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.
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.
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).