France | French | Genre-defying
July, 2013Pierre Autin-Grenier (b. 1947) is a French author living in Lyon and the Vaucluse. His many works are difficult to classify, and the trilogy from which the pieces featured here are excerpted is no exception. They feel very much like prose poems, but combined they read (dixit the author) as autobiography. These pieces are excerpts from the first volume of the trilogy entitled Je ne suis pas un héros (1993). The second volume is called Toute une vie bien ratée (1999); the third, L'eternité est inutile (2002). The three volumes together form Une Histoire, which can be translated as either A Story or A History. Among their many charms are their syntactical idiosyncrasies and the author's prodigiously refreshing use of set phrases and clichés.
The Cansó de la Croza/Chanson de la Croisade Albigeoise, though preserved as a single work, is the record of two different Occitan poems composed by two very different authors. The poems were joined together, probably in Toulouse some 50 years later c. 1275, so that it now appears as a chronological whole.
The first part is the work of Guillaume de Tudèle, who was a Master of Arts and a clerk in minor orders. He seems to have combined knowledge of the chanson de geste with interest in geomancy and may have had some early success as a jongleur. His main period of activity was between 1190 and 1214. He travelled from the Kingdom of Navarre to Montauban, apparently being present at the marriage of Count Raimond VI of Toulouse to Éléanore d' Aragon in 1199. Leaving Montauban, probably, despite Guillaume's claims to foresight, only when it was menaced by the crusading army in 1211, he found refuge in Bruniquel where, under the protection of Raimond VI's brother, Count Baudouin, he became a canon at Saint-Antonin and so, in a small way, he profited from the results of the crusade. His part of the Chanson was probably composed between c. 1210 and 1213/14. Although it is not without criticism of the crusaders (his is the record of the massacre of the citizens of Beziers in 1209), he takes a sympathetic view of the church and of the crusade and is largely favourable to the crusade's effective leader, Simon de Montfort.
The second part of the Chanson, from the autumn of 1213 on, was the work of a still unknown poet whose language and viewpoint are entirely distinct. The second part was composed in what has, until recently, been regarded as probably a Toulousaine dialect. Whatever the mystery of its authorship, this second part is bitterly opposed to the crusade, to de Montfort and to leading churchmen; it is deeply loyal to the people and leaders of the south, most of all to the Counts of Toulouse, being particularly proud of the city, then the second in Europe, and of its people. There is no evidence that the second poet was a Cathar believer or even a supporter of any heretical views.
Though both parts are written with great poetic immediacy, the second part is composed with an even greater ability to evoke the reality of events and this is combined with passion and an eloquent sense of real drama. The two poems follow a largely similar verse form divided into rhyming sections (laise) of unequal lengths, of which there are 130 in Guillaime's part and another 84 in the second part. The Chanson, as a whole, covers events from 1208 to 1219 and the laise extracted here are taken from 143-145 in the second part of the Chanson and are the main part of the debate held before Pope Innocent III at the Fourth Lateran Council in Rome during the period November to December, 1215.
France | French | Novel (excerpt)
June, 2013"The story starts where all stories should end: in bed." With this opening line, Zeller tips the first domino in Nicolas and Pauline's crumbling love story. They have been together for two years but they do not agree on their future. Pauline has high expectations for the relationship; Nicolas is not sure if monogamy is really for him. He finds it hard not to follow his friend Sofia's hedonistic philosophy, her belief in pleasing herself first and living freely without being committed to anyone. But Pauline's pregnancy, and the birth of their daughter Louise, changes everything.
La Jouissance (in English translation: Climax) is the leitmotif of a generation whose lack of any sense of sacrifice works to the detriment of relationships. Why this strong sense of selfish individualism? Zeller underscores one reason: they have never been confronted by history and with their minds fixed on the present, the collective ideal of their parents has been replaced by instant gratification. To hear the heartbeat of this influential generation, Zeller incorporates the views of an eclectic mix of thinkers, politicians and artists, from Beethoven, Milan Kundera, and Godard, to Lenine and Jean-Paul Sartre.
An existential romance that unfolds during the recent European economic crisis, Climax explores the psychological frivolity of fleeting happiness against an ominous backdrop of changing times.
Gérard de Nerval was born in Paris in 1808. His published works include translations of Goethe and Heinrich Heine, numerous plays and operettas (some of which were co-authored with Alexandre Dumas), the travelogue Voyage en Orient (Voyage to the Orient, 1851), the poetry collection Les chimères (Chimeras, 1854), and the prose work Aurélie (1855). He committed suicide in Paris in 1855.
France | French | Play (excerpts)
April, 2013Under the cover of one of her many aliases--"M. Auberte the Mad"--the author takes the stage and conjures up a whirlwind of scenes. This comedy about power relations presents some thirty characters at the dinner table, in the bedroom, and in the boardroom--at work and at play, but always in trouble. Witness domestic drama, national scandal, and capital crimes--in a word, the everyday insanity of the world we live in. The Chonchons, dramatis personae of this play, come directly from Borgès' book El libro de los seres imaginarios. They can be full of humanity, and then all of a sudden they will sin, out of pride, stupidity or fragility.
Ariane Drefyfus, born in 1958, has published Les miettes de Décembre (Le Dé Bleu, 1997), La durée des plantes (Tarabuste, 1998 and 2007 (revised edition)), Une histoire passera ici (Flammarion, 1999), Quelques branches vivantes and Les compagnies silencieuses (Flammarion, 2001), La belle vitesse (Le Dé Bleu, 2002), La bouche de quelqu'un (Tarabuste, 2003), L'inhabitable (Flammarion, 2006), Iris, c'est votre bleu (Le Castor Astral, 2008), La terre voudrait recommencer (Flammarion, 2010), Nous nous attendons (Le Castor Astral, 2012), and La lampe allumée si souvent dans l'ombre (forthcoming from José Corti, 2013).
Critical Stories | France | French
November, 2012Les Invisibles brings together texts written by Luc Lang over the last fifteen years: a selection of pieces that together seem best to express the coherence and the particular obsession of a certain way of thinking. It is a way of thinking that develops over time and by means of a certain group of works and artists that together come to define a posteriori something like a force field, a shared sensibility and certain modes of questioning belonging to it. We have here twelve narratives. The author is, after all, a novelist, someone whose approach to these works involves first and foremost a narrative form of thought or, in other words, an approach to reality, a way of capturing reality, that is specific to the novel.
First published in 1924, Pierre Mac Orlan's "Simone de Montmartre" takes us along on a dash through the Paris of the First World War. The underbelly of Paris opens up for our inspection as we follow first Simone, and then her jealous and worried lover Georges and his associate Léon the Marseillais, through the Montmartre night. Penned around the same time as Dashiel Hammet's first published stories, "Simone de Montmartre" is a wonderful example of early French noir stylization packed full of the rich imagery often found in the narrative poetry of the post-Symbolist era.
France | French | Novel (excerpt)
November, 2011McCash, though no longer a cop, is still one-eyed and consumed by an anger as old as his first Clash concert, in Belfast, before Bobby Sands's hunger strikes and the victims of Bloody Sunday... No more wife, no future, illusions lost... An ophthalmologist informs him that if he persists in taking care of everything that surrounds him by destruction, he will quickly and permanently be blind. A fine reason to end it all with a brilliant bullet to his head! The spark, however, will come from somewhere else. A letter reveals to him that he's the father of Alice. The mother is dead and it's now up to him to look after the little girl... McCash has scarcely arrived in his daughter's village when he finds another little girl drowned. Alice comes to see him. She's the bothersome witness. As the dead pile up, McCash rediscovers fear and hope intermingled. He who wanted to die crashes headlong into the need to weigh up the value of a life. That of his child...
France | French | Short Fiction
July, 2011In a collection of six short stories, Véronique Bizot explores, with humor and a remarkable eye for the absurd in daily life, the themes of solitude and anxiety. In "The Gardeners," an old man living on a grand estate watches the gardeners around him with mistrust. In "The Hotel," young newlyweds under the watchful eye of an elegant elderly lady have their honeymoon disrupted by an invasion of rats. "George's Wife" tells of two friends, the tragic accident that leaves one paralyzed, and the ensuing and unavoidable vengeance. Another story tells of Lamirault, a sworn enemy of the narrator: his funeral proves that loathing, like loving, is stronger than death.
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.
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