise the 178-page Le trottoir au soleil ("Sidewalk in the Sun"). A book of essays may or may not contain a narrative arc, but Delerm’s has a definite beginning and end, and the scenes, reflections, and narratives throughout certainly transport the reader from one point to the next. Essays may be read and appreciated in any order, however.
In Le trottoir au soleil, Delerm is an observer who conveys multisensory scenes that become snapshots of thoughts, of a time of life—from childhood to grandfatherhood. Scenes—each essay could be called such—range from a man standing at a kitchen sink doing dishes and listening to the radio, to the same man observing provocative teenagers in a city park, to remembrances of childhood vacations in contrast to grandparents’ outings. Delerm takes a signature approach as he both demonstrates and advocates being a watcher.
In a conversation with publisher Gallimard printed in the liner notes of a CD of recordings of the essays, Delerm is asked about the fact that in these essays he puts himself in the role of observer, more than participant, and furthermore seems a bit withdrawn from life. Having recently turned sixty, Delerm responds that he feels increasingly transparent. Yet he cherishes this transparent onlooker role, which does indeed permeate the collection. His is not a passive gaze, however, but a penetrating curiosity about, reflection on, and celebration of living. The essays are in turn humorous, poignant, provocative.
- Ellen Sprague
France | French | Radio play (excerpt)
May, 2017The play, Fossoyeurs (Gravediggers), was written by Cécile Cotté upon her return from Rwanda, where she’d put up a production about the genocide with Rwandan actors (video excerpts of the show can be found on Cécile Cotté’s website: www.cecilecotte.fr). Gravediggers is thus haunted by her stay in Rwanda, where she visited death sites and saw piles of corpses stacked in school classrooms and other public places. Murambi is one of the sites she visited: a vision of horror that stayed with her forever and that she tries to exorcize in this play.
Fossoyeurs was produced as a radio play by France Culture in October 2006.
Gravediggers is a collective translation done by New York University B.A. students under my supervision in the spring semester of 2016, as part of an advanced literary translation workshop.
- Emmanuelle Ertel
The title "The Graveyard by the Sea" suggests a poem in the style of Gray's "Elegy Written in a County Churchyard," a contemplation of the finality of death and the way it levels out the differences of fame. Superficially Valéry follows this pattern. Valéry's graveyard, like the one Gray describes at Stoke Poges, is the one at Séte (originally Cette) where the poet was born and where he is buried. It is also a poem about eternals; about death and deathlessness, but it is soon apparent that he is not concerned with pseudo-religious morals.
It is not easy at first (or dare I say it, even at second) reading to grasp clearly what Valéry means. Rather than using words to point up some moral, his language comes across as convoluted, seems to become incorporated back into itself, to be involved in itself like music. It can seem, in fact, meaningless. Rather than use words as signifiers, he uses them to compose sound patterns which draw the reader into a mise en scène, not unlike programme music. Valéry wrote:
"Literature interests me profoundly only to the extent that it urges the mind to certain transformations--those in which the stimulating properties of language play the chief part [...] The force to bend the common word to unexpected needs without violating the 'Time-honoured forms'; the capture and subjection of things that are difficult to say; and, above all, the simultaneous management of syntax, harmony, and ideas [...] are in my eyes the supreme object of our art."
This speaks to the interiority of Valéry's poetic process, He wrote: "Poetry has never been an objective for me, but an instrument, an exercise." The sound of the language is intrinsic to its imaging, its rhythm and this, of course, untranslatable."
Jacques Derrida wrote of Valéry's antagonism to Freud: "We will not ask what the meaning of this resistance is before pointing out that what Valéry intends to resist is meaning itself."
In the highly formal, mannered musicality of Valéry's verse the influence of Mallarmé is clear. In his Cahiers, Valéry notes that the programme of a poem is less important than its subject: By a programme he means a gathering of words and syntactical moments, above all "a table of verbal tonalities, etc." In his La Musique et les lettres, Mallarmé had said something similar:
"I assert, at my own aesthetic risk, this conclusion: [...] that Music and Letters are the alternate face here widened towards the obscure; scintillating there, with certainty of a phenomenon, the only one, I have named it Idea."
Coleridge thought "The French wholly unfit for Poetry" because "Feelings created by obscure ideas associate themselves with one clear idea." So, the translator is presented with a "feel" or "sound" rather than a story or logical structure to hold meaning together, and this makes the whole process almost impossible. It might explain why there are so few translations of either poet.
It is this "feel" that has to be caught and the meaning left to fend for itself.
In Terence Rattigan’s play The Browning Version, the student Taplow, after translating some lines of Aeschylus rather too fluently, is reprimanded: "You are supposed to be construing Greek, not collaborating with Aeschylus." I hope I manage to avoid Taplow's error and that my attempt here, insofar as it succeeds, is a collaboration with Valéry.
- David Pollard
The Brooklyn Rail welcomes you to our web-exclusive section InTranslation, where we feature unpublished translations of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and dramatic writing. Published since April 2007, InTranslation is a venue for outstanding work in translation and a resource for translators, authors, editors, and publishers seeking to collaborate.
We seek exceptional unpublished English translations from all languages.
Fiction, Nonfiction, and Poetry: Manuscripts of no longer than 20 pages (double-spaced).
Plays: Manuscripts of no longer than 30 pages (in left-justified format).