France | French | Novel (excerpt)
September, 2014A young couple, adrift in life, roams the streets of Paris on a snowy winter night. They enter a café but are forced to leave after a dispute with the owner. They continue their stroll, joined, though, by a seedy gentleman of a certain age they had met at the café. He accompanies them and tells them the story of how he reached his current state. He was once a highly regarded figure, successful in private and professional life, and a candidate for office. Returning from an electoral rally one evening, he found his wife leaving the company of another man. He confronted her and killed her. Though never arrested for the crime, his life collapsed. The young couple continue their stroll, and the young man is arrested by passing police for murder. He tries to explain that he had intended to turn himself in for an unnamed crime, and is questioned about the murder of a shopkeeper. A witness to the murder recounts the event and, when confronted with the novel's protagonist, says the young man is not the culprit. The young couple is released from custody and continues their walk, their lives as hopeless as at the beginning.
The excerpt featured here is the opening of the novel.
- Mitch Abidor
France | French | Novel (excerpt)
September, 2014Holy Mother of God! tells the warm, wise, and witty story of the politically incorrect life of Marie, a French housewife in search of happiness. Marie seems to have everything in her life she needs to be happy; a husband, Cornelius, who loves her, a newly purchased home, the news of her first pregnancy--and even though she is new to her small town, she has already become friends with a group of mothers. But Marie is naïve, and her perfect life becomes a little less than that. Astrid Éliard dares to shake the foundations of the maternity through a narrator who explains how this Marie--the French name for the Virgin Mary--struggles with her own life, "holy and full of grace."
- Allison M. Charette
André Chenier is universally acknowledged to be the most gifted poet of eighteenth-century France. His masterpiece is The Bucolics, impersonal but moving and dramatic treatments of classical themes. The best known poem of this collection is "The Tarentine Bride," featured here. Like most of the Bucolics, it is composed in the Alexandrine couplets of rhyming hexameters perfected by Racine, but given a new flexibility by Chenier. I have translated them into their English equivalent, the pentameter heroic couplets that dominated English eighteenth-century verse. The French text can be found on line at Wikisource, le bibliothéque libre, Bucoliques, or Les grands poémes classiques.
- John Anson
Paol Keineg is a Breton poet and playwright. Though he lived in America for many years, he has now returned to Brittany, where he is recognized for both his earlier political work and for the lyric beauty of his poems. One reviewer wrote of his 2005 book Là, et pas là: "A world rich with diverse identities, feats and defeats, from savagery to civilization and back, a poetry of secrets as much as cries. And if the whole point is to stay in the world without getting angry? The strength of his work doesn't ask us to obey" (Claude Lalande, Le Nouveau Recueil, translation my own). The title of his 2012 book Abalamour is a microcosm of these qualities--abalamour in the Breton language means "because," the beginning of a reasoned argument, but in French abalamour sounds like "à bas l'amour"--down with love.
Like Pessoa, he uses heteronyms to create, in his words, "a liberating effect under certain circumstances." Poems in Abalamour are written under the names "Chann Lagatu" and "Yves Dennielou," suggesting lineages and family histories in addition to the author's own.
In the title poem, Keineg draws on Breton, French, and American allusions. Instead of footnoting, I have included a few glosses here. Part of this poem takes place in North Carolina (where Keineg was a professor at Duke for many years). The poem refers to a Breton story about the figure of Death who drives from town to town at night in his carriage. The wheels of the carriage make a squeaking noise ("wik-ha-wak") as he passes through to collect the dead. The other Breton reference in the poem is to al leur nevez--a party where neighbors dance on a new threshing floor to tamp down the dirt and make a good surface for the grain. Kiez ar bed means "bitch of the world" in Breton.
- Laura Marris
France | French | Poetry (excerpt)
June, 2014Sébastien Smirou's eight-part poem "Le chamois" comprises Chapter 3 of his eight-chapter volume Beau voir (Paris: P.O.L., 2008). Subtitled "bestiaire," with a pencil sketch by François Matton of an unfinished beast on its cover, Beau voir features chapters that each address a different animal: lion, giraffe, chamois, cow, cat, turtle, glowworm, dodo. One may hear the title as an echo of mirabile visu, "wonderful to behold," with the reading experience figured like a day spent wandering an unusual zoo: the animals are hardly in captivity, few zoos feature glowworms (or, for that matter, cats), and the dodo is extinct. On the other hand, "beau voir" is also a set expression, indicating doubt: "Oh yeah? I'd like to see that," or, more cynically, "Uh-huh, we'll see about that." Poised between exhibition and exhibitionism, between inventory and invention, Beau voir is a kids' book for grownups, those featherless bipeds who live behind figurative bars but are sometimes freed by rhyme, or nonsense, a run-on sentence, a pun or sing-along. One might keep in mind that bête is not only a noun for "creature"; it's also an adjective meaning "silly," even "stupid." Similarly, "La vache," the book's fourth chapter, refers to cows--but "vache," the adjective, means "nasty," while "La vache!" is an exclamation of surprise: Holy cow! Like its predecessor Mon Laurent, Smirou's Beau voir is divided into eight chapters, each containing as many poems, with each poem comprising an octave of lines. Moreover, the last line, or a portion of it, is repeated in every poem within a section, verbatim or with variegated reiterations. All eight octets of "The giraffe," for instance, conclude, "si tu vois ce que je veux dire" ("if you see what I mean"), a phrase that highlights Smirou's impish wish to marry seeing and saying. That the title Beau voir contains eight letters is no contingent detail--I am calling the translation See About. Previous translated excerpts from the book have appeared in Asymptote, Aufgabe, and Paperbag.
- Andrew Zawacki
France | French | Poetry (excerpts)
April, 2014Paul Valéry occupies a key place in French poetry, summing up much of nineteenth-century lyric practice while anticipating the preoccupations of the twentieth. His reputation was made by a small amount of highly polished verse, but he also published numerous essays, dialogues and other occasional work, and left behind the 28,000 pages of his early-morning notebooks filled with notes, aphorisms, and prose poems.
A closer reading of Charms (1922), the collection that in many ways defined Valéry as a poet, belies the accepted image of him as all charm and no substance: the polished surface of his deceptively classical poems ripple with barely contained tensions. Any translator of these poems is therefore faced with the challenge of preserving their measured sense of form and precision of language, while losing none of their underlying force.
- Nathaniel Rudavksy-Brody
Canada | French | Novel (excerpt)
April, 2014Set in Acadia, the French-speaking region of New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, Bearsaga (L'Oursiade) presents a tale of two families: one of humans, the other of bears. We meet Ozite, a centenarian losing her eyesight and memory and tending to babble (at her age, it is her privilege!), along with the two orphans she's raised: Simon the Halfbreed and his young cousin, Johnny. Both men are dispossessed--their paternal origins are unknown to them, and throughout the novel they search for the identity of the man who fathered Johnny.
The bears, on the other hand, have been dispossessed of their home: when a summer fire forces them from their section of the forest, they move into a trash heap. Black Ghost, the chief, must save what is left of his clan, including his mother, Bearagenarian, a twenty-six-year-old sow who is losing her memory...and tends to babble.
While Simon is obsessed with finding the stranger who seduced and abandoned the mother of his young cousin, and while Black Ghost exhausts almost every possible solution to get his clan through the winter, Ozite and Bearagenarian meet and befriend each other. As they prepare to pass on, they look not to where they have come from, but to where they may go after death. Their homespun discussions of rebirth and reincarnation eventually provide an answer to everyone's questions.
- David L. Koral
Article (excerpt) | France | French
November, 2013...
Note on "Bret Easton Ellis: It's Actually Shakespeare":
Laurent Binet, whose novel HHhH was translated into twenty languages, is cultishly devoted to the author of American Psycho. His tribute to the author he calls BEE is both sexy and precise, with the added bonus of a few literary scoops on his greatest books. This article appeared in the August 2012 issue of Vanity Fair (France).
Note on "Glossary of Literary Received Ideas":
This article appeared in Le Nouvel Observateur in 2011. There are no entries under the letters "E" or "T" in the English translation.
French | Morocco | Novella (excerpt)
September, 2013Once he crosses the hospital's iron doorway, the narrator is trapped. And thus begins Ahmed Bouanani's novella, The Hospital, wherein an unnamed guide navigates the labyrinthine world of a hospital on the outskirts of Casablanca. Despite scant details about the institution or the narrator's illness, we understand that his stay is less than voluntary.
What emerges is a story of Casablanca's beggars and madmen. As the narrator struggles to differentiate between reality and imagination, and maintain his sanity, he records the minutiae of the wards of one wing of the hospital. Through a series of short vignettes, the narrator describes events in wing C that transpire over a period of weeks, months, or even years. The portraits that emerge reveal his fellow patients' simplicity, depravity, and naiveté without ever verging into pity or caricature. Relying heavily on colloquial dialogue, Bouanani creates a contained universe where God, sex, and family are equally lauded, condemned, and mocked.
The narrator himself alternates between remarkable lucidity, offering his observations with grim irony and detachment, and vivid hallucinations. Bouanani uses vibrant imagery to its best effect when describing the narrator's descent into a dizzying fantasy world--one where his younger self and the incarnation of death both have speaking parts. Modeled after the author's own stint in a tuberculosis sanatorium, The Hospital offers the reader a focused, almost claustrophobic look at the patients of wing C--some (the sexual predators and parricidal killers) abhorrent but nonetheless compelling. In short, Bouanani's novella is a story of contrasts: health/disease, pureness/perversion, control/chaos, and lastly, resignation/rebellion. But more than a portrait of a single man's odyssey through madness, the work offers a larger glimpse into one of Morocco's darkest periods. Reflecting Bouanani's experiences as a writer living in a climate of political unrest and harsh government repression, The Hospital is an allegory of the position of the artist and the conditions of the production of art in Morocco in the second half of the 20th century.
Since Bouanani's death in 2011, artists in Morocco have been trying to revive interest in his works. So far, their efforts have resulted in a re-edition of The Hospital in both Morocco and France, and an upcoming Arabic translation of the novella. Bouanani's writings should be framed within a broader, post-colonial aesthetic movement that sought to valorize Moroccan literature and film. The Hospital is an undeniably important work within that corpus. Beyond its historical significance, however, the novella stands out as a compelling and unique narrative characterized by Bouanani's acerbic, engrossing, and magical prose.
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 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).
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