EDWARD GAUVIN

Apparently this 2009 French film has just come out in America. Around Thanksgiving 2007, I translated a draft of its screenplay for a US production company that went bankrupt not long thereafter, and has since been through a real financial rollercoaster. Of all the screenplays I’ve translated, this was probably the wittiest and best written. It had a lot of charm, and kvetching. I’m curious to hear how the movie is, and catch up with it eventually. If anyone’s seen it, leave a comment!

You heard it here late! I will be at the Librairie-Tartinerie in Sarrant tonight hosting a discussion about translation. Looks like a nifty place; locals throughout the region speak highly of it. Venez nombreux nous rejoindre à 20h30!

At first there were still children in the school courtyards when I’d go out for my afternoon run. You could hear the colored spangle of their voices over the fence. The path of grass and earth beside the river took me past one verdant field after the next, alike to my untrained eye. The sun would clear my balcony by midmorning, vaulting high into the sky, and I would move out there to work. The days got hotter and hotter, and I went out later and later, pushing into evening on my runs. The plume of an impact sprinkler rose in the distance, hosting rainbows in its mist. I dined at eight, flocks of swallows screeching past the balcony rail. Along the path beside the river one field revealed itself as corn, another as sunflowers. For a few weekends in a row, whole families with towels round their waists dawdled to the pool, or little girls returned with dripping hair. The hay was mown and rolled; the corn shot up. The children vanished from the schools and reappeared in the streets at dusk, on bicycles with tasseled handlebars. Their cries replaced those of the swallows—now in Morocco, I was told. The heads of sunflowers grew heavy, their fringe of yellow petals paled; when you drove past, the fields seemed blanched. The evening bus brought older sons and daughters to join parents who’d preceded them. Then, for a week, it rained. When it was over, the tourists had arrived.

The sun, slower now to rise, lingers on my balcony through lunch. The town is fuller than ever with cars and people. In the mornings, you have to wait to cross the street. When I bike across the river to the supermarket, there are other bikes locked up at the rack. In line at the checkout, you can hear French apologies in English accents. The cashiers are younger and prettier, and after work ride five in a car to nightclubs folded into a bend on a country road: there is a buvette outside and the light from its counter shines over the gravel lot. Or sometimes a motorcycle pulls up beside you at a light: a bare thigh pressed to a boyfriend’s, long hair spilling from under a helmet. The bales are dried and taken in; those fields are baked and buckled earthen plates with tire tracks. The corn rises over my head. It’s dark now by ten.

It’s the final month of summer in France! Check out my excerpt from Farniente, a paean to vacation by Lewis Trondheim and Dominique Hérody, now up at Words Without Borders!

though in a manner far more apocalyptic, I think, than my friend H.V. Chao had in mind when he wrote his story “Jewel of the North,” published last fall in Epiphany (Fall 2009 issue not up in the archives section yet). Take that, SF: fantasy too can predict the future.

Photo courtesy The Daily Mail online

The Consulate at Joyland is delighted to welcome a distinguished French visitor. Three haunting, mournful, and disturbing short-shorts from Clandestine Messengers can be read for the next two weeks in that lovely litmag’s international section.

Marcel Béalu (1908-1993) was best known for the delicacy with which he explored dreams and the unreal in poetry, prose, and painting. A retiring figure, he ran the Parisian bookstore at 62, rue de Vaugirard named Le Pont Traversé after a novel by his friend, critic and editor Jean Paulhan. There he held readings for a small circle of surrealist and fantastical writers; it is said Lacan, among his first customers, purchased Shakespeare’s complete works and forgot to pay for them. Béalu also founded the revue of fantastic writing Réalités secrètes (1955-1971). His 1945 novel L’Expérience de la nuit was translated by Christine Donougher as The Experience of Night (Dedalus, 1997).

The June issue of Metropolitan, the Eurostar’s complimentary magazine, covered the opening of the first Starbucks in Belgium last February, in Antwerp’s Centraal Station. The magazine itself launched in May.

Two thousand people (in a country whose total population is ten and a half million) were in attendance for the Starbucks opening, some showing up as early as 5:30AM. Howard Gutman, the U.S. ambassador to Belgium, was also on hand. Apparently, this was quite an event because Belgium has been famously resistant to international franchises. KFC withdrew in the ‘70s; McDonald’s held on, but its presence is diffuse (Belgium has one of the lowest numbers of McDonald’s stores per capita in Europe) and it cedes the number one slot to the French chain Quick. Pizza Hut alone has taken off, perhaps because pizza is not otherwise widely available. But 19 year old George El Kyperian seems to speak for much of his age group when he says:

“I sometimes drive two hours across the border to Holland to get Burger King.”

The “We Want Burger King in Belgium” Facebook group has drawn thirty-nine thousand members in its six months of existence.

Harry De Landtsheer, Belgian operations director for the café chain Le Pain Quotidien, tries to explain. He notes that Belgian has “the highest labor costs in Europe… also, there is a very high minimum wage (€1,440.67 a month).” I am glad to know the Fulbright is less than minimum wage.

De Landtsheer adds:

“As an American company, we have to translate all the manuals and advertising into three languages, which takes time and money.”

Well, if you ever need a freelancer… Incidentally, all the articles in Metropolitan were in French and English, though this, like a few select others, was also in Dutch. The French was perfunctory and perfectly serviceable.

A good burger may be hard to find, but I look forward to snacking in a country with a three-story Frietmuseum. (Fries, like Tintin, are yet another Belgian creation mistakenly ascribed to their prominent neighbors.) Richard Hill, author of The Art of Being Belgian, chalks the relative absence of multinationals not up to xenophobobia or to anti-Americanism but to “skepticism in the Belgian mind” and an inherently conservative national character.

“Belgium is a slow starter,” he says. “It was the last European country to start shopping online and was behind the rest of Europe in adopting email. And young people eventually revert to the preferences of their parents.”

What an odd pronouncement. I imagine a nation of reactionaries, in decor and fashion slowly traveling backwards in time, as kids grow up to don their parents’ clothes and eventually live in their houses. Much food for thought and conflicted feelings as, these days, I browse for Brussels apartments online and wonder about the future.

News in brief:

• The Consulate at Joyland is officially OPEN for reading! Thanks to translator Martha Tennent and Open Letter Books, my guest editing stint begins with Mercé Rodoreda’s story “The Salamander” from her volume of Selected Stories coming out next year. Stay tuned for more exciting foreign fiction!
• Over at the Words Without Borders blog, editor Susan Harris puts in a kind word for me and Georges-Olivier Châteaureynaud’s collection A Life on Paper.
• And a piece by local correspondent Maia Alonso in the paper of the Midi-Pyrénées region, La Dépêche [The Dispatch] on my ongoing summer residency at the Maison des Écritures in Lombez. (In French.)

My Clarion brethren are representing all over the Interwebs of late. Go feast your eye-mind complex on their excellence!

• Val Nolan’s double header: “All the Wrong Places” in Cosmos and “Brief Lullaby” in Nature (plus, watch the man read!)
• Grady Hendrix’s “The Bright and Shining Parasites of Guiyu” at Strange Horizons
• Kenneth Schneyer’s “Conflagration” at The Newport Review (plus, hear his short-short read at Drabblecast!) and UPDATE: the entirety of his short story “Lineage” from Clockwork Phoenix 3 available for a short time online!
• Mishell Baker’s “Throwing Stones” at Beneath Ceaseless Skies

“On her belly before the open atlas, Mathilde continued, every Thursday, to tell us about Tripolitania. She made up this fantastical land from scattered memories garnered from every mythology. The boatman of the dead was named Clovis. He had but one eye in the middle of his brow, but to light his way underground, wore a living owl on his shoulder. Like Noah, he’d survived the Biblical flood, and ever since, along the rivers of sand that ran beneath the surface of the earth, he conveyed mortal remains to the heaven of roots. It seemed marvelous to us that in the desert of the dead, the same trees, Aconcaguas, could put forth both infinitesimal buds, barely surfacing from the grains of sand, and roots so long and dense they charted, all the way to the center of the earth, a world of grottoes and gorges where the torrents of that inexhaustible hourglass grew lost…” ~ Maurice Pons

the opening to his 1983 short story “La ville aux milles musées.” The translation “A City of Museums” appeared in Issue 25 of Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet and A Life on Paper, both from Small Beer Press.

And huge congratulations to the author for winning the prestigious triennial Prix Henri Cornélus from the Académie royale de langue et de littérature française de Belgique for his body of work. A tremendous honor!

watch?v=hxWnBAHSO38

I got to hang out with G.-O. a little last week while he was in Muret for the 26th annual Prix du Jeune Écrivain. For many years, the author has been on the prize jury and run writing workshops for its young participants. Last Thursday, a day of staggering heat, writers of all ages took a day off from the intensive workshop schedule. G.-O. and I taped this on the fly in the living room at the farm where writers he, his fellow Neofictionist Jean-Claude Bologne, and Alain Absire had been put up for the week. It was a day of chatting lit and taking a dip in the pool to get out of the heat.

Here is a photo, taken by Nicole Taylor, of A Life on Paper at the Small Beer table at Readercon. Yay Holly Black’s The Poison Eaters!

Elsewhere on the Web that is World-Wide, notably in the July-August issue of The Brooklyn Rail:

• The estimable Kenneth Schneyer reviews Georges-Olivier Châteaureynaud’s A Life on Paper.
• T. Motley’s brief and moralculous fable keeps readers off-balance till the end.