EDWARD GAUVIN

Often, while trying to maximize the multitasking efficiency of my kitchen perambulations during the meal prep and cleanup that are my brief reprieve from a solitary, deskbound life of translation—picture me going almost half moon pose to stow forks in a drawer while kicking shut the newly full dishwasher, or with divided mind hooking a foot in the refrigerator door even as I stir a pot’s contents to assuage their seethe and boil—I think of the little “waking-up” ballet that opens An American in Paris (and begins around 3:22 of this clip):

watch?v=zhYSDgCTaPQ

Gene Kelly greeting the day with a graceful transformation of his garret from bedroom to studio. With a hoist or a nudge, furniture emerges and vanishes, folding out or away; the whole room has that cleverness of train compartments, close nautical quarters, or those tricky Japanese pencilboxes all the rage when I was a grade schooler—press a button and a spring-loaded drawer slides open, another and out pops the pencil sharpener—somehow specifically pleasing and ingenious to children (and later in life to childlike designers). Perhaps because they promise interiors their size and unassuming outsides belie; perhaps because there is something magical about transformations, when we are young enough that not to see a thing is to doubt it exists; perhaps because they traffic in secrets and seem to increase the world’s store of hiding places; perhaps because they are small and we are small. Perhaps it is as simple as that.

The minds behind the former Athanasius Kircher Society, that wondershow of cabinets and other items of curiosity where I whiled away so many pleasant hours as an unhappy temp, returned last summer with the Atlas Obscura, a site to celebrate eccentricities, ephemera, and esoterica. (Since digression is the sunshine of exactly the sort of narrative the defunct Society would appreciate, may I add that it was named for the “Jesuit Leonardo da Vinci,” who also happens to be the hero of the biography-within-a-novel in Jean-Marie Blas De Roblès’ recent French Voices grant winning novel Là où les tigres sont chez eux.)

Atlas Obscura is now sponsoring the exciting Obscura Day, an “international celebration of wondrous, curious, and esoteric places.” From their site:

When and where?
We are celebrating Obscura Day in cities and towns all over the world! Saturday, March 20th 2010. Mark your calendar. These events may fill up fast, so RSVP at the link above. We are not charging anything to attend, but certain venues may charge admission.

First La Fraise rips off Threadless, and now this, which is already eons old in internet years.

Utopod: of use to all you SFF geeks working on your French, or those who have mastered it already and seek entertainment.

in May. I have been advised by a good friend to make official announcement in the most direct and unadorned language possible, forsaking coy allusion and mandarin indirection. My good friend is right. He is also very smart, and a lawyer. So in case this has not been made clear by earlier posts, here goes:

Entitled A Life on Paper, this book is a collection of short stories spanning the career, to date, of French fabulist Georges-Olivier Châteaureynaud, selected and translated by me. This will be the author’s first book in English. It was recently selected for the French Voices grant program, and also received a Hemingway Grant from the French Embassy.

It will be published by Small Beer Press, and the (awfully nice) hardcover is available for pre-order at their site. If you are a buyer for a bookstore, the ordering information is here. Apart from the obvious ways in which buying this book will support author and publisher, I am told that at this stage pre-orders will help build buzz for the book leading up to its release, getting the word out there and maybe even helping with sales to stores by proving interest. Apparently the book is now also listed at a number of online retailers such as Barnes & Noble, Amazon, Flipkart, eCampus, and aggregator sites like Allbookstores. It is also up at Goodreads for rating and recommending.

If anyone has suggestions on how best to help Small Beer in promoting and marketing this book, including nifty or unexpected strategies and venues, I’m all ears. Crowdsource: activated!

I have been translating Châteaureynaud’s work for 5 years now. I am overjoyed that what began as a labor of love is finally seeing the light.

for Châteaureynaud acceptances in upcoming print literary journals:

• the short-short “Fable” in Sentence, a journal of prose poetry: “I remember the dawn of time: what a quagmire!”
• “Unlivable” in California College of the Arts’ Eleven Eleven: “Accommodations obsess me. I have what you might call a housing neurosis.”
• “The Pest” in Conjunctions 54: Shadow Selves: “I’d known him forever, but I never knew his name.”
• “The Styx,” in The Harvard Review: “In hindsight, I should’ve suspected something. Strictly speaking, I didn’t feel sick, but still, those persistent dizzy spells should’ve clued me in.”

Yay January! Publication dates TBA.

For those interested in reading the author’s work currently available online, or ordering copies of journals past and future featuring his fiction, I have created a page centralizing information on him: click on Châteaureynaud Central, to the left.

Nicely tying two recent posts together—Noël Devaulx and French Voices—un grand merci to Chad Post at Three Percent for running a lovely profile of me in his post-ALTA convention project “Making the Translator Visible.” Check out the series: at the 2009 convention Chad interviewed many an intelligent talent that puts present company to shame.

The verb is actually spelled indifférer, but clearly… I couldn’t care less.

Undoubtedly the best experience I had last year and a turning point in my life. Alas, I can’t go again (and it wouldn’t be the same!) but you can, so DO IT NOW:

Established in 1968, the Clarion Writers’ Workshop is the oldest workshop of its kind and is widely recognized as a premier proving and training ground for aspiring writers of fantasy and science fiction. Many graduates have become well-known writers, and a large number have won major awards. The six-week workshop is held on the beautiful beachside campus of the University of California, San Diego.

The 2010 writers in residence are Delia Sherman, George R.R. Martin, Dale Bailey, Samuel R. Delany, Jeff VanderMeer, and Ann VanderMeer. The 2010 Clarion Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers’ Workshop will take place June 27 through August 7, 2010 at University of California, San Diego. » Read the rest of this entry «

I’m delighted to announce that Georges-Olivier Châteaureynaud’s A Life on Paper, due out from Small Beer Press in May, has been selected as part of this year’s French Voices grant program. As French Book News explains:

“In 2006 the French Cultural Services and PEN American Center inaugurated an ambitious new program of support for translations from French into English.  The program’s goal is to create a US-published series of fifty books representing the very best of contemporary French writing in a number of fields.”

A Life on Paper, which was also recently awarded a Hemingway Grant by the Cultural Services of the French Embassy, joins truly prestigious company. I see this as not only a vote of confidence for the quality of Châteaureynaud’s work, and for independent for-profit publishers like Small Beer, but for the addition of a new kind of voice–a new tonal range, so to speak–to the chorus readers have generally come to know as French literature. We all have a notion of what French letters are about, however narrow or hidebound that may be, a notion tied in part to others historical and national, and often shaped by hidden contingencies of canon and cultural exchange, but periodically that notion needs to evolve. The French Voices program is engaged in a noble battle to broaden the expectations American audiences have of French literature–its offerings and possibilities–by giving its imprimatur to what best represents France at this moment: in this case, deeming fabulism and fantasy a worthy addition to the transatlantic conversation. » Read the rest of this entry «

at PS Publishing is the mega-double special issue 20/21 of Postscripts, Edison’s Frankenstein, featuring my translation of Georges-Olivier Châteaureynaud’s “The Denham Inheritance,” a meditation on great apes and loss,  my Clarion teacher Paul Park’s story (which he read aloud at Mysterious Galaxy over the summer), and work by host of terrific writers. It comes in regular and special collector’s editions, the latter with pages of contributors’ signatures. Editor Pete Crowther was kind enough to include me as well as the author; signing all two hundred translucent sheets in a single sitting was a lesson in the vagaries of one’s own autograph. It reminded me of a story another teacher of mine once told me about a similar experience. Imagining her signature consistent, if only through so much concentrated practice, she’d held the stack of sheets up to the light, only to see how erratic it was. A small fable of selfhood.

I have a concise if characteristically abstruse appreciation of French fabulist Noël Devaulx up at The Quarterly Conversation, a top-notch site for readers seeking enlightened commentary. It’s an entry in a feature hatched by editors Annie Janusch and Scott Esposito called “Translate This Book!” Which is exactly what it sounds like: fervent recommendations from impassioned professionals in the field, forty-odd reformist theses nailed to publishing’s door. The article has attracted the attention of, among other places, The New Yorker.