This brief text, posted here shortly after it was translated on 1/15, will appear, along with other selected texts by Roland Jaccard, in a 2009 issue of Absinthe: New European Writing, thanks to editor Dwayne Hayes, in a slightly altered form, thanks to a generous read by Barbara Harshav. The author was kind enough to send me, in thanks, a copy of his latest book, a musing on Louise Brooks. I confess to not understanding the French fetish for Louise Brooks, which approaches their national love of Jerry Lewis, and remains less famous only because that silent actress hasn’t the household-name value of the comedian… perhaps this book will enlighten me.
It's Good to be in Newsarama
July 24th, 2008 § 1 comment § permalink
A late April review of a book that came out last October, posted in late July by a guy who hasn’t blogged in two months.
But seeing the amount of talent that ISR hosts Charlito and Mister Phil were able to assemble for this 200+ page book makes me want to hear what they’re talking about on their show. The table of contents on this thing is a Who’s Who of my favorite independent creators: Josh Cotter, Robin and Lawrence Etherington, Renee French, Sam Hiti, Blair Kitchen, Matt Kindt, Andy Runton; Ben Towle. And those are just the guys I already liked before I picked the book up. There are many more who I like now that I didn’t know much about before. Folks like Chris Schweizer, Ted Wilson, J. Chris Campbell, Sarah Oleksyk, Keith Champagne, Dev Madan, Jamie Burton, Hanvey Hsiung, Gia-Bao Tran, Dave Roman, and Raina Telgemeier…
Most of the work in this book got a positive reaction out of me though, even if it was just a feeling. Richard Tingley’s untitled story about a traveler who finds a dying badger in the woods, for example, doesn’t have much in the way of story, but it presents a beautiful, quiet, tender moment that I’m going to want to relive again. Similarly, Harvey Hsung and Gia-Bho Tran’s “We Are Not Alone†is difficult to follow, but does a beautiful job of creating a mood of tranquil wonder in its scenes of a still, urban night disturbed by an extraterrestrial visit.
Thank you, Chris Mautner Michael May! (apologies!)
Godardiana
May 22nd, 2008 § 0 comments § permalink
S.B. & I popped by Film Forum last week, thinking to catch 2 ou 3 choses que je sais d’elle during the monthlong Godardfest, but I’d misread the dates, so we wound up dunked in the Mao of La Chinoise. Far be it from me to complain. I loves me my Godard. His ludic, manic invention begs us to read his films against their apparent didactic frontload… a sort of “unreliable didactation,” (do you take didactation?) if you will. The effortlessness of his filmmaking seems to supply, on the fly, all the traditional cinematic exaltations even as his characters espouse away. To our surprise, Richard Brody, a New Yorker film editor and Godard nerd, was introducing the movie. Is there no end to art house hijinks (preserved posters on the walls in foreign tongues, the carefully curated review clippings yellowing under glass)? The bushy-bearded eminence, Shavian in his glee, wrapped up his remarks with “His sense of cinema was… innate. The man… couldn’t make a bad film if he tried–though after this one, he started trying a lot harder.” Elephantine red columns flank the cramped rows of the Film Forum’s screening rooms, every seat of which honors a sponsor with a small plate on its back. Rather fittingly, the podium remained at the head of the room, a hard shape in the dark—too short, thankfully, to be silhouetted against the silver screen, though sometimes the small brass lampshade caught the light that fell from the luminous faces of the stars.
Life vs. Blog
May 22nd, 2008 § 0 comments § permalink
Catching up with reviews… The Onion AV Club’s Comics Panel covers Lewis Trondheim’s Kaput & Zösky and Cyril Pedrosa’s Three Shadows.
I read one of Trondheim’s Lapinot books (part of my NYCC swag pile). V. enjoyable: I’d put it on a par with a really clever sitcom, but edgier. Handles multiple storylines well, sustaining tension throughout. Quick and witty neurotic dialogue among citydwellers and, floating over it all, the delicious and slightly despairing nastiness of a pessimistic author toying with his characters.
Trondheim also had a funny sketchbook page on his blog presenting overheard conversation “traduit de l’américainâ€: “J’ai eu le mal de mer à cause des vagues.†Always amusing to have the redundancies of national speech patterns shoved in one’s face through the defamiliarizing mechanism of a foreign tongue. (I can’t link to it anymore; he fades old pages out and takes them down.)
So much for updating more regularly… the perennial life vs. blog conflict, you might say. Not to be mistaken for life vs. art , which is a matter of expectations–the former is purely a matter of time.
Funny-queer as a Five Dollar Bill
April 29th, 2008 § 0 comments § permalink
It was during this time, when low waistlines and oblong spectacles became ubiquitous—when the housing market was referred to as a “bubble”—as if a soap-water whimsy enclosing the house and groomed lawn known as the “American Dream”—and fifty years of headlong spending were coming to a fateful end (for whom else did the rest of the world rely on to buy the fruits of their labors but eager Americans), that the currency itself became progressively, even surreptitiously, more cartoonish, as if money, no longer able to assume the almighty powers attributed to it, were caving in to irony and lampoon. A few years after imaginary super-heroes made their first appearances on stamps as symbols of a national heritage, famous newspaper caricaturists were invited to submit their interpretations of past presidents for banknotes on which denominations appeared, grotesquely enlarged for unambiguous legibility, in such garish inks as orange and purple, as if to admit, if not legitimize, the irresponsibility, the essential impunity, with which we had waved them hamfistedly around.
I'm Back!
April 22nd, 2008 § 0 comments § permalink
And just in time to stop the true love I foolishly betrayed with her best friend (unbeknownst to me, for she was in disguise that tragic night) from marrying the evil second cousin removed I never knew I had–who happens to look just like me (or was it the surgery after the submarine accident?), and be my sister’s secret lover! Stay tuned as the backstory behind my two-month disappearance is doled out in suspenseful glimpses over the next few dramatic blogisodes!
(You may, of course, also have heard about the blogger’s guild strike that kept me away from my keypad. Workers of the world etc.)
Con Town: NYCC Countdown
April 17th, 2008 § 0 comments § permalink
Starting this Friday the 18th at 10am EST, you—yes, you too! Even you! No, except for you, in the back there—can find me at Booth 1960 of the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center for the 2008 New York Comic Con, tending handsome Eurocomics for a consortium of French publishers (à savoir le Bureau International de l’Édition Française). I’ll be there till the madness winds down Sunday evening. Come one, come all, drop by and I’ll get someone French to turn his or her nose up at your Superman tee as we try to interest you in fine and lavish hardcovers for the discerning artiste. No, we won’t share cheese from our platters, but your food offerings are welcome.
As a result of the madness, I will not be answering emails. Stop sending me emails. Yes, that means you in the back there. I am on contact hiatus until the craziness is over.
That is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
Also check out the booths of my erstwhile employers Archaia Studios Press (1713) and First Second Books :01!
Lots of New Publications
April 16th, 2008 § 0 comments § permalink
Silk Road has picked up my translation of Mercedes Deambrosis’ short story “A Spotless Marriage†from the collection La Promenade de délices for their Spring 2008 issue.
Epiphany is publishing my translation of Georges-Olivier Châteaureynaud’s “Écorcheville†from the collection Singe savant tabassé par deux clowns for their Spring 2008 issue. UPDATE: Epiphany has included the following in the latest newsletter concerning the upcoming issue: “the first North American appearance in print of the astonishing Georges-Olivier Châteaureynaud, in a story, brilliantly translated by Edward Gauvin, about the invention of a coin-operated ‘execution machine’ in a small French village and just why you might—or might not—want the advice of a clairvoyant parrot.”
The Café Irreal will feature my translation of Georges-Olivier Châteaureynaud’s “The Pavilion and the Lime Tree†from the collection of the same name, Le Kiosque et le tilleul, in their May 2008 issue.
The 2008 Two Lines annual will include my translation of Chapter 2 from Patrick Besson’s novel Les Frères de la Consolation, which I was lucky enough to give a reading of at last November’s ALTA conference.
I’m overjoyed to report these acceptances: these pieces were all turned down multiple places before finding homes thanks to kind editors, whom I shower with immeasurable thanks.
I’m especially delighted to have doubled, in the last month, the amount of Georges-Olivier Châteaureynaud available in English. He’s sort of my pet project author—a fabulist of considerable repute in France whom I’ve been trying to smuggle into my language for some time now. Two earlier stories others can be found online here and here, in case you’re interested. The Banff Centre has been kind enough to grant me a residency this June to continue work on a book-length anthology of stories drawn from several of his collections—an introductory reader of sorts, in which I hope to interest publishers. Any editors reading this, by chance?
Three Shadows Update
February 14th, 2008 § 0 comments § permalink
Dude, I’m in New York Magazine. Color me astonished. Between Lou Reed and Nicole Kidman. Check it.
Kudos and thanks to Mr. Pedrosa and the team at First Second.
Haste Post
February 7th, 2008 § 0 comments § permalink
A much belated announcement that the Okko hardcover, collecting the four gorgeous issues of the Cycle of Water, has been out for two months from Archaia Studios Press, so why don’t you own it yet? It is sumptuous, handsome, and in the right lighting, or understanding hands, even sensual, redolent of such Eastern spices as were bestowed upon the Lord by road-weary heathen kings. It fine binding creaks discreetly when you open it for the first time, and inside a voyage awaits like that of Keats looking into Chapman’s Homer. The dun and beige scheme of its covers mimics brass plate that gives burnished reflection of the wondering reader. Preview the first issue of the next arc, the Cycle of Earth, here. Everything Archaia pretty much available here. Support my colleagues and an indie comics company.
Maestro Alexis Siegel namechecks me in an insightful article, chock full of excellent examples, on the puns and pratfalls of comics translation, at the First Second blog. Love from the sensei humbles the student. An excellent link may be found therein to an Anthea Bell article from The Telegraph. This woman is responsible for the English rendition of one of my favorite books, Sebald’s Austerlitz. But before that, she was all about Asterix–in the comics world, translations legendary as Beckett’s own of Godot. There is something in these two pieces that points toward the hope and possibility of actually helpful essays on this admittedly very specialized subgenre of a marginalized literary activity. The possibility of saying anything useful in the field had defeated me, but once again, teacher shows the way. I liken it to the pointer-laden craft approach of this article.
Staying with First Second Books for a moment, my lucky editrix will be leaving the company to pursue a full-time children’s dream at Roaring Brook. Sniff! I’ll miss her. She’ll be gone by the time Cyril Pedrosa’s Three Shadows comes out in April, right before NY Comic-Con. Congrats to the French original which was one of five to pick up an audience favorite prize, the Must-Read, at Angouleme: the biggest comics festival in the world.
Last but definitely not least, the new February Words Without Borders, the second graphics issue in what may become a n annual tradition, is a treasure trove featuring an interview with Gipi and a Korean childhood favorite from Heinz Insu Fenkl. Editor Samantha Schnee struts out two South American comics, and Dupuy (of Dupuy & Berberian, the team behind Monsieur Jean, who took Angouleme’s top prize this year), has a whimsical confection about a world-traveling rabbit. I’m elated to have two new comics translations, collage from Lebanon and comedy from Gabon, appear amongst such riches (at this point there are still some typos in them).