EDWARD GAUVIN

A much belated announcement that the Okko hardcover, collecting the four gorgeous issues of the Cycle of Water, has been out for two months from Archaia Studios Press, so why don’t you own it yet? It is sumptuous, handsome, and in the right lighting, or understanding hands, even sensual, redolent of such Eastern spices as were bestowed upon the Lord by road-weary heathen kings. It fine binding creaks discreetly when you open it for the first time, and inside a voyage awaits like that of Keats looking into Chapman’s Homer. The dun and beige scheme of its covers mimics brass plate that gives burnished reflection of the wondering reader.  Preview the first issue of the next arc, the Cycle of Earth, here. Everything Archaia pretty much available here.  Support my colleagues and an indie comics company.

Maestro Alexis Siegel namechecks me in an insightful article, chock full of excellent examples, on the puns and pratfalls of comics translation, at the First Second blog. Love from the sensei humbles the student. An excellent link may be found therein to an Anthea Bell article from The Telegraph. This woman is responsible for the English rendition of one of my favorite books, Sebald’s Austerlitz. But before that, she was all about Asterix–in the comics world, translations legendary as Beckett’s own of Godot. There is something in these two pieces that points toward the hope and possibility of actually helpful essays on this admittedly very specialized subgenre of a marginalized literary activity. The possibility of saying anything useful in the field had defeated me, but once again, teacher shows the way. I liken it to the pointer-laden craft approach of this article.

Staying with First Second Books for a moment, my lucky editrix will be leaving the company to pursue a full-time children’s dream at Roaring Brook. Sniff! I’ll miss her. She’ll be gone by the time Cyril Pedrosa’s Three Shadows comes out in April, right before NY Comic-Con. Congrats to the French original which was one of five to pick up an audience favorite prize, the Must-Read, at Angouleme: the biggest comics festival in the world.

Last but definitely not least, the new February Words Without Borders, the second graphics issue in what may become a n annual tradition, is a treasure trove featuring an interview with Gipi and a Korean childhood favorite from Heinz Insu Fenkl.  Editor Samantha Schnee struts out two South American comics, and Dupuy (of Dupuy & Berberian, the team behind Monsieur Jean, who took Angouleme’s top prize this year), has a whimsical confection about a world-traveling rabbit.  I’m elated to have two new comics translations, collage from Lebanon and comedy from Gabon, appear amongst such riches (at this point there are still some typos in them).

I have a problem with this: the default critique these days for books and albums of a somber mood seems to be to imply that they reference or obliquely address a post 9/11 world. The ashes from that day seem to pall every important new work of art. “Clearly a reference to” is a nightstick critics wield with a certain swagger. Of course, as usual when I let myself topple into tirade, I have no example to point to or truck out in my defense except a certain impression of surfeit that must be the result of accumulated instances, right? America suddenly has a copyright on disaster; let no one else’s grief infringe thereon. Of course our Promised Land, ’tis of thee, has always taken woe quite personally, or do I mean myopically and hubristically? Even our disasters, supersized, are bigger than your disasters, and ditto with our suffering, or so the t-shirts for sale in the French Quarter would have had me believe when I was there in November ’05 as a volunteer. Walls plastered with wreaths and photos of missing loved ones existed elsewhere before Ground Zero and Union Square—notably, the 1999 Taiwan quake—though we see them only as 9/11 references. » Read the rest of this entry «

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.

…Taiwan with the frère cadet.  We dine from a menu of traveler’s delights: for him, a starter of la turista from lobster sashimi, with a side of sunburn and a main dish of heat rash in various crevices.  For me, a dishonorable wipeout on a moped, with some flesh left on asphalt.  Back in a few.

…were probably not worth the trouble, but if we only ever did the things that were, would we learn anything? Cleaning them was a slimy affair reminiscent of early biology dissections, so little did I recognize the parts I pulled—taking hold of the head firmly just beside the eyes—from the mantle, yet so clearly were they parts: gills, intestines, even glands and the hearts of whose multiple existence, indifferentiable to my eyes from the innard mass, I had later to be informed by anatomical schematics—though once I swore to have identified ovaries and their smeary roe, if those are the words. The feathered gills I knew from other fish and seafood. I ruptured only two ink sacs (of twelve), and sacrificed several fins to separating skin from mantle. The cartilaginous spine came out easily each time, though I never got a clear look at the beak, nestled among the edible tentacles, to compare it to a bird’s. It too was easily removed, a hard but never really sharp little nodule, in my fingers. I’ve no aversion to fish eyes but for some reason tried not to meet, consider, or even register beneath my fingers these orbs which, I’ve read, contain a hard lens functioning much like the that of a camera or telescope when focusing: “Rather than changing shape, like a human eye, it moves mechanically.” Tentacles, mantles—the tiny clumps and fibrous tops I might’ve sliced into the more familiar rings of calamari—all these I tossed in olive oil with garlic and sautéed. I hacked a pineapple into cubes while waiting. Back home, I would’ve found a pineapple too troublesome. The secret to a pineapple is a sharp knife.

It is one thing to be lulled into a sense of progress, learning Chinese from a book, by readings ingeniously limited to the words each lesson introduces; quite another to be confronted by those words in the wilds of the language at large. That native habitat finds them consorting promiscuously with strange characters in more configurations than were sketched by Bosch: phrases, formalities, compounds and commercial puns, the elaborate titles of common dishes. Walking down the street, my head swiveling at ads, is to see some word I thought to know leering at me from a coupling at whose meaning I can only guess. This induces in me something like the vertigo of chancing on a girl, believed demure, in some obscure debauchery: lightheaded from the loss of some certainty.

Of the 3000 characters Chinese is said to employ on a common basis, I now know, I would venture, 500: which is to say my chances of recognizing a character are roughly those of losing at Russian roulette. I conceived of the 15th Taipei International Book Exhibition (TIBE) as a citadel of language: a chance to glimpse words at work and play in all the possibilities print offered. I would pick up one, maybe two new expressions. Mostly I would wander in studious bewilderment. My first stop was, just past Google, the pavilion of the Bureau International de l’Édition Française (BIEF), to pay homage as a translator of French to this distant outpost of the Republic of Letters. I returned there several times over the course of three visits to the fair, which I never did entirely cover.

Anyone deriving from my orbits some erroneously Franco-centric notion of the floor plan might be briskly disabused thereof with a glance at the map by whose lights, were booth size any indicator of real-world real estate, France, while still outsizing Google’s domain (but only just), would cover less than half the feudal holdings of Japan’s manga emperor Tohan, its shelves heavy with revues thick as phone books. With some geographic justice, none of these in square footage could rival Russia. As this year’s guest of honor, it boasted both the smallest books—a collection of exquisite miniatures, including Chekhov’s Guinness-recordholding “Chameleon”—and the largest pavilion: yards of carpeted steppe, dotted with scarlet cushions, right under where the roof drew like a giant breath up past stacked balconies toward a skylight vault. Of course booth size and location signified no more secret hierarchy than the pecuniary, and certainly not the geopolitical; no surprise to this jaded shopper, who regularly mistakes, while strolling chain bookstores, the piles of sales displays for bar graphs of publisher funding. Still, I would’ve liked, from idle curiosity, to see last year’s floor plan overlay this year’s in some informative animation of who’d shrunk or grown, gone or stayed. » Read the rest of this entry «

One of the finer pleasures of life in Taiwan is that brands cease to signify.

Apparently, when a shirt has its tag slashed and goes on sale for a third of its American retail in a store generically named “Outlet”, it is also stripped of the ability to indicate social class, taste, or economic standing.

A stout housewife in middle-age brings out all the shapeless frumpiness you’d never guess was in an Abercrombie sweatshirt from its usual setting, draped with calculated provocation across some lithe and nubile teen.

There’s a carnival air to this upending of expectations, which I find perpetually refreshing. Asia really is a parallel universe. The basic criterion for a parallel universe is that everything must initially seem the same, but reveal itself to be subtly different, as though the mirror dividing and begetting the two realms were slightly warped.

The housewife, who is probably engaged in some activity like rinsing her steamer trays with a hose over the gutter of an empty lane, is wearing the sweatshirt because it was cheap, because it was a factory second, because it belongs to her daughter now working in Shanghai, or because it’s not really an Abercrombie sweatshirt at all.

Knockoffs run the gamut from the bald and careless to the fairly meticulous. On one end are those whose blatancy is the obvious product of shamelessness. The athletic brand IKE, above a slightly shorter and less graceful swoosh (ah, for an aesthetics of the swoosh!), can be faulted for laziness and lack of creativity, but not for really giving a damn. At the other end, appropriation approaches self-consciousness: the bakery Just Do Eat has almost entitled itself with punny ingenuity to use of the same swoosh, in its case an stretched croissant. NET, a popular and fashionable domestic clothing chain, fills much the same mildly upscale market niche as The Gap, whose font it apes.

Of course, as is sometimes the case with close-up work, it turns out on taking a step back that, artisan forger though you are, you have been maniacally attentive to the wrong things.

I once saw “dimberlanT” embroidered on a man’s fleece sweater above the zippered chest pocket. The font was impeccable, just as it was another time, for the improbably lengthy and nonsensical name “Cavalier KillerDiller”, which replaced the comparatively banal Calvin Klein in superimposition over the standard CK initials—also, needless to say, perfectly reproduced.

This last was in the subway, on a hat a stout middle-aged woman was wearing, a candystriped plastic sack of fresh fruit swinging from the arm she kept folded to her chest, her fist clenched over her cardigan. I noticed all these things, despite not being able for several minutes to tear my gaze from her hat. A fascination that she, fortunately, did not remark, as she was shorter and it went quite literally—perhaps also figuratively—over her head.

What gives rise to these phenomena: accuracies of appearance and comedies of content? » 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.

The first Dunkin’ Donuts in all Taiwan opened here, a week ago, in Taipei, not far from one of the arthouses, giving Nippon’s Mister Donut, hitherto the market giant, a run for its year-old monopoly. I await some titanic battle of the corporate mascots that will lay waste to the metropolis with cheesy effects; blows will be traded and sprinkles rained on streets thronged with screaming Asians. Two versions, with alternate endings, will be shot and released in the appropriate countries. The Taipei Times, organ of finely edited English prose that it is, featured a picture of six comely and miniskirted hostesses in company colors showing off trays of the famous treats glazed, powdered, and otherwise pampered. “Product localization”, the result as ever of discerning “market research”, has, so say rumors, resulted in sweets not quite as cloying as the American originals. Meanwhile, Hong Kong’s only Krispy Kreme, a sleek art deco mart of brushed silvers and grays in the heart of ritzy Causeway, continues to pack them in with its HOT! light, a beacon to all lonely wayfarers whom only a life ring of fried and sugared dough will save from drowning. I stumbled on it once, in a light fog, dazed from hours of pointless browsing; its spruce logo and mirrored lettering came to me from that twilight zone of collective cultural memory where still reigns, with all its sweetheart hopes, a peculiarly American sham Shangri-La: the fifties of checkered floors and busboys in paper caps. Inside, I was sure, the help would say “please” and “thank you” and Buddy Holly would be singing of a fool’s paradise. There Father hunkers lovingly over cream fillings that murmur futures, just around the corner past the Joneses’, full of flying station wagons, and breathe not a word to him of impending coronaries. » Read the rest of this entry «

Le Hong Kong qui m’a ébloui, dès que je suis descendu de l’avion pour me retrouver dans l’humidité étouffante de 99%, a disparu, cédant sa place à une ville désormais familière, connue de tous ces films que me poussait à voir cette fascination initiale, née de ma visite en été ‘97, lors de sa remise à la Chine. J’ai beau le chercher, il n’existe plus. De temps en temps me viennent des tours de la ville présente, en vision fugitive, les contours de cette autre, alors terriblement exotique, dont l’étrangeté m’avait englouti, et je me rappelle que dans cette ville des gratte-ciels, ne resplendissant que d’argent boursier, se mire quelque chose comme le monde de l’avenir tel que le concevrait un garçon de cinq ans, où se lancent, des grands boulevards, les escaliers évidemment mécaniques dans une course aux passerelles élancées, tapissées de transporteurs, qui sillonnent la métropole des tours étincelants. Une légèreté presque utopienne, comme la bénédiction du soleil, surgirait de cette ville dont les résidents, pour la traverser, n’avait nullement besoin de mettre pied sur terre.