with Jérémie Guez, the author of my most recent translation, the contemporary Parisian noir Eyes Full of Empty, which drops in bookstores November 10th and is currently available for pre-order at the website of publisher Unnamed Books, an LA-based indie press. The novel has garnered some terrific advance reviews from Publishers Weekly and M. Lynx Qualey at Arabic Literature (in English).
Tour dates include:
- Skylight Books, Los Angeles: 7:30pm, November 6, with JAMES ELLROY, 1818 N Vermont Ave
- University of California at Santa Barbara: 3:30pm, November 10, graduate translation workshop
- BookBuyers, Mountain View: 7pm, November 12, 317 Castro St
- Book Passage, Corte Madera: 7pm, November 13, with CARA BLACK, 51 Tamal Vista Blvd.
Jérémie will also be appearing on his own at San Diego’s Mysterious Galaxy at 7:30pm on November 11.
This year’s ALTA, the 38th annual conference of the American Literary Translators Association, is in Tucson and themed “Translation and Traffic.†I will be speaking on a panel that takes its title from Karen Emmerich’s forthcoming book, “The Making of Originals: Translation as a Form of Editing†with translator and professor Karen Emmerich herself, and translator and co-chair of PEN America’s Translation Committee Alex Zucker, moderated by Words Without Borders editor Susan Harris. It’s at 3:45 on the afternoon of Friday, October 30th. Come see!
To grab your copy of the October 2015 issue of Harper’s Magazine, featuring my translation of “The Bawdyhouse for Beggars,†a chapter (or subchapter) unto itself in the “nonfiction novel†Paris insolite (“unseen†or “curious†Paris), which first ran in Issue 58, the John Le Carré issue, of TLR, Fairleigh Dickinson’s litmag The Literary Review. It will also be featured in the forthcoming anthology of writing on Paris from Serving House Press, edited by TLR World Literature Editor Jessie Vail Aufiery.
Clébert’s complete book is forthcoming next spring as Paris Vagabond from New York Review Books, in a translation by Donald Nicholson-Smith.
Jean-Paul Clébert (1926-2011) is the author of more than forty works of fiction and nonfiction. He left Jesuit school at 16, to join the French Resistance, and afterward, traveled Asia. In the 1950s, he frequented two related movements—dwindling Surrealism and burgeoning Situationism—as well as reporting from Asia for Paris Match and France Soir. The 1996 Dictionnaire du surréalisme, for which he single-handedly composed every entry, is widely considered a classic, as is his first book, Paris insolite, a memoir of homeless life in Paris said to have influenced Henry Miller and the Situationist principle of the dérive. Published in 1952 with a dedication to Robert Doisneau and photographs by Patrice Molinard, it was, in the author’s own words, “not a story in the journalistic sense, but a personal investigation.†Among other prominent works are The Blockhouse (1958), his only translated novel, and 1962’s Les Tziganes, a pioneering sociological study of Gypsies also based on personal experience, translated into English by Charles Duff (Dutton, 1963). His later works were dedicated to the history, nature, and culture of Provence, where he spent his final years.
