EDWARD GAUVIN

Scheduled to be out the door and on the freeways 10 minutes ago, with a box of donuts in my lap, on the road south from L.A. Yessir, it’s Friday, and I’ll be at the great Comic Con of 2007, for all those fans of… er, translation. Seriously, though, today or tomorrow, check out my friend and co-creator G.B. Tran‘s table in Small Press, or drop by at the Archaia Studios booth and say Hi! I’ll likely be there or roaming the vast nerdy plains. Can’t wait! Also, check out the afternoon premiere of NBC’s fall series Chuck, co-created by the formidable Chris Fedak–known in college days of yore simply as The Fedak.

“The French,” begins Miss Bird, “are different from you and me.” Vive la différence, and vive Miss Bird, prolific Amazon reviewer who in the thoroughness (mystifyingly unmotivated, but let’s not give gift horses oral exams) of her commentary saw fit to honor me beside Alexis Siegel with a mention for my work on Tiny Tyrant in these choice words:

“Not for the first time would I wonder to what extent translator Alexis Siegel and (uncredited) Edward Gauvin added their own personal touches to these exceedingly funny bits of wordplay. Princess Hildegardina, for example, speaks with a lofty convoluted speech that frequently leaves Ethelbert tongue-tied himself. How many of these words are direct translations of the French and how many the delightful vocal curlicues of Siegel and Gauvin?” » Read the rest of this entry «

Happenings in Translationland: I’m pleased to announce I’ve gone from a single person to a service, joined by two other superb translators to form a company now handling the rendering of French, Japanese, and Chinese into English.   That means not just BD but manga and manhua.  Let’em eat brioche.  And mochi.  Now we are officially UNSTOPPABLE, a FORCE unto OURSELVES, a TRIPLE THREAT, a TRANSLATING TRIUMVIRATE—or just three guys who speak in tongues.  Click on TRANSLATIONS at the top of the page to see the revised page.  Give us your bizness, wot?

It’s raining tonight. I go as though following the sound where it’s loudest to the other room, to watch where, squatting on the single bed, I can push the screen aside and feel, if not drops, the threat of water flicking on an end of wind through the open window instead of catching on fine wire. The streetlights show me rain at the vanguard of a gust driving up the avenue and the puddles at the intersection when I lean out, still beneath the awning clattering as though to boast of how it shelters: and suddenly, the sight of two awnings on the building opposite makes me think to hear the water clattering on them too and, like picking one instrument’s part from a song, the awnings of all Taipei, a city of awnings, of bits of cymbal hatting windows, of canted, corrugated panels rattling in supplication and complaint to some ancient and presiding god of rain. I think of Maokong then, and who might be there at 2 a.m., of rain falling on the leaves and railings, decks and stone benches; the lighted pavilions nestled in the trees, where on tables carefully laid, water is fast disappearing from the sides of clay teapots; the road like a necklace of streetlights lost in the valley’s folds.

Joann Sfar and Emmanuel Guibert’s rollicking Sardine 4, now at the First Second site with a preview, hits shelves this fall! Or pick up an early copy at SDCC.  I’ll be there.

Just finished the semifinal draft of Okko #6 this week. That’s two issues into The Cycle of Earth, which will follow on The Cycle of Water—which I trust you all are reading faithfully—when that concludes this summer. No spoilers, hopefully, in forecasting a satisfying character arc for our young narrator Tikku, and a rare creature for any D&D fans of Oriental Adventures from back in the day. Also, hints of pleasingly troubling moral ambiguity shadow our heroes’ triumph—seeds of greater future uncertainty and even thematic grandeur? We deny monsters, the other, whatever we hate, the capacity to feel what we believe ennobles us—for if they too were so entitled, then what should tell us apart? And how should we justify our mercilessness toward them?

I myself haven’t read the second volume of The Cycle of Earth yet. Maybe it’ll even tell what the deal is with Noburo and his mask.

Okko # 3 out in stores this very month! Go buy it! Or, er, be square. » Read the rest of this entry «

A little plugging never hurt a blog. In hectic February I missed the boat when another series I’d been translating for Archaia Studios Press made its debut on the racks the week after NYCC—namely, The Secret History. Here I am, catching up with a few words in time for the release of the second issue.

I’ve now read and translated my way through four books of The Secret History, taking me in the story’s chronology up through the late Middle Ages, via the Crusades and the Wars of the Guelphs and Ghibellines, and the Renaissance siege of Rome, featuring everybody’s favorite action hero artisan, Benvenuto Cellini, whose classic memoirs I’m now inspired to read. The series has definitely grown on me, and the transition from crazy Igor Kordey’s art in the first two books to the more even, if less impassioned work of Goran Sudzuka in the third hasn’t been jarring. There’s some particularly lovely brushwork in the third volume, when a band of evil monks raid a sacred forest (shades of Broceliande and Fangorn, and also naked killer druid chicks. That phrase alone should draw some Google traffic my way). » Read the rest of this entry «

A short stateside tour: popping up at, among other places, NY Comic Con. Forgive the absence–too luddite, or is it lazy? to post from the road. Happy Lunar New Year, best wishes to all believers for the pig days ahead. Snow country, here I come.

* Two new translations by yours truly up at Words Without Borders, the Online Magazine of International Literature, as their first ever Graphic Issue, long in the offing, becomes a reality this month. O frabjous day! Treats for lovers of la B.D. dit avant-garde, as L’Association founding member Jean-Christophe Menu would have it, or alternative Euro-comics, as they might say in the States. Which means no tights. An excerpt from La Bombe Familiale, by French comics superstar David B., best known in English for his epic Epileptic and his appearances in Fantagraphics’ Mome, thanks to the tireless efforts of the polyglot Kim Thompson. A short first published by L’Asso in their Patte de Mouche collection back in distant ’97, it tells the humane and absurd tale of a city in the shadow of war, and the dangers of befriending missiles. David B.’s bold blacks and whites, as ever, combine unease, imagination, and storybook immediacy.
Favorites of The Comic’s Reporter‘s Bart Beaty since their début, the Belgians Florent Ruppert and Jérôme Mulot, who walked off with this year’s Best Newcomer Award at Angoulême for their Panier de Singe (L’Association, coll. Ciboulette), penned a short, “Les Pharaons d’Égypte“, from the January 2005 issue of Les Réquins Marteaux‘s revue Ferraille Illustré. The duo upend traditional time and space within the panels of this nightmarish social invective; their faceless characters achieve a worrisome menace. I hope I’ve done justice to the almost Beckettian exchange of banalities, the patter populating their pages. » Read the rest of this entry «

It’s wonderful, as I fly into a new translation for First Second Books, to know I’ll once more have the intrepid and dependable Alexis Siegel on wing, ready to blast any tricky French from the sky before it blindsides me. I call him my mentor, though never to his face; he’d surely decline the title.

The target, this time, is yet another collection from the mind of the ever-zany and hyperprolific Lewis Trondheim. I’ve never seen the Nicktoons import version, though the books are predictably uproarious. Trondheim is one of the great French humorists, right up there with Francis Veber in my book, though my favorite thing he’s done would still be Farniente, a slim book from L’Asso with art by Dominique Hérody: a quiet series of witty, wistful conversations between a husband and wife on vacation, he the pessimist, she, well, une française. » Read the rest of this entry «