Tag: American University of Paris

Waxing lyrical and irritable: QWERTY Invectives by Éric Chevillard

French writer Éric Chevillard opens QWERTY Invectives, his contribution to the Cahier Series, with a short reflection on translation, its importance and its limitations. Although any text will invariably suffer certain mutations on its passage from one language to another, these changes need not be met with certain despair. The re-imagining required to facilitate the journey can offer, he suggests, a well-needed breath of fresh air. Case in point, the present text, derived from his book Le Désordre AZERTY, “a primer arranged according to the layout of the French keyboard.” Not only does this short, beautifully presented cahier, represent a “radical abridgement” of the original text, the sections selected necessarily reflect a new order—that determined by the Anglophone keyboard.

What follows then, are six short treatises inspired by words beginning with the first six letters of the keyboard with a little linguistic gymnastics, no doubt, to line up an English word with a word compatible with the exercise at hand. And, given the words, or rather themes that feature, one must wonder what other liberties were taken to extract six pieces from what one assumes was a selection of at least twenty-six offerings, not allowing for diacritics and accents. In this slender volume we are treated to Chevillard, or his fictional alter-ego, waxing lyrical and irritable on reaching the age of fifty (“Quinquagenarian”); the “Water Closet” (or more explicitly the product one deposits in such facilities); the nature of one’s metaphorical “Enemy”; the “Return” to home or, more exactly, to routine and fresh promise in the fall; the photographer’s art (“Technician of the Darkroom”); and finally, gross human anatomy—especially the foot—in the final installment that opens “You, Eyes!” (or, I would suspect “yeux” in the original).

The narrator is never afraid to examine a subject from a most unlikely angle, employing language that is colourful and inclined to hyperbole. This is evident from the opening offering, a meditation on the misery of attaining the ripe age of fifty, dished out with a healthy dose of melancholic satire:

‘Half a century!’ people say, all smiles, thumping me on my osteoporosis-ridden shoulder-blades.

A little respect would be welcome; a little consideration wouldn’t hurt. Balzac writes somewhere of a ‘fifty-year-old codger’. That’s Balzac for you, who died of exhaustion one year after celebrating the same sinister birthday. I tell myself: Times have changed, today’s fifty is the nineteenth century’s thirty. Thirty year-olds back then were eighteen, and ten-year-old urchins weren’t even born yet.

And more often than not, his starting point, or apparent subject, is rarely more than a launching pad that can potentially take him anywhere. R’s entry which opens “Return Home?” begins with a description of the end of the summer holiday and the beginning of the school year, but his dissertation soon wanders into speculation about the flood of new books that arrive each year with the publishing houses’ autumn offerings. Here our narrator’s cynicism is barely held in check:

Where once there was the book, now there is the public figure of the author, duly dramatized, whose only real use turns out to be to provide a caption for the photo of the artiste who is the one really being featured. All the author can hope for is a meagre compensation in a currency that is already so outdated that it works only in public payphones and slot machines.

Each year sees a glut of new releases, so what of the game, the publishing lottery, into which eager authors enter?

The author of the present lines, given he contributes to full-bloodedly to the current literary over production, may not be ideally placed to complain. But nonetheless: six hundred novels published between September and October? It’s a figure that must be far in excess of the thirst for reading displayed by our contemporaries; it’s akin to pouring an ocean onto a piece of blotting paper, then peeing on it for good measure. Booksellers will soon have to surround themselves with ramparts and equip themselves with flame-throwers in order to repulse writers—those supernumerary writers. No matter! it will surely be educed that the phenomenon serves to demonstrate the surprising vitality of the literary landscape in France!

It would be fair to say that Chevillard’s humour might not whet everyone’s whistle. As a reader who found Author & Me, his book-length diatribe against cauliflower gratin which served as the pretext for a greater meta-fictional reflection, an endlessly hilarious exercise, I find his wit with even the most unlikely of subjects to be a treat. And this Cahier, lavishly illustrated by French artist Philippe Favier, is a perfect introduction to this energetic, imaginative writer. As ever, woven into his literary escapades are some very astute observations about life, the world, and our uneasy navigation of all the joys and obstacles we encounter every day.

QWERTY Invectives by Éric Chevillard is translated by Peter Behrman de Sinéty. It is the 31st title in the Cahier Series, a joint project of the Center for Writers & Translators at The American University of Paris and Sylph Editions.

Of reality and imagination: To Begin at the Beginning by Javier Marías

In the opening paragraph of her “Postface” to Javier Marías’ recently released contribution to the Cahier Series, To Begin at the Beginning, famed translator Margaret Jull Costa confesses that every time she starts to work on a new Marías novel, she thinks: “I can’t do this.” His work, with its long, convoluted sentences, and its precise, but shifting, language lies ahead of her at the outset of each project, and until she gets back into the flow she feels a sense of anxiety. I must admit that similar sort of uncertainty faces me as a reader. I wonder, am I ready to commit to Marías again right now? Unfortunately, with a few efforts since I was first swept away by A Heart So White many years ago, the answer has been no, not now.

beginSo imagine my delight with this short, reflective essay about the art of taking the stuff of life—the truths and myths that arise from one’s own family history—and using, even re-using them, to tell stories, create literature. I found this Marías, talking about his family, and his approach to the art of writing, so wonderful to read that I’ve mentally added his trilogy to my list of books to read. And that is one of the absolute joys of the Cahier Series: the opportunity to meet, or meet again, a writer or translator, and spend a little time with them as they explore writing or translating, or the intersection of both, in unique and original ways.

Marías, the highly-respected Spanish novelist and translator, sets out in this piece to explain his desire to devote his energies to writing “inventions,” and why, even when he borrows elements from real life, so to speak, he is inclined to break them up, and blend them into his fictional characters and creations rather than putting them in, unaltered.

2017-01-15-02-12-11 He begins by trying to set himself apart from writers who make every effort to make their fictional offerings appear factual, and expresses his dismay whenever presented with the expression: Based on real events. His inevitable reaction? “I’m filled with a feeling of tedium and anticipatory boredom, of distrust and resistance, of suspicion and even scepticism,” he says, going on to be more exacting:

‘What is so strange and unbelievable, so extraordinarily random, arbitrary, and corny about this story that, even though it’s already happened in real life, they still want to tell me about it, even warning me that I have to believe it whether I like it or not, because this is how it was, this is what actually happened?’

2017-01-15-02-13-49Of course, in the essay that follows, he goes on to share aspects of his own family history, reaching back to his Cuban great-grandfather, pulling out some of the stories that have made their way into one or more of his novels. This abbreviated family history is fascinating in its own right (inadvertently causing one to think that any story “true” or otherwise can be magic in the hands of the right storyteller), but his discussion of his process of re-imagining and working people and incidents from the past into his fictions—and the decisions he has faced when handling elements of the real within the world of invention—is equally compelling.

2017-01-15-02-10-09Marías reports that, when he writes, he applies the same principle of knowledge that is at play in life. He does not know if what he writes at page five of a novel will prove to be a good idea at page 200 any more than we can know if what we do at age twenty will seem to have been wise from the vantage point of forty, and so on. In writing, one has the advantage of editing, adjusting events back and forth between earlier and later portions of the work, giving meaning to the capricious and superfluous, as required, so that “what had no meaning at the beginning does have meaning at the end.” Subject as it is to the unforeseeable variables that mould reality, he contends, life makes a very poor novelist. Imagination is a critical mediator—and one of the essential keys to literature— filtering the invented and the actual, rendering everything equal.

To Begin at the Beginning, the twenty-eighth addition to the Cahier Series, offers an opportunity to spend a little time in the company of a renowned novelist and his chief translator. Illustrated by the works of Cuban artist Wilfredo Lam, it will likely be appreciated by Marías’ committed readers. For those who have little or no experience with his novels, it serves as an ideal introduction, or, as in my case, an inspiration to read more.

The Cahier Series is a joint publication from the Center for Writers and Translators of the American University of Paris and Sylph Editions.

Words, the most vital gift: Translator’s Blues by Franco Nasi (The Cahier Series, #26)

Charged with the task of bringing a piece of text to life in another language, for another culture, and possibly also for another moment in time perhaps centuries after it was originally conceived and recorded, the translator stands armed with words alone: “imperfect, approximate, or a tad reductive”. But, employed with skill, sensitivity and creativity; words can facilitate a little literary magic.

2016-01-18 01.59.14Translator’s Blues, the latest addition to the Cahier Series of the American University of Paris (#26) is an imaginative discourse on the dilemma of translation – a meditation on the interplay between language and culture, facilitated through words; an elegy for what is gained and what is lost in the process. Italian translator Franco Nasi adopts the voice of a naive alter-ego who is, like his creator, a translator who hails from the province of Regio-Emilia where he was born and expects he will die. His home – with its mountains, Parmesan cheese factories, and cemeteries laid out like miniature cities behind high walls – is a place which makes sense to him, a world that is idiosyncratic but familiar. He is grounded there.

When he chances to befriend an American architect who is visiting his fabled region of Italy, he is offered an invitation to travel to the States in return. After a brief visit to Vermont, our translator finds himself in Chicago where his host is presently employed. As our erstwhile hero makes his way through the linguistic landscape of America he finds himself exploring of the boundaries of language that are blurred when one endeavors to navigate the tricky waters that lie between one culture and another. Through an account of his adventures and encounters he orchestrates, with insight and and a measure of impish delight, an argument that translation is, at its best, an inexact art form. However, rather than seeing that as a limitation, he celebrates the challenges, possibilities and rewards of bringing a piece of literature to new audiences that would otherwise be denied access by the borders of both language and culture.

Our narrator’s journey of discovery starts inauspiciously on a snowy Sunday morning in Chicago when he sets out to purchase non-alcoholic beer from a nearby shop. Bemused by his inability to procure alcohol of any description before 11:00 AM, he inquires of his host as to whether this is a daily reality or one confined only to the one day. He learns that it is, in fact, a law applying only to Sundays, to what are known as the “blue hours”. Blue. This is a word that has a special impact for our translator. He had just finished reading William H. Gass’ On Being Blue: A Philosophical Inquiry. He was given the book so that he could assess its suitability for translation. Thus it was with a translator’s eye that he read it, and he found himself rather out of his range. He was inclined to wonder if attempting to translate a book like this, with its multi-layered references to the significance of the colour blue, would be at all possible. References in some instances, such as those with sexual or potentially pornographic overtones, would likely be rendered nonsensical to a culture that tended to associate the same arena with the colour red. It would, he feared, surely induce in him a state of melancholy:

“… a malady that takes hold of you whenever, after a thousand false starts, you find yourself being invested by an overwhelming sense of inadequacy and impotence. This blue-tinged malady makes the translator wish that Babel and the multiplication of languages were only a legend, and that all the various languages in the world did not exist and had never existed. With melancholy comes nostalgia for an ur-language, in which all colours and all their meanings were the same for everyone, in which plants were identical for all and sundry; in which flowers, and sounds, and ceremonies, every object and sensation, and belief was expressed in a single, universal, manner, in which a rose was a rose was a rose.”

All the culturally and linguistically entrenched peculiarities of blue aside, Nasi allows the shade to colour, if you will, much of the exploration of the art of translation that follows. His translator is led, most immediately to a famous Chicago blues bar. As he soaks up the atmosphere and the music, he reflects on the translation of African traditional music to America, facilitated through the songs that black slaves brought with them. Typically based on a pentatonic scale, these songs are echoed in the adaptation of one musical “language” to instruments designed to the specifications and precision of the chromatic scale. As a consequence, notes tend to slip a little out of tune, to bend, and acquire the nostalgic, mournful tone, the blueness, that we associate with the blues. On his way home he contemplates the resonance between the music he has been enjoying and his craft:

“Could it be that any translation, if it seeks to be more than a cold and sterile transposition, must contain blue notes? A translation needs blue notes to hint at an elsewhere, at nostalgia, and with nostalgia the tension provoked by unappeased desire for whatever is distant and unreachable. As William Gass puts it, ‘So it’s true: Being without being is blue.’”

From this point on our hero chances to meet a well-known American poet who, it turns out, is seeking a tutor to help him improve his Italian. So the two begin to meet regularly. Over the course of their acquaintance the poet gives his new friend a volume of his poems. Seeing this as an opportunity to exercise his own English skills, with the added advantage of being able to check his success against the original author’s perceptions, the protagonist asks if he might translate some of the poems. The poet seems pleased with the resulting translations, even if they might at times be less than exacting. So talk of publishing the Italian versions arises and a publisher is sought. Suddenly the poet’s self-appointed “official” translator emerges and demands that a halt be put to the fledgling enterprise – after all, audiences are accustomed to one voice, to offer an alternative would certainly be disorienting.

Nasi’s translator backs down. But at the same time he wonders about the “versions” of writers such as Homer, Sappho or Aristophanes that already exist. He envisions the silence of the library where the respective translations must sit shoulder to shoulder on the shelves, to be broken once the lights are turned off and the key turned in the lock:

“Of a night, there must be some turbulence in the library stacks, what with all those competing voices. And it’s clear that the music does indeed change according to who is playing – and just as well too: what a bore it would be to hear over and over Beethoven’s ‘Eroica’ Symphony in the way it was played in public the first time, on 7 April 1805 in the Theater an der Wien. To translate is to betray – tradurre è tradire – and only through betrayal is a writer’s voice kept alive. To the liveliness of this voice in time will correspond the number of voices multiplying it, so permitting it to dialogue across the ages.”

Nasi goes on to expand on this fundamental idea. Looking at translation close to the source – that is, within the author’s lifetime – has a particular value, especially when the author is engaged in the translation process. However some authors, and Nasi points to a few of his fellow countrymen here, may run the risk of insisting on a degree of literal accuracy, as they perceive it, that could hinder an emotionally and culturally authentic transition to a foreign language. And to round out his argument he allows his alter-ego to experience the shock of receiving a copy of his own translated book, which is, in reality, the very book the reader happens to be reading. He fails to recognize it at first, his child released into the world now returning and standing at the doorstep – changed but somehow the same and possibly richer for the experience of immersion in another language and culture. Just as our Italian narrator returned from his own trip beyond the borders of Regio-Emilia informed and enlightened.

2016-01-18 01.57.27An essay within a most charming story, Translator’s Blues offers an entertaining, thoughtful reflection on the relationship between translators and the works they attempt to realize in another language and culture. With humour and a gentle wisdom, Nasi explores what can be preserved, what is lost, and the responsibilities that, he would argue, have to be surrendered in the process of translation.

Franco Nasi is a writer and translator who has taught Italian language and literature in the United States, and has translated into Italian a number of writers and poets including S.T. Coleridge, William Wordsworth, J.S. Mill, Billy Collins and Roger McGough. Translated by Dan Gunn and paired with illustrations taken from a notebook kept by Italian artist Massimo Antonaci, Translator’s Blues will be released in February, 2016.