The latest issue of Paris-based literary revue The Black Herald, the innovative bilingual brainchild of Paul Stubbs and Blandine Longre, is now available for purchase in print and digital format. features my translation of a nonfiction piece by Pierre Cendors: “The Invisible Outside,†an excerpt from a book forthcoming from Éditions Isolato.
Here’s an excerpt:
Some places on earth overlap with the spirit’s untamed wilderness. Traveling to such places amounts to making a double voyage, a waking conversation between the senses and sense, ramble and ritual, geography and poetry. In this double movement, two aspects of the real, two faces of the same peak pierce the voyager’s consciousness, sometimes creating a calm and lucid kind of seeing, a trance state serene amidst the landscape’s unfurling.
Here in Hornstrandir, what is human comes after. After what? After what came before. Nature, the landscape of an isle that the elements shaped on a different scale, the timeless window it opens in our spirits—everything points to origins. That’s my starting point. The original fascinates me. I have contemplated it in Ireland, in Scotland, and in Greece… Now I contemplate it in Iceland.
Cendors, a French-Irish poet and novelist, was born in 1968, and has published more than eleven books, including the novels Adieu à ce qui vient (2011), Engeland (2010), and L’homme caché (2006) with Éditions Finitude, and Les fragments Solander with Editions La dernière goutte (2012).
Writing that we deem can withstand the test of time and might resist popularization — the dangers of instant literature for instant consumption. Writing that seems capable of escaping the vacuum of the epoch. Where the rupture of alternative mindscapes and nationalities exists, so too will The Black Herald.