At Words Without Borders, Jeffrey Zuckerman, formerly of Dalkey Archive and now Digital Editor at Music & Literature Magazine, has these kind words for my translation of Jean-Philippe Toussaint’s recent essay collection Urgency and Patience:
Edward Gauvin seems to have devoted the same patience to translating Toussaint as I once did proofreading him; Gauvin’s facility with both the original, crisp French and a correspondingly transparent English are in full evidence here. A reader intimately acquainted with Toussaint’s novels might well wonder if his mind occasionally becomes as flattened, as empty, and as analytical as those of his overlapping narrators. The delightful revelation offered by Urgency and Patience is that such a prospect is nigh well impossible.
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