EDWARD GAUVIN

The penultimate translation of my tenure as guest editor for the Consulate, Joyland’s international fiction section, is now live. It’s the second story of Devaulx’s that’s appeared there.

“The Sign of Jonah” begins with a quote from the Book of Jonah, but the Bible line it reminds me of is Matthew, 26:11: “For ye have the poor always with you; but me ye have not always.” The exceedingly short piece is enigmatic as ever, but this time also cinematic. It also strikes me as somewhat Poe-ish: in fact, it shares with Poe’s “Masque of the Red Death,” to which Devaulx’s piece refers, the mounting sense of dread that accompanies sedulously orchestrated progression through space. Merging as it does bourgeois tourism with biblical parable in a doom-laden urban environment, the story is oddly timely again in our recession-harried era, when storefronts go empty, and the old familiar places are no more, suddenly closed: the dull gaze of empty windows or the gaptoothed smile of a bankrupt city block.

Hailed by Jean Paulhan and Gaëtan Picon as a master of the fantastique, Noël Devaulx was a frequent contributor to the NRF. Known mainly for his short stories, which have received the Prix de l’Academie française and  the Prix Valéry Larbaud and appeared in The London Magazine, he is published by Gallimard and Éditions José Corti.

struck me as a particularly toothless example of the very contemporary kind of humor I explored and derided in my October post for Mischief & Mayhem Books. In this case both the medium and the message were to blame. Grim, impotent, post-ironic, pre-defeated, and worst of all, complacent, as though watching it were meant to lend the moral superiority, if not the actual minute ameliorations, of activism. And delivering it as a preface to The Simpsons? Way to sap your own message of any potentially remaining force.

It does no good, of course, to point out what everyone with a conscience knows but no one is doing anything about. It does, in fact, little good to point out even this fact. As Louis Simpson said in “On the Lawn at the Villa” (1963): “It’s complicated, being an American,/Having the money and the bad conscience, both at the same time.”

My latest post, on visualization and translation, is now up at Mischief & Mayhem.

• Jeffrey Ford posted a very nice entry about me at The Writing Room, the LiveJournal of Brookdale College Creative Writing. Jeff was a terrific fiction guru of mine; when I lived in Newark, I trekked down to Brookdale on the train once a week for his evening fiction class.
• My translation of Noël Devaulx’s story “The Sacrifice of Images” is up at the Joyland Consulate. This is the first fiction in English from a major 20th century French fabulist, a perfect example of the “parables without keys” that editor and critic Jean Paulhan once admiringly claimed Devaulx wrote. I find allusions to the French and Cultural Revolutions… and you?
• H.V. Chao’s twitterfic from October 8^th at Nanoism (exactly one month ago) was reposted the next day at Fiction Daily. Thanks, editor David Backer!

In their Best Books for the Holidays flyer, Small Beer Press has picked A Life on Paper as a sure bet gift for “The Smart One” in your friend or family set. They also give a nice nod to the recent issue of The Harvard Review, which I neglected to plug over the summer, and is still available, featuring G.-O.’s story “The Styx.” The Philadelphia indie bookstore Joseph Fox recently featured A Life on Paper in their translation special coinciding with the American Literary Translators Association conference.

And in mid-October, Lavie Tidhar gave a generous write-up to G.-O. and myself at the World SF blog. Thanks!

Meanwhile, the author reports that he’s just finished his latest novel, to be published by Grasset in the spring. Its title is Life Watches Us Go By (La vie nous regarde passer).

in particular their treatment of the sky: ‘These hymns, of more than ten thousand lines, are brimming with descriptions of the heavens. Scarcely any subject is evoked more frequently. The sun and reddening dawn’s play of color, day and night, cloud and lightning, the air and the ether, all these are unfolded before us over, and over again, in splendor and vivid fullness. But there is only one thing that no one would ever learn from those ancient songs who did not already know it, and that is that the sky is blue.’ So it was not just Homer who seemed to be blue-blind, but the ancient Indian poets too. And so, it would appear, was Moses, or at least whoever wrote the Old Testament. It is no secret, says Geiger, that the heavens play a considerable role in the Bible, appearing as they do in the very first verse… and in hundreds of places after that. And yet, like Homeric Greek, biblical Hebrew does not have a word for ‘blue.’

~ Guy Deutscher, Through the Language Glass

and other modest observations are now LIVE at Mischief + Mayhem Books’ Wild Rag blog. To think I just blogged about the site two days ago… but mention mayhem, and Mayhem ensues.

Tremendous and hearty (if slightly belated) congratulations to my fellow National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellows for 2011! I am thrilled and amazed to be in such company, and delighted to see the names of friends, ALTA acquaintances, and other translators from the French trenches on the list: Esther Allen, Robert Bononno, Sean Cotter, Jason Grunebaum, John Taylor. I am especially psyched to hear news of Deborah Hoffman, who surely remembers that not-so-distant Dallas conference where we started out as ALTA fellows together…

Some close friends of mine are among the founding members behind a nifty new indie publishing venture: a print-on-demand collective whose goals are “to nurture and promote distinctive authorial voices, especially those that fall outside of commercially acceptable notions of literature, and to do everything we can to bring those writers to the largest possible audience.”

The collective came together in response to the increasingly homogenized books that corporate publishers and chain retailers have determined will sell the most copies. “We recognize that there are readers who want to be challenged instead of placated.” Founded by Lisa Dierbeck, Joshua Furst, DW Gibson, Dale Peck and Choire Sicha, Mischief + Mayhem intends to “promulgate writing unconcerned with having to please conservative editorial boards or corporate bookstore executives. It will also help writers earn a living wage without compromising their radical aesthetics.”

I’m genuinely sorry to have missed the launch party, which reputedly featured a burlesque dancer with a dress made from the pages of a book and a raffle whose prizes included a graffiti kit (stencils, spraypaint, and a wild rag to conceal your identity). Wild Rag being the name of their blog and webzine whose regular contributors include “such well-respected writers as New Yorker editor Ben Greenman, journalist and editor Zia Jaffrey, and New York Times art critic Martha Schwendener, each of whom will offer a challenging, rambunctious perspective on things literary, cultural, and political. Additionally, the company plans to host readings, performances and other social gatherings in order to build a literary community in the real world as well as online.”

And yeah, I’ll be blogging for them too! On translation, fabulism, genre, forgotten authors, the occasional “Letter from Brussels”… So go like M+M on Facebook!

From their press release: » Read the rest of this entry «