EDWARD GAUVIN

Also up at Anomalous this month in print and audio is Jean Ferry’s “A Tear in His Eye,” which begins with these bewitching words:

Who among us, at that age when we grow curious about fantastical tales, hasn’t been captivated by the story of that character who describes himself as endowed by the creator with the face of a hyena, lips of bronze, eyes of jasper, and a reproductive organ much closer to the deadly viper than a harmless phallus?

What are you waiting for? Go read! The issue can also be downloaded in its entirety in pdf or Kindle format, or as an mp3 audiobook.

The Translations page (in the left sidebar) is now fully up to date through mid-2013, including some forthcoming publications. – ed.

My translation of an excerpt from Jacques Gélat’s clever and charming 2006 novel Le traducteur is up at Words Without Borders in this month’s Postrevolution Iran issue. I did this piece in the summer of 2010, so I’m glad it’s finally seeing the light of day in a subsection on Writing about Translation.

As with all dramatizations, Gélat’s founding premise of forgotten punctuation is a bit of a stretch: practicing translators regularly rearrange punctuation, and how punctuation use differs between languages is one of much discussion among translators. However, his observations of what the act of translation can mean on a more metaphorical level are quite astute.

Every translator has dreamed of writing someday, and I was no exception. Sheets of paper have long dawdled in my drawers; diverse notes, vague plans for novels, even the beginning of a short story. But I’d always given up under the pretext of having a translation to start or finish. In truth these projects didn’t inspire me; they lent me no élan. Perhaps there would be a day for writing, but moreover, and most importantly, you must know just how daunting writing is for a translator.

I make definitive assertion: no one knows books better than we do. Readers, critics, editors—none of them know the weight of a word, the structure of a novel, its most intimate arrangements, as we translators do. I’ll go even farther: in many areas, writers themselves are less aware than we are of their work. Quite often their style, an instinctive reflection of their affect, gets away from them; they toss it onto the page, too busy to chase it down and make out the logic whose very workings we translators follow with a jeweler’s loupe.

Issue Fifteen of the Hugh Behm-Steinberg-edited Eleven Eleven, the literary journal from California College of the Arts, will soon be available. Meanwhile, for those who can’t wait, I’ll be reading for it at an exclusive sneak preview event this coming weekend in Oakland’s Beast Crawl, a free literary festival now in its second year. It will feature more than 140 writers in a single night spread out over three hours and twenty-six local galleries, bars, restaurants, cafés, and storefronts. The name “Beast Crawl” derives from the Pig Latin for Beast, which is East Bay, symbolized by the classic Oakland image of the giant cranes that stalk our shore.

This Beast has four legs, each lasting an hour and offering as many as a dozen readings to choose from.

• 1st leg: 5pm to 6pm
• 2nd leg: 6:30pm to 7:30pm
• 3rd leg: 8pm to 9pm
• 4th leg: 9pm to 2am (After Party)

There’s a half hour break between literary legs for socializing and relocating to a new venue before the next reading begins. Crawl maps listing all the venues, curators, legs, and after-party locations are available online.

Eleven Eleven’s event, entitled “Four out of Fifteen,” is in the second leg of the crawl, and starting at 6:30, I’ll be reading alongside Monica Mody, Tedd Fluffqvist Trees (aka Ted Rees) and Caitlin Myer at the exquisite SomaR bar: 1727 Telegraph Avenue, Oakland, CA. See you all Saturday, July 6^th!

Subtropics Issue 16 (Spring/Summer 2013) is now available, and my contribution to it can be read in its entirety online: a translation of Jean Ferry’s story “La Maison Bourgenew,” first published in the August 1953 issue of La (Nouvelle) Nouvelle Revue Française, the eighth issue of the august Gallimard house organ’s postwar resumption under the editorship of Jean Paulhan. As can be seen from the cover below, that issue was a litany of interesting names: playwright Paul Claudel, novelist Jean Giono, poet Jean Follain, an essay by Maurice Blanchot, reviews by Michel Butor and Roger Nimier, André Pieyre de Mandiargues (in his capacity as regular chronicler), and Pierre Leyris’ classic feats of translation: Gerard Manley Hopkins in French (“faucon-Phaeton” for “dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon” remains a personal favorite).

Old issues can be such a grab bag of goodies. Here’s hoping Subtropics #16 will age just as well. All my thanks to David Leavitt and the Subtropics team at UF Gainesville, where I have been blessed with being a fairly regular contributor. This marks my fourth translation to appear in its pages since Bernard Quiriny’s “A Guide to Famous Stabbings” (still available in its entirety online) in early 2010 (Issue 9 Winter/Spring 2010), followed by Paul Willems’ “Cherepish” (Issue 13 Winter 2012) and Georges-Olivier Châteaureynaud’s “Final Residence” (Issue 14 Spring/Summer 2012).

I owe my title for Ferry’s story “La Maison Bourgenew” to Simon Watson Taylor, who in his 1968 anthology French Writing Today published the only other translation of the story in English (his own). Watson Taylor (1923-2005) was an English actor and the secretary of the British Surrealist Group, who edited the English language surrealist review Free Union. He translated Breton’s nonfiction and plays by Boris Vian, as well as works by Artaud, Louis Aragon, and Alfred Jarry. He also co-edited, with Roger Shattuck, the  famous May-June 1960 special issue of Barney Rosset’s Evergreen Review devoted to ’Pataphysics.

In his memoirs, Taylor refers to Ferry as a friend. Standing on the shoulders of Watson Taylor’s freeflowing version, I can only hope to have brought my own slightly different sensibility to it.

I think of Ferry’s tale as a take on Shangri-La. It’s one of the two more fully standalone tales he ever wrote, ones that feel like full-fledged stories in a more traditional sense, rather than sketches—the other being the oft-anthologized “The Society Tiger.” In 1991, Claude Andrieux adapted the story into a prizewinning short film (his first), which can also be watched online, though do yourself a favor—read the story first.

Should Ferry’s name seem familiar, he has been my next big project (see the Forthcoming link in the left sidebar). So far, besides Subtropics, I’ve published his work in Weird Fiction Review and The Coffin Factory, with forthcoming pieces in Anomalous (#9), Birkensnake (#6), and elsewhere. Ferry (1906-1974) was something of a 20^th century touche-à-tout, on the fringes of France’s great literary schools: ’Pataphysician, Surrealist, Oulipian, fantasist.  A career screenwriter, best known for his collaborations with Clouzot, Buñuel, Louis Malle, and Georges Franju, he was also considered, in his day, the greatest specialist in the works of Proust’s neighbor, Raymond Roussel.

Jean Paulhan published Ferry’s only book of prose fiction, The Conductor, in 1953 at Gallimard. Recently brought back into print by Éditions Finitude, it will be published in English for the first time by Wakefield Press this fall in my translation. There’s a bit more recent good news about this book that I’m not able to share yet, so… stay tuned!

Hearty congratulations to my fellow winners for this year’s John Dryden Translation Prize!

• First prize: Francis Jones, Ivan V Lalić (Serbo-Croat), Early Poems
• Third prize: Adam Elgar, Alessandra Lavagnino (Italian): The Mother of the Prophet
• Commendation: Angus Turvill, Hisashi Inoue (Japanese):  House up the River

I’m delighted to announce is the second time I’ve placed (with midcentury French fantastical fiction) in the yearly competition sponsored by the British Comparative Literature Association and the British Centre for Literary Translation. In 2010 I took first place with André Pieyre de Mandiargues’ “The Red Loaf,” since published in Words Without Borders, and this time I took second with Marcel Brion’s “La Capitana” (as yet unpublished).

All glory to Lauren Evashenk, who penned a winning piece about me for USC’s Dornsife College of Letters, Arts, and Sciences site. Merci beaucoup to her and photomaster Vince Passaro for making me look good!