Category: French

Each person has their own star: The Fiancée Rode in on a Donkey by Vénus Khoury-Ghata

Deep in the desert, excitement is building. Among the Qurayza, a Jewish nomadic tribe, young girls are being readied for the arrival of a special visitor. An important rabbi is coming to select a bride for the great Algerian military and religious leader Emir Abdelkader. He has wives already, of course, but another, a Jewish girl, is to be offered to secure protection for her people.  For the girls, scrubbed and polished and hennaed, to be chosen would mean a chance to escape a prison of sand for a better life. Or so everyone believes.

Just one look around is enough for the rabbi to find the chosen one. He picks Yudah for her name, a contraction of Yahuda, and for her eyes which she lowers when he looks at her. Every woman is beautiful to the rabbi as long as she isn’t one-armed or one-eyed.

Each one of Khoury-Ghata’s spare novellas is different, exploring a different time and place, and The Fiancée Rode in on a Donkey is no exception. Set in the mid-1800s, this tale follows Yudah, the promised fiancée, from her desert home to the streets of Paris in a year rocked by revolution. Although, if time frames are correct, her journey lasts little more than ten or twelve months at the most, it will test the courage and resolve of this young heroine.

When Yudah arrives on the back of the rabbi’s weary old donkey, she is dismayed to discover that Abdelkader’s entourage is not housed in town, but in an encampment nearby. She realizes that she has traded one kind of tent life for another, but the welcome she might have anticipated is not forthcoming. The Emir is away on campaign, engaged in a battle that he will not win, and no one seems to know what to make of this scrawny teenager who claims she is his bride-to-be, destined for his bed. An outsider trying to find a small corner in the camp or wandering around town alone, she begins to mourn the desert community she has left and the boy, her cousin, to whom she had given her heart. It is but the first of a series of displacements to follow.

Before Yudah has a chance to meet the man she has been led to believe would become her husband, Abdelkader is forced to surrender and exiled to France with his family. Yudah, with no formal connection to him, is taken to Île Sainte-Marguerite with the great man’s followers—hundreds of men, women and children, few of whom will survive the winter on the island. But here, too, the young daughter of the desert is still an outcast. She does find refuge in a convent where she is, for a time, renamed Judith, until her stubborn nature and—at least to the eyes and ears of the nuns—cultural coarseness disrupts the strict order of religious life. She is forced to move on several more times until she eventually finds herself in Paris in the spring of 1848.

Alone and forced to repeatedly adapt to circumstances and customs that her fifteen years of life have in now way prepared her for, Yudah clings to the superstitions of her tribe:

The Qurayzas say that the sound of a badly oiled drum can unleash a war, but who among all these people has ever heard of the Qurayzas? Do they know that the inhabitants of the desert see farther than life? That their gaze goes beyond the horizon that separates the living from the dead? That the parched camel drivers who dream of wells and rain drown in the sand as in the sea? That the palm tree at arm’s length is only a mirage and that what they think is a galloping horse coming to meet them is only the slow steps of the evil spirits crying between the dunes? Female spirits, they point out, the only ones authorized to accompany the lost at the time of their death.

Her conviction that a special destiny awaits her, born less out of any sense of superiority than out of a belief that the well-being and security of her people depend on it, keep her from losing all hope even when she falls into thinking that she is insignificant and could disappear from life without anyone ever noticing. Uneducated and illiterate, Yudah carries a traditional wisdom that belies her age, one that intersects with French society at such a distinctly foreign angle that it allows her to see and measure things differently. This otherworldly charm will lead her into the most unlikely situations, both fortunate and tragic.

What allows this historical, yet slightly magical, tale to work so well is the light touch with which it is told. As a poet, Khoury-Ghata is capable of creating memorable characters, and capturing settings and interactions with a devastating economy of words, whether she is working with well-known figures like Osip Mandelstam or Marina Tsvetaeva, or someone like this young Jewish girl from the Algerian desert. In tracing the fate, not only of Yudah but of the other young men and women she meets, this novella offers an unexpected view of a well-known period of French history, highlighting the challenges endured and the damage that can be done to ordinary people caught up circumstances they cannot control.

The Fiancée Rode in on a Donkey by Vénus Khoury-Ghata is translated from the French by Teresa Lavender Fagan and published by Seagull Books.

We’re too small for the sky to pay attention to us: Great Fear on the Mountain by Charles Ferdinand Ramuz

In this novel, the stage is set quickly with little fuss. The story opens at a village council meeting in an unnamed Swiss alpine community where the members have gathered to discuss the shortage of available grazing land for their cattle. The situation is acute and the answer seems obvious to some and ominous to others. High on the mountain lies the verdant Sasseneire pasture, abandoned for many years after an event so terrifying that the elders dare not speak of it, warning that to go back would be to invite evil to return once more. But the young, who don’t remember that time, put little stock in what seems more folklore than fact. As the Chairman argues:

“Those are just stories. No one ever really found out what happened up there. It’s been twenty years since then, all that’s in the past. To my mind, the long and the short of it is that for twenty years now we’ve been making no use of that fine grass, which could feed seventy animals all summer long; if you think the village can afford to be extravagant, then say it; myself, I don’t think so, and I’m the one who’s responsible . . .”

The debate is short; the younger folk win the vote. And so begins the process of securing the site, repairing the chalet, and, most challenging of all, finding enough men willing to spend the summer up on the mountain with the herd.

Great Fear on the Mountain, the 1926 novel by Charles Ferdinand Ramuz, is a bucolic tale that takes place in the looming shadow of mystery and death with a hint of the supernatural. Ramuz (1878 – 1947) was a Swiss-French writer who, although he spent his adult years in Paris where he counted Igor Stravinsky among his close friends, continued to look to Switzerland for his fictional landscapes. He set his stories in rural communities, writing of farmers, villagers, and mountaineers often confronting disaster and tragedy. His distinctive style would later influence Jean Giono and Céline. And, it is this style, with its shifting, almost omnipresent, narrative voice, vivid depictions of nature, and the ominous repetition of key phrases, that manages to build the intensely claustrophobic atmosphere of dread that gives this spare  novel its power.

Seven men ultimately come forward to go up to Sasseneire. They include the leaser of the land, Crittin, generally referred to as the master and his nephew, a young man named Joseph who hopes the extra money earned will allow him to marry his beloved sweetheart, and old Barthélemy, a survivor of the last summer on Sasseneire who wears, as a protective talisman, a bag containing a piece of paper on a rope around his neck. Along with an adolescent and another townsman, the team is rounded out with the strange, physically deformed Clou—an odd man who seems to have his own agenda.

Once they are up on the mountain with the herd, a sense of unease quickly settles over the men, becoming especially palpable once night falls:

Outside, it must have been thoroughly dark, and perhaps there were stars, perhaps there were not; they couldn’t know. Nothing could be heard. Listening did no good, nothing at all could be heard: it was like at the beginning of the world, before there were humans, or, at the end of the world after humans had retreated from the surface of the earth—nothing was moving anymore, anywhere, there was no longer anybody, nothing but air, stone, and water, things that do not smell, things that do not think, things that do not speak.

Before long, disease begins to appear among the animals. Just like the last time. The boy comes home shaking with fear, soon followed by another man. The villagers react to news of the sick cattle with alarm. They establish an armed guard on the access road to prevent anyone else from returning and spreading this mysterious  illness. The remaining men and their slowly diminishing herd are essentially trapped and only Clou, who disappears each day, shows no concern about being unable to return to the village. As the men try to cope with increasingly dire circumstances, various shades of despondency and madness begin to take hold.

As the details of the events that originally led to the abandonment of the Sasseniere pasture are alluded to yet never fleshed out, the happenings this time around are equally ambiguous. And potentially much more devastating. A steady sense of dread builds and spreads, up on the mountain and down below, while around them all nature seems to be at once ambivalent and mildly malevolent. It’s a delicate balance:

It was perhaps midday. The sky was arranging itself, without paying any attention to us. At the chalet, they’d tried once again to look into the mouths of suspected animals, grasping their pink muzzle in one hand, introducing the fingers of the other between their teeth, while the animals lowed; up above them, the sky was arranging itself. It was covering itself, was turning gray, with an array of small clouds, lined up evenly spaced from one another, all around the combe, some of them capping the peaks, at such moments they’re said to be putting their hats on, others lying flat on the ridges. There was no wind.

The omniscient third person narrative occasionally shifts perspective, into second and more commonly first person plural. Bill Johnston’s translation traverses this shifting narrative terrain with ease. Great Fear on the Mountain is presented as an allegorical tale that has become part of a larger consciousness, and one that is made more suspenseful by the intentional, almost jarring, repetition of phrases and images, and the depiction of natural phenomena, such as the light and shadows on mountain peaks, as portents of ill fate. You know it can’t end well, but like all the members of this little community, you cannot see what is coming.

Great Fear on the Mountain by Charles Ferdinand Ramuz is translated from the French by Bill Johnston and published by Archipelago Books

At last, the final volume of Michel Leiris’ The Rules of the Game is available in English—a few (well, more than a few) words about it and a link to my review at Minor Literature[s]

As a reader, I do not tend to be a completest, collecting and diligently making my way through the complete works and associated letters and journals of a particular writer, but if I have made one exception, it is for French poet, novelist, essayist, ethnographer, and critic Michel Leiris. However, as English language Leiris enthusiasts will know, his most important work—the four-volume autobiographical essay to which he devoted thirty-five years of his writing life, The Rules of the Game—was not yet translated in full. That is, until now. This spring, Yale University Press released the final volume, Frail Riffs in Richard Sieburth’s translation.

Sieburth, who translated the book that served as my introduction to Leiris, his 1961 dream diary, Nights as Days, Days as Nights, takes over the Rules of the Game translation enterprise from Lydia Davis, who translated the first three parts of the project, plus Leiris’ novel Manhood. But, if there is any stylistic shift, it is not an issue because Frail Riffs itself marks a sharp shift in approach and style from the dense, labyrinthine prose that characterizes the first volume, Scratches, Scraps and Fibrils toward the fragmented, eclectic form of Leiris’ late work which will be familiar to readers of The Ribbon at Olympia’s Throat (which I wrote about at length for The Critical Flame).

Leiris was, throughout his long life which spanned most of the twentieth century, deeply engaged with the political, intellectual and artistic culture of Paris. Yet, his influential autobiographical endeavour was self-focused, scrupulous and often obsessive and critical. It’s not an accounting of his life, per se, but rather of episodes that strike him as important or interesting, against which he can analyze or dissect himself. A love of language and a concern about truthfulness and discretion in the autobiographical exercise are critical. He draws on, among many things, his childhood experiences, travel (as an ethnographer or as part of political or artistic delegations) and, in a particularly vulnerable section of the third volume of Rules, on his suicide attempt, the affair that triggered it and his difficult recovery.

Frail Riffs continues in this vein, but in a more open manner, with short essays and observations, typically grouped thematically, and interspersed with poems, lists, and passages of word play. One of the aspects of Leiris’ character that becomes more apparent in this book and again in Olympia, is his deep despair with the ongoing state of war and violence in the world. He is, as he ages, increasingly confirmed in his anti-colonial and anti-racist convictions. He knows he is too afraid of pain and death to be a true “revolutionary” but as students take to the streets of Paris in 1968, he watches from his well-placed apartment with admiration and offers what refuge he can (the irony of his own bourgeois contradictions never lost on him). I’ve thought about his observations a lot in recent weeks. He would, were he here now, still be in despair.

Anyhow, this long introduction stands as an invitation to follow up with my review of The Rules of the Game Volume 4: Frail Riffs, which has been published at Minor Literature[s]. Thank you to everyone for welcoming my work back to this great literary journal .

The Rules of the Game Volume 4: Frail Riffs is translated from the French by Richard Sieburth and published by Yale University Press.

Farewell to 2023 with the annual list of favourite reads

In my small corner of the world, away from forest fires raging, earthquakes and wars continuing and erupting anew, I read some very good books. 2023 was, world events aside, a complicated year, which is to say, a very human one. Within my extended family there were life-changing diagnoses and surgeries, but all in all, we’ve been fortunate to access care within a health system buckling under the strain that is far from unique. And I finally returned to India for a visit, my first trip anywhere in four years, which was a much-needed opportunity to connect and re-connect with many friends, and even take a little time to explore on my own. But travel did cut into my reading, as one often imagines that with all that time spent flying and waiting for flights, books will be avidly consumed, but that’s not always the case. And then, when I returned home, just days after the events of October 7, a renewed politically motivated awareness started to influence my reading choices and appreciation, something that will no doubt continue into 2024. If one sets out, as I do, to read with a special interest in works and authors from outside my own experience, especially in translation, reading widely and intentionally should ideally be a guiding factor.

So what of 2023’s reading? I read just over 60 books, a number I’m satisfied with. I wrote reviews or responses to 48 of them. The majority of the books I chose not to review are books of poetry, in large part because I do not always feel confident that I can add something meaningful to the conversation about such works no matter how much I might enjoy them and return to them often. (Perhaps this year I can gather some of my favourite “unreviewed” collections into  a special post.) Nonetheless, for the purposes of this annual exercise, I selected 14 books  that I particularly enjoyed or wanted to call extra attention to.  It includes four nonfiction works, nine fiction and one poetry collection. Ten books are translated literature, while four are written English, although one of those is a book about translation.

Listed chronologically according to date read, I’ve divided my 2023 favourites into two categories—books I particularly enjoyed and, then,  my top five:

Journey to the South – Michal Ajvaz (Czechia) translated from the Czech by Andrew Oakland
This wild murder mystery/adventure that begins with a murder during a performance of a ballet based on Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason was my first introduction to Ajvaz’s idiosyncratic story with a story within a story narrative form. I definitely want to read more.

A Mountain to the North, A Lake to the South, Paths to the West, A River to the East
– László Krasznahorkai (Hungary) translated from the Hungarian by Ottilie Mulzet
The historical details that emerge in this dream-like journey in search of a mystical Buddhist monastery have lingered with me with all the misty beauty of the initial reading experience.

 Falling Hour – Geoffrey D. Morrison (Canada)
This strange and wonderful tale of a man trapped within an urban park is both smart and funny in just the right measure.

The Postman of Abruzzo – Vénus Khoury-Ghata (Lebanese-French) translated from the French by Teresa Lavender Fagan
As one of my favourite writers, it is difficult to imagine compiling a list like this without including Khoury-Ghata. This sharp, spare tale of a French woman who finds herself in a community of displaced Albanians in southern Italy in search of a connection with the work of her dead geneticist husband so that she may heal, is charming and profound.

All The Eyes That I Have Opened – Franca Mancinelli (Italy) translated from the Italian by John Taylor
Another favourite, a poet whose works always seems to speak directly to me, I would be hard pressed not to include her at year end, but this collection with its central image inspired by the eye-shaped scars on the trunks of trees continues to haunt me every day as I pass aspen trees on my walk.

river in an ocean: essays on translation – (Canada) Various authors, Nuzhat Abbas (ed)
The importance of this feminist decolonial project—a rich collection of essays on translation by writers with origins in the global South—was intensified by the changing world events that marked my reading, my review and every day since then. Vital and necessary.

A significant number of my favourite books of the year were read in the final months of the year, and hold political relevance for me by virtue of my desire to listen to the voices of those impacted by violence, occupation and genocide. The following three included:

Passage to the Plaza – Sahar Khalifeh (Palestine) translated from the Arabic by Sawad Hussain.
I have read a number of very powerful works by Palestinian writers and poets over the years. In search of more female voices I was drawn to this work by a new-to-me author who, fortunately, has been widely translated. Set, written and published during the First Intifada, this novel is the rarely told story of the impact of the events on women.

Tali Girls – Siamak Herawi (Afghanistan) translated by the Farsi by Sara Khalili
Based on true stories of girls and women in an isolated and impoverished region of Afghanistan under growing Taliban control and local corruption, this almost folkloric narrative is swift, devastating and, ultimately, hopeful.

Landbridge [life in fragments] – Y-Dang Troeung (Cambodian-Canadian)
Born in a Thai refugee camp just across the border from Cambodia, Troeung gathers memories, documents, photographs and artworks to tell the inspiring and difficult tale of her family’s survival against unspeakable horror, their lives as refugees in Canada, and her own personal journey to explore her own history in a world that, as we can see today, is reluctant to acknowledge genocide.

* * *

My top five reads of the year:

The Last Days of Terranova – Manuel Rivas (Spain) translated from the Galacian by Jacob Rogers
This was the first book I read in 2023 and I knew right away that it would be hard to beat.  Employing a narrative style that rewards the attentive reader, this is essentially the story of a family bookstore, the eccentric characters that pass through and their involvement in making banned literature available during the Franco years. I loved it.

The Book of Explanations– Tedi López Mills (Mexico) translated from the Spanish by Robin Meyers
As someone who has exclusively written and edited nonfiction, I am more often than not disheartened by the personal essays, book length or collected, that I try to read. This series essays exploring the nature of memory and identity blew me away. I don’t know if it was the innovative approach or the degree to which I related to the themes, but this is an excellent, innovative work.

The Geography of Rebels – Maria Gabriela Llansol (Portugal) translated from the Portuguese by Audrey Young
This enigmatic work is simply a haunting and profound reading experience in which historical and imaginary figures interact in a world out of place and time, yet linked to faith, books and ideas. I can’t wait for her diaries to be released later this year.

Austral – Carlos Fonseca (Costa Rica) translated from the Spanish by Megan McDowell
Another favourite author, Fonseca delights in intelligent, complex narratives that appear, on the surface, deceptively simple. Austral is perhaps his strongest work to date and, given that he is still a very young writer, I look forward to what may be yet to come.

We the Parasites – A.V. Marraccini (US)
As per what I said above about nonfiction, I approached this book with my usual essay wariness coupled by the fact that it was presented as a book about criticism. But everyone else is right, this is a singular piece of writing. Intelligent and completely original.

So, there you have it. As ever, many other excellent books from this year’s reading had to be left out but contributed, all the same, to a very satisfying literary year. This year I focused on Archipelago Books and will continue to read their publications with enthusiasm. I’ve found that looking at publishers rather than specific titles I hope to make my way through as each new year dawns is a good approach. To that end, I need to pay a little attention to some of the Dalkey Archive and NYRB books that I have been accumulating, among the many other works from worthy independent publishers that I do, and always will continue, to seek out. And, of course, all plans are subject to change, so I will commit to few.

Happy New Year. May there be peace in 2024.

The heart’s nocturnal lament: Night of Loveless Nights by Robert Desnos

On the tree trunks the same two initials are always carved. By what knife, what hand, what heart?

 In 1973, Issue 10 of The Ant’s Forefoot, a New York City based poetry journal (originally started in Toronto) was devoted to one single epic poem—Lewis Warsh’s translation of Night of Loveless Nights by French poet Robert Desnos. As such, it was the first English publication of a book by Desnos, more than forty years after its original limited French release in 1930. The chemistry between Desnos, one of the early Surrealists and Warsh, a member of the second generation of the New York School of poets produced an translation that is attentive and sensitive to the original despite the fact that Warsh was born the year before the Desnos’s death. The context of the creation of Night of Loveless Nights is as fascinating as the story of its first appearance in English. Long out of print, this translation has now been rereleased in a special fiftieth anniversary dual-language volume from Winter Editions, complete with an afterword by poet David Rosenberg, the editor who originally gave Warsh’s translation a home.

Robert Desnos was born in Paris in 1900. He published his first poems in his teens and, in 1921, he was introduced to the Paris Dada group and André Breton through poet Benjamin Péret. He became an active member of the Surrealists and demonstrated a particular gift for automatic writing. But he began to move away from Surrealism due to political differences and this led to a falling out with Breton. By 1929 the rift was more or less complete as Desnos  joined Georges Bataille’s journal Documents. During the Second World War, he was active with the Resistance and, in February 1944, was arrested by the Gestapo. He died of typhoid in Terezin in occupied Czechoslovakia in 1945.

Desnos began writing Night of Loveless Nights, which he titled in English, in 1926 and completed it in 1928–29. It was inspired, like several other pieces he composed during this period, by his hopeless romantic obsession with night club singer Yvonne George. Although his love was not returned, he remained devoted to her through her increasingly crippling addiction to drugs and alcohol, to her death from tuberculosis in 1930. His epic unfolds over one anguished and feverish night filled with sleepless dreams, slipping in and out of opium delirium and infused with blues and jazz tones. Lewis came to Loveless Nights with little translation experience and less than full confidence with French, but he connected with the imagery, irony and rhythms of Desnos’s verse and felt he could carry it into English.

In his afterword, American poet and Biblical translator David Rosenberg recalls how he and his friend Warsh were both drawn to Desnos’s  poetry over that of his contemporaries:

We were twenty-somethings when we took the French avant-garde poets in primarily the 1920s, from Max Jacob to Pierre Reverdy, as our forefathers of deadpan, no less than Louis Armstrong: it was the decade in which American jazz riveted Paris. Stein, Breton—they were too pragmatic for our sensibilities, though Stein was in our blood and manifested later. But Robert Desnos. . . was in-between; he seemed to push through surrealism and come out the other side as a literal dreamer, in search of reality and lost love. Desnos’s dreamer was parallel to a soul, disembodied—not the disordered mind’s “we must change life” of Rimbaud. Desnos was more grounded by loss.

Warsh was a regular contributor to Rosenberg’s The Ant’s Forefoot when he shared with him his Desnos translation for potential inclusion in the magazine’s upcoming issue. As they read it together over a shared joint, Rosenberg marvelled at its length and wondered if it would be feasible to turn an entire volume over to a single text. Excerpting it did not seem to be an option; it had to be reproduced in full. Desnos’s original publication was a collaborative effort with painter Georges Malkine who provided illustrations to accompany the text. Financial constraints and devotion to a minimalistic aesthetic guided the layout and production of the English edition which included archival photos provided by Lewis. The cover featured original artwork by Rosenberg himself, which is reproduced in the present fiftieth anniversary edition. Otherwise, the materials and production techniques employed in issue 10 of The Ant’s Forefoot are now lost with a graphics art scene that no longer exists. But the Winter Editions anniversary edition now has the advantage of extra space—the French text runs alongside Warsh’s English version, allowing a bilingual reader to appreciate how poet meets poet in this now-classic translation.

Night of Loveless Nights opens with vivid imagery that leans toward the surreal, but with the long initial section of rhymed quatrains, Desnos is adopting a classical form. Warsh does not attempt to reproduce the rhymes, but focuses on staying to true to the mood, tone and important motifs that will recur throughout the long dream-soaked night that follows. One can almost smell the foul air:

Hideous night, putrid and glacial,
Night of disabled ghosts and rotting plants
Incandescent night, flame and fire in the pits,
Shades of darkness without lightning, duplicity and lies.

Who sees the rivers crashing inside himself?
Suicides, trespassers, sailors? Explode
Malignant tumors on the skin of passing shadows,
These eyes have already seen me, shouts resound!

Quatrains like these carry much of the poem, broken first by a section of landscape inspired prose poetry and then by stanzas that vary in length and form. Desnos then returns to the stricter quatrain format before falling into longer, often incantatory, free verse  as the night stretches on and the speaker wearily and warily faces the brightening sky and his growing fatigue.

Desnos never names the object of his desire, but his longing and unrequited passion is laid bare. His romantic desperation is tangible:

I give everything to you, down to the heart of the ghosts,
Submit it to my fatal and delicate torment
Leave in order to disappear in two lines of a book
Without having invoked the evening of lovers.

I am tired of fighting the destiny which conceals me
Tired of trying to forget, tired of remembering
The slightest perfume which rises from your dress,
Tired of hating you and blessing you.

Although Desnos had, perhaps, as Rosenberg suggests, “pushed through surrealism,” it is not entirely behind him here. Beyond a surreal quality to much of the imagery, Warsh’s translation retains a suggestion of Desnos’s experiments with automatic writing and especially something he called “sleep writing,” especially later in Loveless Nights where the verses become freer, the poet seeming to riff on an image, such as in an extended chant-like passage featuring hands which in part reads:

Hands that stretch hands that soften
Is there a sincere hand among them
Ah I no longer dare to shake hands
Lying hands loose hands hands that I mangle
Hands clasped in the prayer of one who trembles when I look him I the eye
Is there still a hand I am able to shake with confidence
Hands on the lover’s mouth
Hands on the heart without love
Hands cut by false love
Hands founded on love
Hands closed to love
Hands dead to love
Hands straining for love
Hands rising for love

And on it goes. It feels, when one reaches this passage, that the poet is drifting off while writing, until the hint of dawn at the windows pulls him back to attention. To read this poem is to accompany the lovesick speaker into the haunted and lonely night, but somehow the dark beauty and the underlying sense of opium-enhanced irony keeps it from feeling impossibly bleak. It is as if Desnos is aware that the depth and futility of his romantic and sexual obsession is the real drug that fuels his poetry and keep his pen on the page.

The fiftieth anniversary edition Night of Loveless Nights by Robert Desnos is translated from the French by Lewis Warsh, and published by Winter Editions.

A wanderer between two worlds: The Postman of Abruzzo by Vénus Khoury-Ghata

“Rifling through the papers of a dead man isn’t enough to bring him back to life.”

Ten years after her geneticist husband died following his return from a village in a mountainous part of southern Italy, Laure leaves her home in Paris in search of something—she’s not sure exactly what—that will help her understand why he kept returning to this isolated community of displaced Albanians again and again. As Luc travelled to collect samples from populations scattered across the globe, being left behind became such a constant condition of their marriage that Laure can’t quite accept that he is really gone for good. The only way to come to terms with this unsettled absence, she is certain, is to visit the one place he had returned to fifteen times and where, on his last trip, his “heart had broken down.” Armed with a folder of his final notes on the Albanians and her portable typewriter, she arrives in Malaterra in the region of Abruzzo, and rents a house.

This is the set-up of Lebanese-French writer Vénus Khoury-Ghata’s 2012 novella, The Postman of Abruzzo, the latest of her works to be released by Seagull Books in Teresa Lavender-Fagan’s English translation. But, if Laure embarks on her journey under the illusion that she will somehow be able to put names to the anonymous donors of blood, urine and saliva recorded in her husband’s files, as if some code rests in the notes she has yet to transcribe, she soon recognizes the foolishness of that idea. What she encounters instead is an eccentric collection of characters who hold fast to beliefs and traditions long since forgotten back in their homeland, preserved in Abruzzo like a fly in amber, and she discovers she is not the only one mourning an unresolved past.

The first and most essential villager Laure meets is Yussuf, the postman of the title. On her first day, he arrives on the doorstep of her cave-like temporary residence high on the exposed mountainside above the valley where the villagers are spending the hot summer months. He has come, he tells her, to feed a litter of kittens, and promises to return every day regardless of whether or not he has any mail to deliver. As one of the only people in town who can read, having learned in prison, he knows everyone’s secrets and has an opinion on everything, sharing his knowledge and uncanny insights with the newcomer as he see fit. Yet, although he can read, the postman has no time for writing:

Putting words on top of words doesn’t construct a house, doesn’t make a child or a tree grow, doesn’t plough a field or prevent locusts from devouring an entire crop of corn. The pages one writes on a table don’t change the shape of the table but make the brain of the one writing explode. Too many word’s crack one’s skull and shorten one’s life.

With his mailbag and his tendency to hold fast to the letters that he feels are too painful to deliver or too important to release to the vagaries of the postal system, Yussuf plays a critical role linking the residents of Malaterra to one another, and Laure, as an outsider, to the community where she hopes the answers to the questions Luc has bequeathed her lie.

The only person in the village who professes to have a true respect for words is the Kosovar, the sole Muslim in a community of Catholics, who has, over the years, bitterly retreated into the confines of his dusty bookshop. In Laure he hopes he has found a kindred spirit, but his desperation and general state of deterioration unnerve her. The other residents are of a much earthier stock, including Mourad, the lusty baker, who proposes marriage despite the fact that he already has a wife and household full of children and the local women who, guided by superstitions, eye the skinny, short-skirted foreigner with distrust. Most are widows, by fact or fate, as economics have driven husbands and sons away to seek work in cities from which they rarely return. And they all seem to remember a Luc very different from the one his wife thought she knew. But the one person who interests and terrifies Laure most is Helena, the woman who cared for Luc in his illness and sent his washed and ironed shirts to Paris after his evacuation to a hospital in Rome. Helena has been waiting thirty years, rusty rifle at hand, to avenge the deflowering and subsequent death of her daughter—by hanging from a fig tree with her mother’s assistance.

Even the mountains mourned the girl, only the mother’s eyes were dry. She cried inside. Condolences poured in from every direction: plastic buckets of every colour, aluminum pans, wicker baskets, even a nightingale in a cage, but nothing consoled her. The priest who refused to give her absolution because of suicide was immediately replaced with another priest. No people are more solidary than Albanians. It makes sense! The same blood flows in their veins . . .

This blood, O negative, not only binds this community and attracted the interest of the foreign medico, but nurtures a deep-seated tradition of blood tax and blood debt imported and preserved through generations of migrants. Laure’s agitation is heightened when Yussuf reveals that a letter sitting undelivered in his bag indicates that the “boy” Helena has been waiting for, known as the Australian because he was rushed off to an uncle in Sydney for his safety, is finally on his way back to Malaterra. His arrival will affect the entire village, Laure included.

The Postman of Abruzzo reads a little like a fable set in a place caught between the modern world and a past that is filled with a complicated network of ancient traditions and carefully maintained prejudices. Laure is also caught between two worlds, half-underground and half-aboveground as the Kosovar keenly observes. Khoury-Ghata’s prose, characteristically poetic, spare, and unsentimental, is perfectly suited for the telling. Sometimes it is simply breathtaking to experience the way she can conjure a vivid and moving image with just a few well-placed words. With this work she uses this gift for precision to craft a story of loyalty, love and loss that is both tender and gently absurd.

The Postman of Abruzzo by Vénus Khoury-Ghata is translated from the French by Teresa Lavender Fagan and published by Seagull Books.

“I’m afraid of myself.” Down with the Poor! By Shumona Sinha

In my half-sleep I saw faces and bodies emerge out of the floor tiles. Blissful, intrigued, tormented people. They appeared when I blinked my eyes. Disappeared when I blinked my eyes. Like this night, in this police cell. To tell the truth, I am still not rid of that shouting and whispering.

Opening with an epilogue from Pascal Quignard about the implication inherent in ancient Greek notions of liberty and freedom of movement that those who defy borders and fences are akin to wild beasts rather than obedient animals, and taking its title from Baudelaire’s narrative prose poem “Assommons les pauvres!” in which a self-enlightened man inadvertently rebalances inequality by violently attacking an elderly beggar, unleashing an equally violent response from his victim, Shumona Sinha’s novella Down with the Poor! is a relentless meditation on the complicated and corrupted system that drives desperate migrants to seek fairer shores, only to find themselves mired in equally, if not worse, circumstances and threatens to destroy the spirits of those who attempt to help them. As she lies in a cell in a Paris police station, a young woman endeavours to untangle the forces that conspired to drive her, an Indian immigrant working as a translator for asylum claimants, to assault a migrant on the metro by smashing a bottle over his head.

Born and raised in Calcutta, Sinha started studying French at the age of twenty-two and moved to Paris a couple of years later. In this award winning novel, her second, originally published in 2011, her unnamed narrator is also from Calcutta. She is a woman who has tried to separate herself from her parents and her hometown, but finds the shadows of Kali, the city’s dark, powerful and protective deity, and Mother Teresa, its symbol of charity, haunt the life she had imagined she had earned, far from memories of poverty, in France, the adopted country she loves. Everything starts to unravel when a series of personal and professional endings lead her to accept employment as an interpreter—a “language gymnast”—in an office on the edge of Paris where ragged petitioners are called to appear before an officer and make their case, or more typically repeat the story they’ve been forced to purchase, in the hope that they might be allowed to stay in a new hostile, unwelcoming land and make some kind of better life.

Unfolding as an intense monologue, poetic and compulsive, the narrator, in light of her arrest and recent interrogation, navigates a flood of feverish thoughts and memories in attempt to figure out how and where things started to fall apart in her world. From early on it is apparent that her role as the conveyor of meaning, from her first language to her second, is more than a simple act of rewording. For her, it is an act of verbal alchemy that carries an emotional cost.

The officer spoke her language, the language of the host country, the language of glass-walled offices. The petitioner spoke his supplicant’s language, the language of the hidden, the language of the ghetto. And I repeated what he said, translated it and served it up piping hot. The foreign language melted in my mouth, leaving its aroma. When I said the words, those of my native language, they turned awkwardly in my mouth, paralyzed my tongue, echoed in my head, hammered my brain like the wrong notes on a wobbly piano. It was a rope bridge, thin, quivering, between the petitioners and me. I had to lean toward each one of them to hold out my hand, lean into their dismembered, chopped-up sentences, fish for their disjointed words and reassemble them, weave them together, make them sound coherent.

The stories she hears, the horrors, real and embellished alike, start to seep into her being. She finds herself carrying their pain. Their desperation. The knowledge that many, if not most, have paid smugglers dearly, become slaves consigned to a poverty much more wretched and inhumane that anything they left behind, builds up inside her. She seeks to shake it in meaningless sexual encounters, while secretly harbouring an attraction for a female officer that she cannot quite articulate.

Over time, her work takes her into other overlooked corners of the city’s margins, while the in the offices of her primary employment, she finds it increasingly difficult to hold herself apart from the stories she hears. Questions of class, colour, gender are never far from her mind, knowing that her own skin, sex and status bind her to and irrevocably separate her from the masses of refugees, while also keeping her apart from those who are driven into work with these populations by charitable passions. She cannot help but absorb the fear she encounters in others. Eventually that fear is transformed into anger and in turn her anger frightens her. She finds she is afraid of herself.

Holding its intensity for a little over one hundred pages, Down with the Poor! is a poetic novella that addresses some of the most pressing and difficult questions we face today in a manner that is shocking, brutal and lonely. This is a very powerful little book.

Down with the Poor! by Shumona Sinha is translated from the French by Teresa Lavender Fagan and published by Deep Vellum in North America and Les Fugitives in the UK.

“Ask the light to be clement”: Portrait Tales by Jean Frémon

This book arrived unannounced. An author unfamiliar to me, but on the very first page ten previous titles are listed, complete with translator and publisher. Then, on the title page, a personalized salutation from the author himself and the explanation of how this lovely little book found its way to me—the name of the translator: John Taylor. Over the years, through John’s translations, I have come to know of a number of writers and poets who have quickly become indispensable additions to my library. And now, another.

Jean Frémon is French author who, in the words of the publisher of this volume, Les Fugitives, “has been contributing to a trans-genre tendency in contemporary French letters since 1969.” By day, he is the president of Galerie Lelong, by night a prolific writer of poetry, fiction and essays on art, or, quite often, work that blends all three forms. He has published over twenty books in France and the present text, Portrait Tales is a selection of narratives on portraiture originally published in his 2020 book Le miroir magique. His tales explore well-known and little-known works and artists alike, and demonstrate Frémon’s extensive knowledge and deep appreciation of art whether he is playfully fictionalizing his subject or examining artistic techniques or revealing the historical consequences faced by those who allowed their likenesses to be captured against religious or cultural mores.

These short narratives cover a wide range of subjects. He begins with Lucian Freud’s singular, and less than flattering, portrait of Queen Elizabeth II, travels back in time and across the world to close with a remembered conversation with Louise Bourgeois, the only artist to appear twice and someone he worked closely with as a gallerist. In between—although reading the pieces in order is not prescribed, freedom of movement as in an actual gallery is encouraged—we are invited to learn about an Indian ambassador who paid the ultimate price for allowing Élisabeth Vigée-Lebrun to paint his portrait in defiance of Koranic law and entertain a meditation on the legendary impossibility of rendering a likeness of a young Jewish prophet named Jesus.

We travel back to Imperial China and Japan, to trace changes to ideas and styles of portraiture and conventions about what can or cannot be captured.  Meanwhile in Europe, a number of factual or elaborated tales unfold. Frémon details, for example, the obsessiveness of Maurice Quentin de la Tour who worried his pastel portraits into being and the revenge of a young sculptor who becomes enamoured with the woman he is commissioned to portray.  One of the shortest and most charming essays, is a sketch of the life and remarkable art of seventeenth-century Italian painter Sofonisba Anguissola:

Having withdrawn to Palermo, Sofonisba continued to paint. There is a self-portrait of her at age seventy-five. She is sitting in an armchair, in a three-quarter profile, her arms on the armrests. A large white ruff surrounds her oval face, which she has not tried to make look younger; her cheeks are hollow, her lips thin and tight; two large folds surround her mouth; but the pose is dignified and her bearing is not without nobility.

Ever confident in her ability to capture life in her many noble subjects and in herself, Frémon closes his sketch with an account of her submission to another artist’s pencil, the young Van Dyk, when he visits her at the age of eighty-nine. Her only instruction to him: “Ask the light to be clement.” It almost feels like each of the artists, or artistic moments  Frémon considers here, is presented in a clement light. It is an intrinsic element of his tone.

Varied in spirit and style, every piece in this slim volume is a gem, enlightening and entertaining. As I was reading, I frequently found myself stopping to search the internet to find the portrait or artist in question, if such a record was available. That is a compliment, of course, not a criticism. A sign of a good book is, for me, one that sends a reader down the odd rabbit hole or two, expanding the experience of reading beyond the pages of the text.

Portrait Tales by Jean Frémon is translated from the French by John Taylor and published by Les Fugitives.

Women in Translation Month 2023: Some suggestions from the past year of reading

August. Another Women in Translation Month is upon us. I have already read my first contribution to the annual project with a review to come in a few days but, as usual, there will be a few non-women read and reviewed this month as well. Nonetheless, I hope to make a good showing.

Looking back over the reviews I posted since last year’s edition, I see that I have read less women in translation than I expected—less women over all, perhaps, but my reading has been governed a little more by review copies and release dates than usual, something which can be offer opportunities and present restrictions. However, I have read some excellent books since last August and if you are looking for suggestions, I have linked them here:

Eastbound by Maylis de Kerangal, translated by Jessica Moore (French)             — A spare, yet intense thriller. (Archipelago)

Balkan Bombshells: Contemporary Women’s Writing from Serbia and Montenegro, compiled and translated by Will Firth — A  surprisingly sharp, strong collection introducing many new voices. (Istros Books)

Grove by Esther Kinsky, translated by Caroline Schmidt (German) A novel born of grief and a healing sojourn in Italy by one of my favourite contemporary writers. (Fitzcarraldo /Transit Books)

Rombo by Esther Kinsky, translated by Caroline Schmidt (German) — Again Kinsky’s acute sensitivity to landscape writing frames this fictionalized account of a year of devastating earthquakes in northern Italy. (Fitzcarraldo/NYRB)

The Book of Explanations by Tedi López Mills, translated by Robin Myers (Mexico/Spanish) — A highly original collection of essays that I simply loved. (Deep Vellum)

Mothers and Truckers by Ivana Dobrakovová, translated by Julia and Peter Sherwood (Slovak) — Five stories, five difficult, complicated women you won’t easily forget. (Jantar Publishing)

The Geography of Rebels Trilogy by Maria Gabriela Llansol, translated by Audrey Young (Portugal) — A surreal, immersive tale of saints, heretics, philosophers, strong-willed women and what it means to write. Quite unlike anything I’ve ever read. (Deep Vellum)

Requiem for Ernst Jandl by Friederike Mayröcker, translated by Roslyn Theobald (German) — A collection of poems Mayröcker composed after her long time partner’s death, perhaps the best place to start with her idiosyncratic work. (Seagull Books)

Hospital by Sanya Rushdi, translated by Arunava Sinha (Australia/Bengali) — Rushdi, a Bangladeshi Australian writer draws on personal experience to capture the reality of psychosis with humour and grace. (Seagull Books/Giramondo)

Twilight of Torment I by Léonora Miano, translated by Gila Walker (Cameroon/French) — Over the course of one night, three women with a connection to a man who is absent, tell their stories of love and determination. (Seagull Books)

Marina Tsvetaeva: To Die in Yelabuga, by Vénus Khoury-Ghata, translated by  Teresa Lavender-Fagan (Lebanese French) — Another favourite author offers an intense, short fictional account of the life of the tragic Russian poet.

If you are looking for Women in Translation Month inspiration, I can recommend any one of these wonderful books.

Not all there: My Life as Edgar by Dominique Fabre

With a child narrator it is always a challenge to strike the right note, the right balance of insight and innocence, but when the child in question has a developmental disability it can be even more difficult to create a believable, engaging voice. Or, as in Dominique Fabre’s My Life as Edgar, it can be an opportunity to present the world through an unusually sensitive, yet unfiltered lens. As is clear from the opening sentences, Edgar has a clear sense of what it is that sets him apart from others, even if he and those around him are never really certain just how far apart that truly is:

I was a quiet, unassuming child, but I had features of a kid with Down syndrome—a kind of coldness around the eyes, pale lips, big cheeks, a big butt, though my chromosomes weren’t really to blame. I could hear people around me say He’s not all there, is he? in soft voices, secretively, only I had ears, phenomenal ears, Micky Mouse was deaf compared to me, nature didn’t do me any favors, except for my ears.

When we first meet Edgar it is 1964, he is three going on four and living in Paris with his single mother, Isabelle. Life is pleasant. They go to the park, she takes him to visit a psychiatrist he is fond of, and when she goes to work he stays at a day home. But things start to change when a married man comes into his mother’s life. Suddenly his small world becomes a little uncomfortably crowded, perhaps too crowded. Before long, Edgar is sent to live with a foster family in Savoy. He will remain there for the next seven years, his care paid for by monthly cheque. He will talk to his mother on the phone weekly, write her letters, carefully copying the examples his caregiver prepares for him, and, on occasion, she will come to visit. But in a sense, out in the country he has more attention, freedom, responsibility and companionship than he had at home in Paris. He is even allowed to go to school. With Auntie Gina and Uncle Jos, and the other kids of unwed mothers who pass through their home, he has a second family and freedoms that urban life would never have afforded a young boy who is “not all there.”

On the surface, Edgar’s story is simple, but his telling of that story is neither simple, nor direct. The first section, recounting life in Paris with his mother, has a certain charm. He understands more of what is going on around him—or at least he appears to—and reports his observations and responses with a clarity that belies his age. However, this is a relatively focused period of his life that he may well have replayed in his mind many times over the years that he lived apart from his mother, because, with the second and longest section, the tone changes. Unfolding as an internal monologue addressed to his psychiatrist, Madame Clarisse Georges, he confesses: “I’m still not all there, but I know how to hide it well. I’m grown up now. I’m still quiet and unassuming too, but I’m not sure that won’t change.” He is eleven—a good year for him, he says—it is the year he will return to the city. But he admits that the years before that were also good, and he wants to talk about them. So he sets out to “dive into the past without remembering much actually.” And, sometimes, remembering too much.

As one might expect, Edgar’s efforts to fill in the gaps in his memory leads to a narrative that can be rather disjointed. He reports what comes to mind, moving back and forth in time, from event to event, often unaware of the larger context of what he sees and hears. His foster mother is of Italian descent, while his stepfather apparently doesn’t like Italians “even though he married one and she’s not the first, but I only know that because I let my ears listen.” Uncle Jos is a man who has chosen Stalingrad over the Catholic Church and works for the local municipality:

[H]e has road workers from the Department of Roads and Ditches who are all the time filling the holes of the world so it won’t spill over on all sides. Sometimes at night he goes out in his underwear, wearing his Damart thermals, when the roads collapse  and no one can get through.

His narrative is peppered with stock expressions seemingly incongruous with that of a young child, especially one who is supposedly “not all there.” He talks about his mother’s “dark and traumatized gaze” and accepts that he is the “village idiot.” He calls Italians Dagos and talks of cuckolds without understanding that the terms are being used in a derogatory fashion. His language absorbs and reflects the prejudices and politics of 1960s working class rural France.

As a narrator, Edgar has no filter. He tells what he remembers, the significant and the insignificant alike, from the quality of his bowel movements (especially after the weekly polenta dinner) to the excitement of the Revolution of 1968. What he reveals is often quite telling, even funny, but he his always very serious in his accounting. His is a monologue that invites one to read between the lines, revealing much about the society and the family units within which he exists. And his observations can be quite profound as when he describes his stepfather’s relationship with his adult son on a day when his own mother has come to visit:

They also fought about the Algerian war. I’d often heard the story since being here. Uncle Jos had tried to break Ricardo’s leg so he wouldn’t go back and help the French get killed over there in the colonies, but his leg had held up against the hammer blows, so Ricardo returned to Algeria covered in gauze and bandages. Since then, the two of them didn’t talk much. Me, if we had to go to war for independence, I think I’d go see Ricardo, not Uncle Jos. It feels weird, Madame Clarisse Georges, I’ll always know more about Uncle Jos and Auntie Gina than about Edgar and Isabelle, and all the rest. But today, in case you’re still alive and don’t mind listening to me, I’m like a separated Edgar, I’ve already lived a long time.

In the final section, Edgar, now eleven, returns to Paris and after a few weeks with his mother, is sent off to boarding school. He navigates the dynamics of this new environment for a while, but ultimately  will try to take control of his life in a world which has repeatedly pushed him off to the sidelines.

Dominique Fabre is a writer who is interested of illuminating the lives of people on the margins. This is a brave little book that I suspect may have missed the mark with some readers who fail to connect with narrator. Edgar, for all his concerns about the gaps in his memory, is an endearing child trying to tell his own story as best he can. In the process, he unwittingly tells a much larger tale about the lives of children whose parents are unable, or unwilling, to care for them, the systems in which they find themselves—day homes, boarding schools and foster families—and the value of consistency and support, wherever one may find it.

My Life as Edgar by Dominique Fabre is translated from the French by Anna Lehmann.