I have a contemporary reaction to the life of Charles Baudelaire. I am reminded of Bob Dylan's "Yonder stands your orphan with his gun/Crying like a fire in the sun." Or of James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause. Or I think of the joke between a friend and me that to "follow your bliss" may lead to homelessness. An adolescent genius, Baudelaire sometimes, like most adolescents, felt weary beyond his years. Seemingly willful and contrary—undoubtedly to protect his role as the soul in revolt—the poet setting out to make great demands on language was intently committed, it seemed, to a certain internal journey. While his biography has romantic connections with various women, you may read in his poetry that his essential nature was that of the poet, a life essentially of solitude, resisting the world.
In the process of translating, one finally walks into the poem as if into a house or a forest and looks around from the inside, because you cannot make the final transition from literal translation to new poem if you are not drenched in the presence and feeling of the original. (Perhaps my inflated language about this only expresses the joy I feel whenever pieces in the English counterpart little by little fall into place.) What a kick to have a dialogue with someone speaking a different language—in the case of Baudelaire, a dialogue across time. We hear Baudelaire colored by the style of English translation during each era since his death, and those past translations lose effect for me, and so I am motivated, as well, to let Baudelaire go on speaking as fresh as in his original by "refreshing" the way he is translated. (James McColley Eilers)
Arabic | France | Novel (excerpt)
August, 2009As an adolescent, Zeina left Iraq for the United States with her family, her father having been accused of conspiracy against the regime of Saddam Hussein. Well-integrated in her country of adoption, but raised in the love of her native land, at the age of thirty she decides to return there as an interpreter with the American army. Convinced of the nobility of her mission, yet slightly ashamed of returning in this uniform, she delays in informing her grandmother, the widow of colonel in the Iraqi army. Given the job of translating and sensitizing the American military to Arab culture, the young woman realizes that her role goes beyond this: with reluctance, she is present at interrogations, or bursts into suspect houses during the night... Uneasiness sets in. And disapproval as well, that of her grandmother, of close ones, and, worse still, her own....
Through the beautiful character of this woman torn between two identities, the author paints the picture of the life of expatriate Iraqis in America and of their intensely close relationship with the mother country. The resentment of Iraqis on the inside toward the American occupier is echoed by the pain of families in mourning in the United States. Written in a pacy, punchy language like a soldier’s logbook, this novel renders with great subtlety the wounds that war inflicts on each individual, whether in uniform or not, and thus is universal in effect.
The novel was published in Arabic by Dar el-Jadid, 2008, and in French by Liana Levi, fall 2009.
France | French | Short Fiction
August, 2009Force ennemie (Enemy Force) was awarded the first Prix Goncourt in 1903. In 1906, Paul Léautraud said: “The Prix Goncourt has really only been given once—the first time to Nau.” And years later Huysmans would say, “It was the best one that we ever crowned.”
A visionary masterpiece: Phillipe Veuly, accursed poet, wakes up in a rubber room. Where is he? An insane asylum. Why? He doesn’t know and the doctors refuse to tell him. Is he crazy? Or rather are the ‘psychiatrists’ the ones who should be in his place? Stricken with amnesia, he learns from a guard that he was committed by his cousin to separate him from his alcoholic tendencies. In reality, he is the victim of the imaginary (?) jealousy of this relative. Soon he thinks he is inhabited by a being from another planet: Kmôhoûn, the ‘enemy force’, (among others), a disembodied spirit who fled the insupportable conditions of his home planet, Tkoukra. It’s not easy living with this naughty tenant who doesn’t hesitate to act insanely, speak extravagantly and even vulgarly, or even scream inside your head when others talk to you. And the “semi-lucid mental patient” falls passionately, madly, desperately in love with a female inmate, Irene. She leaves, disappears; he flees after her. He runs to the ends of the earth to find her. Enemy Force tells the story of the troublesome cohabitation of these two beings in the same body, and Veuly’s desire to concretize his love for Irene while protecting her from Kmôhoûn.
Also featured is a short story by Nau called The Emerald Eyes.
France | French | Novel (excerpt)
July, 2009The novel excerpted here, La fin des paysages/The End of Landscape is a suspenseful and obsessive oratorio about brotherhood and affiliation, not only between the twin brothers at the center of the book, and the sisters they love, but also between Africa and Europe, and the ties—affective, artistic, and political—that bind them together.
The setting is Liverpool in the final days of the Thatcher administration, hovering between the rioting youth of an abandoned industrial working class and the burgeoning gentrification of the all-but-abandoned port area and its forlorn population. The symbol of this moment is the opening of a new outpost of the Tate Gallery in the former Albert Dock. Sir Abel Manson is the Irish-born curator of the first exhibit, "A Century of Africanism: 1850-1950."
The novel opens with a gruesome accident on the docks: while unloading a shipment of priceless artifacts on loan from the governments of Nigeria, Ghana, Tanzania, and Kenya, a chain breaks, a man is swept up by the loose wire of a crane, his body sectioned, and a crate smashes open on the ground. Some sculptures are lost in the space between the boat and the dock. A fallen landscape painting is slashed by an angry worker and some masks are purloined by a mysterious stranger. A narrator describes the scene. His voice is unpunctuated, relentless, and the reader seems to become this man, Martin Finlay, as he tries first to help his employer get the exhibit back on track, and then solve the mystery of the missing masks.
French critic and literary blogger Pierre Assouline on The End of Landscape:
Here is what the author calls venturing into the labyrinth of time—that time which, in the words of Faulkner used by Lang as an epigraph, is "longer than any distance." Revisiting a story he first told fifteen years earlier, Luc Lang has produced a block of prose with an energetic and sinewy rhythm, at times Céline-like and stuffed with narrative detonations reminiscent of Dos Passos. The novel turns on twindom, on doubles and duels: the harbour master and the museum curators, two brothers that everything sets against one another, two sisters standing for two ideas of love.... Lang has not chosen an easy path. So much motion gives rise to a highly visual story. Luc Lang has filmed his own On the Waterfront in his head...a boundless palimpsest. The experiment can take the reader's breath away, and this quite literally: no white space, no extra leading, no paragraphs, no air. No better way, though, to approach a paroxysm. But the reader who feels that this is a mere exercise in bravura will surely suffocate.... Luc Lang clearly enjoys the role of an (anti-)landscape architect on the terrain of the novel.... This was a risky undertaking, but a successful one. It is impossible not to think of both Joyce and Lowry, for both of whom Lang confesses a passion.
Luc Lang on novel writing:
One day in the early 1990s, I heard a news report on the radio. There, in the incandescence of the facts, was a model for fictional narrative.... A woman pulls up in the fast lane of a highway and begins to change a wheel, as though she was on the hard shoulder. Just as she is removing the wheel with the puncture, she is struck by a fast-moving car and killed, borne aloft along with her wheel, her jack, and the rear wing of her car—bone, flesh, and metal exploding on the hood of the other vehicle. Was she stupid? Was her psychological make-up involved? Her mental state at that particular moment? Her age? Sex? Family history? Her psycho-socio-historico blah-blah-blah background? Who cares? We could not care less! From the point of view of the novel we could not care less. Only the act matters, in all its madness, all its intensity. No chatter, no analysis, no glossing, no academic editorializing on universal lessons. And no intellectual detachment either! All null and void. No distance! None! Just the facts! Write inside the fact, the fact in its opacity, its mystery, its chance quality—in its humaness therefore, its, mad, mad unpredictability, partaking of the order of creation. Because the act is all: the act in itself reveals and illuminates the whole world that is ours.
*
Like dance, it seems to me, the novel should forbid itself to think, to think itself, to reflect itself, to theorize itself within its own realm of movement. Failure to abide by this principle means slowing down, unbalancing, or even destroying the movements of writer and dancer alike. Dancers cannot comment on their movements while executing them, for the time in which they move is of great intensity and the sequence of their gestures is part of an irreversible fusion of duration and speed. This is not to say that the novel cannot become a subject of analysis outside its own space: but this must only happen after that space has been traversed and experienced at first hand, along with the characters, their story, and the writing that brings them into being. Like speaking of swimming only after allowing oneself to be swept down a river, and not while still on the bank, imprisoned in some distant, inert form of knowledge.
*
A novel is a black box, closed around its own time yet without beginning or end. A place where what is living speaks and tells of the world to which it belongs from within its own continuum, which is, to say it once more, the coherence not of a subject but of a time, constituting ultimately whatever remains of the universal despite the fury, whatever its source, that strives to silence or instrumentalize its voice.
(From Luc Lang, Notes pour une poétique du roman (Paris: Inventaire/Invention)).
The excerpt here is from his 2000 collection of “essays” On n’y voit rien: Descriptions. The chapters (on Velazquez, Titian, Bruegel, Tintoretto, Manet, Francesco da Cossa) are not essays in the usual sense. In what has been called his brilliant “narrative and pedagogical strategy,” Arasse’s analyses of the paintings in question are presented as fictional tales, dialogues between an “I” (Arasse) and a foil who questions his ideas, forcing him to clarify them for us. In the chapter presented here, the reader can see all the intelligence and humor Arasse brings to bear on his subject, in this case, the lovely snail in Francesco del Cossa’s Annunciation (1470).
(Alyson Waters)
Maurice G. Dantec was born in Grenoble, France, in 1959. After a period as an advertising copywriter in the early nineties, Dantec turned his attention to writing fiction. He has published seven novels, which might loosely be categorized as a blend of science fiction and crime fiction. One of them, Babylon Babies (semitotext(e), 2005), has been translated into English. He has also published three volumes of journals, Le Théâtre des opérations, the latest being American black box, which appeared in 2007. Dantec has also been involved in the music scene for a number of years and is the founder of the rock groups État d’urgence and Artefact. Since 1997, he has worked with musician Richard Pinhas as a member of Schizotrope. Since 1998, Dantec has been living in Montreal, Canada.
I first encountered Bernard Da Costa's Boomerang when I played the role of The Teacher in a staged reading for New Jersey Repertory Company. I had serious problems with the translation, the wording of which felt awkward and unnatural to an English-speaking actor. Even in that form, however, the response was most gratifying—lots of laughter—and the entire audience stayed afterward for the post-show discussion, and seemed genuinely fascinated by these two troubled, passionate people.
When Bernard wrote to me, asking for my impressions of the play, I told him that I would love to attempt a new translation, and he gave me his blessing. As I worked on it, I found that both Isabelle and Pierre were wonderfully articulate, smart, fiercely defiant people—both among the Walking Wounded of the world—yet both refusing (against all reason) to surrender their dreams. What the audience had responded to, I felt, was this phoenix-like quality in both. Whatever their faults (and they are capable of terrible cruelty, and probably incapable of any intimate relationship with another human being), they cannot or will not abandon their unattainable goals. They certainly lack Don Quixote's nobility of mind, yet they are, in their own ways, akin to him. Their hopeless, blindered optimism makes them unsuited to the Real World, but they and their kind are part of what makes our world so endlessly fascinating.
(Kathleen Huber)
France | French | Novel (excerpt)
September, 2007Anne Garréta's La Décomposition, written over a four-year period and published in 1999, is the story of a serial killer. However, given that the author is a member of Oulipo, and the killer well versed in literature, we shouldn't be surprised to discover that victims are chosen from among the characters in Proust's In Search of Lost Time. Their flesh-and-blood counterparts are hunted in a contemporary Paris of video arcades, bars, and shadowy corners by the Seine. As the murderer dispatches the victims, their fictional counterparts are eliminated from a digitized version of Proust's magnum opus. Every reference to the “murdered” character is expunged from the book, reducing the novel's length with each fresh kill. To complicate matters, the philosophical and ruminative killer, who is, disturbingly, also the book's narrator, chooses these victims on the basis of a grammatical rule: they must agree in gender and number with the character in the novel. Otherwise, they are chosen randomly.
As should be obvious in a book with such a literary plot device, albeit a quirky one, La Décomposition is not simply the story of a serial killer, even a well-read one. For along with the victims, the narrator is also murdering Proust's novel, lopping off body parts bit by bit, cutting it down to manageable size. At one point in the beginning of the book, the narrator even comments, “For life is too short, and Proust is too long.”
In the novel two ideas widely found in twentieth-century literature are merged: the perfect crime and the gratuitous act. Through their amalgam the murderer hopes to raise murder to a fine art, to blend fiction and reality. And what better way to do so than to use a literary masterpiece as the scaffolding for one's crimes? For, in doing so, murder will wrap itself in the aesthetic mantle of the fine arts. But ethics is lost in aesthetics.
Filled with dark humor and dense, classically tinged prose, La Décomposition is ultimately not about serial killers but the role of the reader. For Garréta not only cuts Proust down to size, she questions literature's complicity with violence. In allowing us to identify with a murder, even a fictive one, literature provides a way for us to identify with evil, to absorb it through our sympathy with a character. In what is ultimately a profoundly ethical book, La Décomposition questions the mechanisms used by fiction to enable us to experience violence from within, vicariously, safely.
(Robert Bononno)
Drama (Excerpts) | France | French
September, 2007A woman struggles to reclaim her identity after a violent event leaves her stripped from her sense of self. Written as a monologue, Jaz transcends its form by distancing the character from herself—being both the character and outside of the character—and by engaging dialogue with a musical instrument.
(Chantal Bilodeau)
France | French | Novel (excerpts)
April, 2007”Yvan Goll is a man without a country; fate made him a Jew; chance caused him to be born in France; and a rubber stamp on a piece of paper decrees that he is German.“ This was how Goll described himself in 1920 for Pinthus’s famous anthology of Expressionism. He might as well have added that Yvan Goll was a man with no name—a man living anonymously, pseudonymously. And—inasmuch as Goll was equally at home in French, German, and English—a man with no mother tongue.
(Donald Nicholson-Smith)
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).