RIP Bernard Hoepffner & Juan Goytisolo

It is with sorrow that I report the passing of Bernard Hoepffner (1946-2017), the belauded French translator of many Anglophone authors and works, including Mark Twain, James Joyce, Robert Burton, Martin Amis, Edmund White, and Robert Coover, as well as my Counternarratives--his masterpiece of a translation appeared last year.  First, the sad, astonishing news: on May 26, French news outlets reported that Hoepffner had disappeared after being swept away by a wave on the Welsh coast, near St. Davids Head, Pembrokeshire, on May 6. (His body was recovered yesterday on Tywyn Beach in North Wales.) With this almost inconceivable event, the world of letters and translation, in France and worldwide, has lost a major, deeply appreciated figure, as a number of his colleagues have readily attested. His varied career before becoming a translator included having restored Asian art in the UK, and a run a farm in the Canary Islands. Once he undertook translation as a career, he ranged widely, never shying away from difficult books, and as the list above suggests, he translated classics as well as newer authors with aplomb. To his family and friends, I send my deepest condolences and prayers.

I never had the pleasure of meeting Bernard Hoepffner in person, but over the span of a year, and as recently as April of this year, we had exchanged emails, first about the collection of stories, and, more recently, about a volume of his long correspondence with the late American writer Guy Davenport, another original in the world of literature, that he hoped to place with a US publisher. As a translator, he was as much as an editor as any I have ever worked with, and his subtle readings of my English were often so perceptive that they enlightened me to what I had intuitively achieved--or only thought I had. Sometimes he would ask questions that forced me to justify choices, such as whether there were "falls" on a river--I was able to find links saying that there were--and whether an anachronism like "scenario" (which entered English only in 1878, as he reminded me), was appropriate for a story whose bulk was set in the 17th century. It was, I was able to say, because the story itself opens in the present, shifts back in time, and the narrative voice is constitutively unstable. In other cases, he caught errors produced by my pen listening more to my ear than eye, which then allowed me to rectify them in English and, upon his translation, French (and now, any other language).

When I communicated with him, Bernard was generous and rigorous, often witty, and capacious in his knowledge and sense of how English prose might become and work as French. As a writer and a translator, I learned a considerable deal from our exchanges, and I am applying our lessons as I write and translate new work this summer. I only wish I had been able to go to France late last summer when the book launched, which also would have provided an opportunity to meet not just my French publishers, Éditions Cambourakis, but Bernard as well. His influence among his peers in terms of opening up the body of English-language for French publishers and readers was and is significant. On his personal site, you can see how rich his trove of translations, as well as other literary and artistic projects, actually is. Here is one encomium for him from the notice in Libération: Joëlle Losfeld writes

«Il m’apportait des textes (Coleman Dowell par exemple, Guy Davenport, Joe Ashby Porter) et je lui en ai donné à traduire. Ma grande satisfaction (ce fut un sujet d’amusement entre nous) a été de lui faire connaître William Goyen qu’il ne connaissait pas, à ma grande surprise car c’est typiquement le genre d’auteur qu’il aimait lire et traduire. Bien sûr, il était pointilleux sur le choix des textes et n’acceptait pas tout, au regard de ses choix mais aussi d’un emploi du temps très chargé par l’ampleur de certaines traductions comme Ulysse par exemple. Et quand il ne pouvait pas traduire, il m’indiquait d’autres traducteurs. C’est ainsi qu’il m’a fait connaître Catherine Richard. Merveilleuse traductrice dont la démarche me semble proche de la sienne. Textes difficiles à traduire mais convertis en jeux dans leur pratique.»

(He brought me texts (Coleman Dowell for example, Guy Davenport, Joe Ashby Porter) and I gave them to him to translate. My great satisfaction (this was a subject of amusement between us) was his getting to know of William Goyen, who he wasn't familiar with, to my great surprise because it is the typical genre of author that he liked to read and translate. Of course, he was picky about the choice of texts and didn't accept everything with regard to his choices, but also because of a work schedule very filled by the size of certain translations like Ulysses, for example. And when he could not translate something, he pointed out other translators. That's how he got me to become familiar with Catherine Richard. Marvelous translator whose approach seems to me to be close to his. Difficult texts to translate but converted into games in their practice.)

Aux anges littéraires, and you can find more tributes to his life and work on the page his brother has established for him. I also hope someone will publish those Davenport letters; reading Davenport alone provides a rich education, so I can only imagine how enlightening Davenport and Hoepffner in conversation will be.

***

When I was in my 20s and first encountered the work of Juan Goytisolo (1931-2017), in particular his 1966 novel Marks of Identity (Señas de identidad), it hit me like a meteor. Not only did the story reset my thinking about how you might draw upon autobiography while writing a story that cast far wider imaginative, philosophical, political, and critical nets, but his relentless experimental method of telling it mesmerized me. What I soon learned was that this novel wasn't the then-35 year old Goytisolo's first, but his tenth, and that while he had written his late 1950s and early 1960s novels, which grappled with conditions in Francisco Franco's fascist Spain in a more conventional, social realist style, by the time he published Marks of Identity, he had begun to criticize his native country openly and harshly, and had been living in exile for a decade, in France. He never ceased his critique nor separation from his homeland, despite periodic visits much later; both extended to the end of his life.

Marks of Identity, I was also soon to grasp, was but the first in a trilogy centering on his literary stand-in, Álvaro Mendiola, and the predecessor to what is his most extraordinary and daring novel, Count Julian (La reivindicación del Conde don Julián). Published in 1970, Count Julian remains a landmark in Spanish language, European and global literature, and is one of the most brutal attacks on national tradition written from within that tradition to perhaps ever achieve major fame. In it, Goytisolo lacerates Spain's history by reinvoking and vindicating a figure thought to be one of Spain's greatest traitors, the eponymous Count Julian of Ceuta, who is said to have opened the door to the Moorish conquest. Taking the linguistic experimentation of Marks of Identity even further, but with his irony sharpened like a straight razor, his Count Julian's recitation of Spain's historical crimes woven like the dazzling threads of an exquisite tapestry as he peers through his window at the monstrous home country across the Straits of Gibraltar, Goytisolo holds nothing back. It is a breathtaking work, and won him readers across the literary landscape, though no few fans among Franco's hierarchy or the country's traditional literary world. It is telling that this magisterial, endlessly inventive writer did not win Spain's major literary prize, the Premio Miguel de Cervantes, until three years before his death, in 2014--and never won the Nobel Prize, though his vision, formal, political, spiritual, far outstrips most of the last decade of recipients of that award.

Anti-racist, anti-capitalist, anti-establishment--and ever-willing to speak out: you could characterize the bulk of Goytisolo's work this way. A Barcelona native, from a prominent family, he lost his mother to a fascist bomb as a child. His two brothers, the older Jose Augustín Goytisolo (1928-1999) and the younger Luis Goytisolo (1935-), also wrote, but Juan was the towering figure among them. After arriving in Paris Goytisolo initially worked for Gallimard, and met his future wife, novelist, publisher and screenwriter Monique Lange, soon thereafter, but, as he revealed to her and to his readers in his work, he was gay, and together they built a life that acknowledged this crucial aspect of his existence, which shifted more fully into a new form of living after her death and his move to Morocco, where he lived with two former male partners and their extended families.

As a fiction writer, Goytisolo never looked backwards in terms of his aims to push the limits of the genre or the Spanish language, as books like Juan the Landless (Juan sin tierra, 1975), the third novel in the Mendiola trilogy; Makbara (1980), set in a Muslim graveyard; Landscapes After the Battle (Paisajes después la batalla, 1985), which prefigures Houellebecq's Submission, but in more inventive and anti-Islamophobic way; Quarantine (Cuarantena, 1991), which explores the AIDS pandemic; Marx Family Saga (1999, La saga de los Marx, 1993), a witty novel about the Communist founder and his family; and his final novel, Exiled from Almost Everywhere (2008), set in an afterlife accessible via social media, all make clear. His journalistic nonfiction often served as critique and expose, from his early work, Campos de Níjar, about impoverished Andalusia, to 2001's Paisajes de guerra: Sarajevo, Argelia, Palestina, Chechenia.

He was also a literary critic and editor, and undertook a decades-long effort to reconnect Spain to its Muslim roots--and to remind readers of the richness of the North African, Arab and Islamic traditions in their overlapping and longstanding yet changing forms, work that strikes me as particularly salient these days.Goytisolo's frank and disarming memoirs, Coto vedado (1985), and In the Realms of Strife (En los reinos de taifa, 1986), which one of my dearest friends gave me, reminded their readers of his profound humanity and humility, and, yet again, of his fearlessness at sharing truths, his and those of the worlds in which he lived and moved. Perhaps unsurprisingly, his books, however, were banned in Spain until after Franco's death. As I noted in 2006, I was fortunate to catch him during one of periods in the late 1990s when he was lecturing at NYU, though I was too shy to introduce myself, and barely understood his Castilian Spanish. In that blog post, I mentioned Fernanda Eberstadt's New York Times Magazine profile of Goytisolo, "The Anti-Orientalist," which remains an excellent glimpse into his life.

I'll end by restating something that I'd written about back in 2011, which is that one of my favorite works of Goytisolo's is his late, slender novel The Garden of Secrets (Las semanas del jardín, 1997), which is a brilliant novel about storytelling that enacts what it explores. It contains a series of stories in multiple styles, linked through a concentrically circular form, told by various narrators who beguile as they reveal. What I found especially compelling about this novel, though, is how Goytisolo strives to remain true to the pre-literary heritage from which Goytisolo and all written literature draw, even going so far as to remove his name--Juan Goytisolo--from the novel's cover, ceding the credit to the tradition of storytelling. If there is anything antithetical to the culture of contemporary publishing, this certainly fits the bill. It may not be his greatest work, but it is representative of the artist, critic and activist that Goytisolo became, and offers pointers for anyone thinking about how to create and live in this complex, difficult, and riven world we find ourselves in today. For this book and all his others, I express my gratitude.

Yves Bonnefoy (1923-2016) + Translation

Yves Bonnefoy at the Collège de France in 2001
(The Telegraph/AP/Getty)

On July 1 of this year, one of the most important--arguably the most important--late 20th century poets of the French language, Yves Bonnefoy--passed away in Paris. Bonnefoy remains little known in the US, I would venture from anecdotal evidence, even though he spent significant amounts of time here, even teaching for a while at a number of universities, including Brandeis, Johns Hopkins, Connecticut, Yale, Williams, and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York; unlike a number of his Francophone contemporaries, his poems are fairly accessible, if quite distinctive from the mainstream of Anglo-American poetics, and most can be found in translation too. In 1981, he was awarded the chair in poetry at the august Collège de France, and taught there for the remainder of his career.

A native of Tours, Indre-et-Loire, France, and an associate of the Surrealists, Bonnefoy might be thought of as the second generation of that movement, though he declined to sign one of their manifestos in 1947, and his poetry stands as testimony to a rather different approach to composition and image-making, even if the Surrealist and prior French influences, including Symbolism, are evident in it. Bonnefoy was not just a major poet, however; he published copiously, creating an imporessive oeuvre that includes criticism, biography, and fiction. One of his chief foci was art history. His book-length prose works include biographies of Alberto Giacometti and Francisco Goya. He also was a translator, primarily of Shakespeare's plays, as well as notable poets including John Donne and W. B. Yeats.

Bonnefoy's first book, Du mouvement et de l'immobilité de Douve, usually translated as On the Motion and Immobility of Douve, though I like the English cognate "movement" better, heralded his entry into the world of letters. It is, like all of his work more or less, a series of highly lyrical, often haunting appeals, alternating between abstract and concrete language, that when read aloud possesses the air of song. Even the book's title is melodic, rhyming, consonant: Bonnefoy signals Douve's presence before calling her name forth in that initial "Du [m]ouve[ment]." I find that so much of his poetry carries this linguistic-semantic resonance, so that even at its most abstract, it is still conveying, in indirect ways, a surplus of meaning.

Nevertheless, Bonnefoy's poetry may puzzle people grounded in the English and American traditions of poetry that is almost always about someone, something, some place, using specific, non-abstract language. This is, in fact, one of many an introductory poetry class will warn budding poets against; alluring as the examples of a Mallarmé or Supervielle--to pick a different generation of poetry--may be, too much abstraction does not a good poem make, even though there are traditions within US poetry in which abstraction flourishes. Bonnefoy's poems often charge the abstraction with a background conflict--a quest, a battle, loss--and dream-like movement, giving them inherent drama that keeps the reader engaged. With Douve, one of the most basic questions is, who is this person to whom the poetic speaker is writing? Who or what is a "Douve"? That alone made me want to read and decipher that text.

8 years ago I had the pleasure of translating a short catalogue essay, on the work of my dear friend J. Eric Hamel, by Bonnefoy, but I have never translated his poetry before. Here, therefore, is my rough translation of my favorite poems of his, "Vrai nom," from his first book. If you read French, you can both see and hear the music, but even if not, try the words and listen to what you hear.  Please forgive any felicities, and do offer your thoughts if you'd like. In tribute, RIP, Yves Bonnefoy!

TRUE NAME

I will name desert this castle that you were,
Night that voice, absence your face,
And when you fall in the barren earth
I will name nothingness the lightning that bore you.

Dying is a country that you loved. I come
But eternally by your dark roads.
I destroy your desire, your form, your memory,
I am your pitiless enemy.

I will name you war and will take
for myself war's liberties and will hold
in my hands your obscure and well-traveled face,
In my heart this country which illuminates the storm.

To appear the deep light requires
an earth profligate and broken by the night.
From a shadowy wood the flame grows bright.
The word itself needs substance,

An inert shoreline beyond all song.
You must overcome death so that you can live,
Blood spilled is the purest presence.

Copyright © John Keene, all rights reserved.

And the original French:

VRAI NOM

Je nommerai désert ce château que tu fus,
Nuit cette voix, absence ton visage,
Et quand tu tomberas dans la terre stérile
Je nommerai néant l'éclair qui t'a porté.

Mourir est un pays que tu aimais.
Je viens
Mais éternellement par tes sombres chemins.
Je détruis ton désir, ta forme, ta mémoire,
Je suis ton ennemi qui n'aura de pitié.

Je te nommerai guerre et je prendrai
Sur toi les libertés de la guerre et j'aurai
Dans mes mains ton visage obscur et traversé,
Dans mon cœur ce pays qu'illumine l'orage.

La lumière profonde a besoin pour paraître
D'une terre rouée et craquante de nuit.
C'est d'un bois ténébreux que la flamme s'exalte.
Il faut à la parole même une matière.

Un inerte rivage au delà de tout chant.
Il te faudra franchir la mort pour que tu vives,
La plus pure présence est un sang répandu.

Copyright © the estate of Yves Bonnefoy, 2016. All rights reserved.

Patrick Modiano Wins the Nobel Prize

Patrick Modiano (© SIPA)

For many years, as some of my students will attest, I have shared with them my ongoing fascination with writers who essentially write the same book over and over. By "same book" I mean these writers take what might thought of as a core text, however fully articulated in its first published version, and then rewrite it over and over, with some variation. Though I have often expressed my interest in such projects, it is not because I do so myself; I am constitutionally incapable of doing so. A senior writer I admire greatly once asked, with interest and perhaps concern for my career, why I had not written multiple variations on Annotations, suggesting that they might have gotten published. (And created a brand?) My general approach, however, seems to be to condense two--or multiple--books into one, as my slender oeuvre will suggest. Each book, however small or large, stands as its own creature, and multiple ones.)

Yet I have always urged my creative writing students to write any book they produce at the very least twice, the second time to perfect what they attempted the first (another bit of advice I've never been able to follow so far, for the reasons outlined above). In so doing, I tell them, they will written two books instead of just one, meaning potentially two to publish, and experience has taught me that many readers have little problem with reading an improved variation on a previous book. (The same seems true of movies.) Nearly all writers in the United States, are rewarded for being productive, and for publishing, hiring, award, etc., purposes, two is better than one, four than two, six than three, etc. Some writers manage to make a lifelong career of this.

To take one example, John Ashbery has essentially written the same book over the last 25 years (, after producing sometimes quite distinctive books over the first 25-30 years of his career (think Some Trees through A Wave). Our current US Poet Laureate, the great Charles Wright, also has rewritten, with slight variations, the same book--poem--over his last half-dozen collections. In fiction, nearly all (though not A Little Lumpen Novella, for example) of Roberto Bolaño's final ten published novels and story collections are variations on a core book, with similar characters, themes, techniques, etc. Bolaño, in my humble opinion, had the skill to transform each book into something distinctive, however. And certainly there are many more. Oe Kenzaburo has repeatedly written a variation on the same book: a writer has a child with developmental disabilities, and the rest of the plot follows from there. Oe usually finds engaging ways of addressing this theme.

Another writer I deeply admire, Alexander Kluge, also has done this; you could conceivably take any of this story collections, beginning with Case Histories (Lebensläufe), through the most recent ones, and, accounting for an increasingly radical concision, interchange them. The depth of and variation in the content, however, is impressive. Alice Munro, who received the Nobel Prize two years ago, has also been accused of rewriting variations on the same story, too narrow subject matter, and so on, though close study of her skill at varying her subject matter offers a master class on prose fiction. One could say of another favorite of mine, Harold Pinter, that his early works and the late ones could conceivably read as the same work, with slight changes (characters, scenarios, development of style, etc.). The same is true of the Norwegian playwright Jon Fosse, whose work I acquainted myself with earlier this year.

By "same book" I do not mean works merely marked by a consistent style, carry-over characters, etc. Anyone familiar with Toni Morrison's style, say, or Christine Brooke-Rose's formal playfulness, could spot one of their books. You can spot a sentence by Henry James or William Faulkner on the other side of the library door. But each of their books is clearly different in terms of structure, content, and so on. Nor do I mean a serial writer, like Marcel Proust, whose A la recherche du temps perdu, or Anthony Powell, whose A Dance to the Music of Time, or Nathaniel Mackey, who in both poetry (The Song of the Andoumboulou) and fiction (From a Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate), has produced a series of texts which, in the eyes of the author, are intentionally part of and constitute a larger, continuous work.

I say all of this as a prelude to noting that this year's winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, the French author Patrick Modiano, is one of the great literary replicationists of our or any era. The Nobel committee praised him in its citation "for the art of memory with which he has evoked the most ungraspable human destinies and uncovered the life-world of the Occupation." Modiano has, since his outrageous, highly controversial first novel, La place de l'étoile (still untranslated as a whole into English, but roughly, The Place of the Star, the doubled meaning of the actual Parisian address, where the Arc de Triomphe stands, and of the yellow star the Vichy Government forced Jewish residents to wear embedded in the French term--you can find an excerpt, translated by Pepe Karmel, on Agni's site here), written the same book over and over, or rather, variations on the same, fairly narrow theme, characters, and plots. In fact, one could say that his entire body of work functions as a vast, continuous investigation of the same concepts, themes, ideas, and characters, with variations. Yet in Modiano's hands, when he is writing at his best, this repetitiveness ascends to the status of considerable emotional power and beauty.

I am neither a scholar of French literature nor of Modiano's work, but I have read several of his books, mostly in English, as well as two in French, and I can say that you can pick up almost any Modiano novel--or, in the case of Dora Bruder, which could also be read as nonfiction--and you will encounter the following: characters who vanish or forced to do so; some reference to the German Occupation of France, the Vichy collaboration, and, in the background, the terrors of the Holocaust and World War II; a meditation on time, memory and loss; ethical complexity, such that many of his main characters are neither easily categorized as good or bad; and some element of mystery as a narrative mode, though not in the direct form of the mystery genre per se. There is also his precise, occasionally lyrical French--we are not talking about Proust, for example here, but work that reads stylistically almost like his inverse--prose, which is deceptive in its simplicity. In some, of course, this combination works better than in others.

One of the best that I read a few years ago is the 1995 novel Du plus loin de l'oubli (Farthest from Oblivion, translated as Out of the Dark, by Jordan Stump, University of Nebraska Press, 1998). Rather uncannily, though perhaps because I'd mentioned him to my graduate fiction class, I wrote to a friend shortly before the Nobel announcement that:

Modiano tells the same story over and over and over, but sometimes, he can be very original and striking. Out of the Dark is one of my favorite of his books. It’s about this guy who meets a couple and falls in love with the woman. They run away to Britain, but after a short period of time, she leaves him. The husband seems to be a criminal or gangster. Then, years later, he meets the woman again, this time briefly. Turns out she’s married, but he’s still smitten, only he realizes he cannot have a life with her, though he remembers their youth and the excitement of that earlier moment. Third time, years later, he sees her again, but now he does not even try to catch her attention; the memory is enough. That’s the whole novel. But it’s thrilling. What you can do with art, man!

That's basically it. Of course the plot is a bit more complicated than I outline above, but Modiano often manages to achieve complexity with carefully chosen details, brief lyrical passages, and shifts in rhetoric and perspective.

His 1978 novel, Rue des boutiques obscures (Street of Dark Shops, translated as Missing Person by Daniel Weissbort, Boston: David R. Godine, 2004), which received France's most prestigious fiction prize, the Prix Goncourt, is a mystery novel that fails at that genre, yet manages to be utterly enthralling. Set in 1965, the novel concerns the protagonist Guy Roland, who mysteriously lost his memory and identity 15 years before, at which point his soon-to-retire boss in a Parisian detective, (Baron) Constantin von Hutte, created the new one for him. The novel explores Roland's search for his past self, through his interviews with people who may have known him under his prior guises, as (Jimmy) Pedro (Stern) (McEvoy), a Salonican Jew and "broker", later to "disappear," only to return as an envoy at the Dominican embassy, who'd married a beautiful young woman, Denise Coudreuse, of French and Belgian Christian background, and then, when the stranglehold of the Gestapo and their Vichy authorities and foreign collaborators grew too tight, attempted to slip away with her to Switzerland via the mountains separating that country from France.

I'll say no more except that Modiano manages to do quite a bit with impressive narrative economy, to give a history lesson while appearing not to, and to create a constant air of menace, psychological but also at times almost corporeal, with the slenderest of means. Many threads remain hanging but, once you set the book down, you begin to piece them together. For example, was it Hutte, the former tennis champion, who rescued Pedro in the Swiss snow? Did Pedro, working in concert with the Argentinian embassy, create the story that Salonica's archives--which would have contained family histories, thus making it easier to identify Greek Jews there--had been destroyed? Was it not Oleg de Wrédé who'd arranged to entrap Pedro and Denise? And, more broadly, was not Pedro's story a version of Modiano's mother's and father's stories, only without the stranding at the border? Missing Person is, as the Nobel committee noted, a masterpiece of the highest order, though, as I noted at the beginning of this paragraph, as a mystery novel, it most certainly fails.

I'll mention one other work of his that suggests his innovativeness and gifts and is worth reading, though I did not like the book was much, despite its evident skill and haunting elements. I am talking about the 1997 text Dora Bruder (translated by Joanna Kilmartin, University of California Press, 1999), which could either be a novel or a work of memoiristic nonfiction. In it, Modiano explores the disappearance of a girl, Dora Bruder, who was nearly his father's contemporary, during the period of the Occupation. Dora Bruder, a young Jewish girl, Modiano learned by reading a 1941 Parisian paper, had run away from a convent school, but whereas this would mainly provoke parental concern and censure under normal circumstances, under Gestapo rule, the stakes rose incalculably. Her parents, frantically searched for her, placing the notice that Modiano discovers, and from this he begins to assemble a mystery backwards--much as in Missing Person--with elements of fictional narration, as well as nonfictional speculation and meditation woven together uneasily. What we come to grasp is not only Modiano's own troubled youth after the war, but the perilous path, parallel to Dora Bruder's Modiano's father, like all French citizens of Jewish faith and ancestry, found himself on. Utterly saddening is the moment when Modiano finds Bruder's name on a 1942 list of people deported to Auschwitz. Had his own father suffered the same fate, he and we realize, there'd have been on Patrick Modiano.

So, on the whole, I recommend his work, and while I do think there were more deserving French (Michel Tournier, Yves Bonnefoy, etc.) and Francophone (Assia Djebar, Maryse Condé, Leïla Sebbar, Frankétienne, Edouard Maunick, etc.) writers, as well as other writers who might have been considered, like the pioneering figure Ngugi wa Thiong’o, or perennial favorite Haruki Murakami, or writers whom I mention every year who seem never to receive enough consideration (Jay Wright, Wilson Harris, etc.), Modiano is not a bad choice. Prolific, distinctive, and capable of doing a great deal with very little. That's not a bad epigraph.

"Re-Thinking" Literature @ NYU

As part of my preparatory remarks before my reading at Naropa University, I noted a "horrible" conference I'd attended only a week before. I also invoked the same event during my comments at the &Now Festival at the University of Colorado. In both cases I mentioned only that the conference took place at New York University. I didn't elaborate, but that's in part what a blog is for, isn't it? The international conference I was referring to at both events was "Re-Thinking Literature," and it ran from September 19th through the 21st this fall. Oxford (New College) faculty member Donatien Grau and NYU professor Tom Bishop were the organizers, and nearly 20 writers, critics, scholars, academicians, and theorists spoke over the three-day gathering.

So what was my beef? You probably know what's coming. In three days of pontificating about "literature," the conference featured not a single author, scholar or theorist of color, from the US or overseas, on a single panel, nor did a single panel or panelist, as far as I could tell, directly address or discuss literature by non-Europeans or non-Euro-Americans. Not one. Why? I don't know. It was not as if this French-slanted conference, one of whose organizers is a professor in NYU's French department, had no colleagues who could conceivably participate. The esteemed writer and critic Assia Djébar was, until a few years ago, a professor of French at NYU, as was the historian Sylviane Diouf, and among the NYU French department's current faculty there is J. Michael Dash, a major scholar of Francophone Caribbean literature, with Manthia Diawara, the scholar, critic, film-maker, and former head of NYU's Africana Studies department an affiliate. And that's just NYU's French department. (I can't speak about Oxford's faculty.) Perhaps he asked all of them, or one of the (m)any other faculty members of color working in and around literary studies in (m)any of NYU's other departments, whether they wanted to participate, and perhaps they all said no. Perhaps they all were busy.

Shelley Jackson (l) and Ben Lerner at the podium

But say they were not. One might then argue that the organizers intended that the conference, which included papers and conversations on a range of topics, including the relationships between literature and: art criticism and installations; religion; affect; cognition; and textualities, to name just a few of the topics, be primarily about what they saw as literature, which is to say, mostly European and Euro-American literature, unmarked by anything beyond and occupying nothing not somehow captured by the unnamed, unacknowledged and unacknowledgeable signifier of whiteness. I mean, it stands to reason that when one says the word "literature," a Platonic abstraction, one means only, can only mean, the literature of Europe and (some parts of) European America, no? Yes? So be it. But then why not just call the conference "Re-Thinking Euro-American Literature" or "Re-thinking Elite/High Literature by White People" or something similar, since the organizers made it clear that the vast corpus of literatures by everyone else across the world did and does not matter? There is privilege, there is entitlement, there is blindness, there is arrogance, and there is the expectation that because you have told yourself and others for centuries that you--or certain ones of you--are all that matter, that's all that's supposed to matter.

I should add that after a day of this stuff--and a report, by a friend, who attended and was aghast at the rambling mess served up by the conference's opening night speakers--I had had enough of what I have encountered for much of my adult life. I left them to their intellectually and hermetically sealed white room. It very well could have been the case on the final day, which I did not attend, that, even if all the speakers--and I should be clear that I do respect and admire the work of many of the participants--were white, perhaps one or several of them did look and speak past the self-constructed wall of Euro-American literary comfort, to acknowledge that there was and is quite a bit of other very vibrant work, in literature, literary and cultural criticism, philosophy, translation, etc., out there not centered on or produced by Europeans and Euro-Americans. If so, great for them.

I do wonder if any of them asked themselves why there were only white people on the panels. Did anyone verbalize this to Grau or Bishop? Did they see this as a problem and even mention it to each other? The audience certainly was not only white. If no one did ask such a question, I do wonder, what would lead them even to the threshold of doing so of their own accord? At any rate, my adult experience has been and continues to be that when it comes to the literary and the academic literary world, this sort of thing, a kind of de facto aesthetic and critical apartheid is still too prevalent.  Sometimes there are one or two tokens, or a panel in which all the people of color are bunched up together and only expected to talk about certain expected things. It's this way still in various pockets of American society, including popular culture. And in any case, as I noted about the "Re-thinking Poetics" conference at Columbia University a few years back, it represents a particularly perverse irony in a city like New York, the most diverse in the United States. Some "re-thinking" really does need to occur, but it's not just about literature.

That said, I did hear one talk I found quite intriguing, by Ben Lerner, whom I approached afterwards and briefly chatted with. I specifically noted the conference's whiteout cast to him, and he agreed it was not good. (I did not expect him, as an invitee and panelist, however, to say anything to Grau or Bishop, but perhaps he did.) Ben's paper was titled "Virtual Ekphrasis: Fiction as Criticism and Curation," and explored the idea of the novel--as opposed to poetry, a genre in which he has distinguished himself--as a curatorial site, a space "in which you can embed other artworks," and a "testing ground for aesthetic experience." An introduction of sorts both to his first novel, To the Atocha Station, and his forthcoming one, his talk was full of insights, but it circled around the key point that in "speculative" fiction, and not just in the commonly understood science fictional sense, you could write about "artworks not yet realized" or, to go further, that were and are "unrealizable."

As one example from the canon, he cited Henry James's famous story "A Madonna of the Future," a narrative about an artist producing a blank canvas (and which I thought of as I assigned John Ashbery's famous sestina "The Painter" as part of my fall undergraduate class's poetry component). This James story is often thought to dramatize the tyranny of artistic influence and resulting failure. In Arthur Danto's reading of the story, however, the philosopher and critic views James's character's Theobald's artistic production or lack thereof as a masterpiece, and a curator version attempts to convince the artist that his work is a harbinger of later artists like Robert Ryman, Alexander Rodchenko, Kasimir Malevich, and Robert Rauschenberg, and that what appears as failure in one age harbors potentiality for the future.

Ben linked this concept to contemporary novels written in the current moment of the "postmedium," which is to say, after the stability of particular media as we've known them, and also to our current aesthetic and social ontologies, where the status between art and life often blurs. He identified Rachel Kushner's National Book Award-nominated novel The Flamethrowers as exemplary in exploring this unstable status. In Kushner's novel the main character, Reno, is deeply interested in the artist Tony Smith and his idea of abandoning art in favor of situationism, experience. Kushner describes Reno's experience of temporality at times as a "trace of a trace of a trace," but Lerner was especially interested in the novel's depiction of her attempts to collapse art into life, and the links with 1970s art and earlier precursors, including Italian futurism and industrial design, via the figure of T. P. Valera, and the Valera bike--which occasioned, though Ben didn't discuss this, a prickly review from motorcycle enthusiast Frederick Seidel--which entailed entangling and collapsing art into life. Kushner, he said, organizes her novel around the dream of dissolving the line between art and life. Unlike recent works by Sheila Heti or Tao Lin, however, it doesn't stylistically or generically collapse the distinctions but virtualizes them.

As part of the Q&A portion, I asked Ben a question about the limits of liberal discourse, particularly in the face of incommensurable, globalizing alterities and competing rationalities--ideas I've been writing through a bit myself in my current fictional projects and thinking about after reading some of David Palumbo-Liu's critical work--and the novel's capacity to address and possibly resolve this crisis. He responded thoughtfully by talking about the relationship between novels and politics, though he did not really answer whether the contemporary American realist novel, so favored by the publishing industry and American literary culture-makers, could do what Palumbo-Liu has argued certain works, by writers such as J. M. Coetzee and Ruth Ozeki, have managed to. His talk nevertheless really got me thinking about questions of representation and futurity, the imagination and the possibilities or impossibilities--challenges--of depicting the possible, in art, and that, I guess, does entail "re-thinking literature," which ultimately did make attending the conference, for all its limitations, worthwhile.

Camille Laurens (l), Tom Bishop (center), and Jean-Pierre Toussaint (at podium)

Translation: Poem: Stéphane Mallarmé

Mallarmé, by Whistler, 1893

I really did think about posting about the various things happening today (the debt limit talks fiasco; the Major League All Star Game in anti-immigrant pacesetter Arizona; the primaries in Wisconsin, in which the real Democrats defeated the fake Democrats; the unfolding News International/News Corporation scandals, etc.), but instead I'm going to post a translation I undertook earlier this afternoon during a break from writing fiction (i.e., a novel, which has nothing to do with the poem below). It is my rendering of one of the more celebrated later sonnets by Stéphane Mallarmé (1842-1898), a poet who needs little introduction.  One of the things that intrigued me early on and still does about Mallarmé, among his many poetic distinctions and triumphs, was his willingness to prioritize sound over sense, or the music of language over the usual semantic approaches to meaning that were predominant in his day (and still hold sway in most poetic precincts as I type this entry). This direction, emphasizing music over meaning, linked to a post-Romantic, intricately developed symbolic register, made possible, as students and readers of modernist literature know, the sorts of poetic innovations that would appear across a range of languages.  He anticipated--and wrote--the poems and books to come even as he dreamed of writing the Poems and Books to Come.

In the translation below, which I have always loved, and which I sent earlier to some poet friends, I tried to retain some semblance of a rhyme scheme, which given the poem's aural structure and specific phonemes, is impossible; Mallarmé's final "i" and "ui" sounds, almost a kind of piercing bell--'eeeee'--cannot be captured in English, so I went for long vowels, with a few short ones in those places where nothing else was possible, and consonance in the final two stanzas (the "s" sounds) to mirror the rhyming. Also, in terms of the content itself, in some cases I took leaps ("flow" for "flee," "it is itself alone," for "it is he,"  "which to it says no" for "it denies it," "seized" for "taken," etc.), following the leads of a colleague and great translator who, in a number of discussions and papers, has led  me to think a lot more about how important it is to think with even greater complexity about translation and what might be carried over and created in the target language. One task I set for myself upon reading Mallarmé's poems like this one was to trace out an argument, thematic or lyric arc, or narrative. Can you figure this one out? Can you trace out the symbols?  I have a book in Chicago, Towards the Poems of Mallarmé (California, 1980), by Robert Greer Cohen, that explores this and similar poems in depth, in case you want to see a scholar's take. I think, that devotes a I think it's clearer than some of his poems, like the famous sonnet "Ses purs ongles....", also known as the "Sonnet ending in -yx", for example. At any rate, here is pale echo, for I do love this poem, in its infinite strangeness.

THE VIRGIN, THE VIVID AND THE BEAUTIFUL NEW DAY

The virgin, the vivid and the beautiful new day
Will it tear apart with a drunken wing's blow
This forgotten hard lake haunting beneath the frost
the transparent flights' glaciers which did not flow!

A swan of yesteryear remembers it is itself alone
Magnificent but without hope of freeing itself
For having not sung the region where it dwelt
When the boredom of sterile winter shone.

Its whole neck will shake off that white agony
Inflicted by space on this bird which to it says no
But not the soil's horror in which its plumage is seized.

Phantom which its pure brightness here assigns,
it is immobilized in the cold dream of scorn
that enfolds amidst useless exile the Swan.

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LE VIERGE, LE VIVACE ET LE BEL AUJOURD'HUI

Le vierge, le vivace et le bel aujourd'hui
Va-t-il nous déchirer avec un coup d'ail ivre
Ce lac dur oublié que hante sous le givre
Le transparent glacier des vols qui n'ont pas fui!

Un cygne d'autrefois se souvient que c'est lui
Magnifique mais qui sans espoir se délivre
pour n'avoir pas chanté la région où vivre
Quand du stérile hiver a resplendi l'ennui.

Tout son col secouera cette blanche agonie
Par l'espace infligée à l'oiseau qui le nie,
Mas non l'horreur du sol où le plumage est pris.

Fantôme qu'à ce lieu son pur éclat assigne,
Il s'immobilise au songe froid de mépris
Que vêt parmi l'exil inutile le Cygne.

From Stéphane Mallarmé, Poésies, 1887. Translation © John Keene, 2011.

August + French Essay Update + Race/Cuba/Dissidence

I can hardly believe August is already here. Just two weeks ago I realized graduation was only a month ago, though it's sometimes felt like I've been home three months and at others like no more than, well, a couple of weeks. July is a hot blur; one minute a cool spring and moderate June were winding down and then the outdoors, at least out here, turned into the inside of a kiln.  I have been writing steadily and drawing (and animating, gardening, baking, etc.), but whenever I've tried to complete entries here, lassitude overwhelms me.  So I still have a number of posts from July to complete; many of them have made it only to the draft stage, but I do want to post them before we get too far into August, and find myself trying to keep up with this month....

}}}

Some news about projects and so forth: a while back I mentioned the French essay on Abdellah Taïa's novel Une mélancolie arabe that I toiled over last year, for the Montreal-based journal Spirale. It is now published, as part of the "théâtres de la cruauté: du jamais vu" dossier edited by Nathalie Stephens, whom I want to thank once again for all of her excellent guidance, edits, suggestions, patience, and support. (Many thanks also to Catherine Mavrakakis, whose editorial help was also crucial.) If you read French, you can download Nathalie's introductory essay ("Présentation"), which engagingly explores the dossier's key themes and constellation of ideas and provides an overview of the contributions, which includes essays exploring texts that range from Diamanda Galas's Guilty guilty guilty and David Wojnarowicz's Close the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration and In the Shadow of the American Dream: The Diaries of David Wojnarowicz, to Maryse Condé's Comme deux frères, to assorted works by Brazilian writer Hilda Hilst. Unfortunately these essays are not accessible by download, but if you're really interested in them and read French, you can order a copy via the link above.

Also, improved versions of my translations of Dominican poet Mateo Morrison's poems, and my translation of one of Congolese-Francophone writer Alain Mabanckou's poems have been accepted and will appear, I believe, later this year in different journals. I haven't done too many translations this summer, but I will eventually post several of the ones I did complete, nearly all by Brazilian writers: poets Ana Cristina Cesar and Paulo Leminski, two major figures in Brazil's late 20th century literary avant-garde, and fiction writer João Gilberto Noll, whom I learned about from colleagues both at and outside the university.  Between this blog and unpublished translations, I think I've translated close to 20 writers thus far, and one hope for the future is that I can get more of these into print and, if possible, be able to translate more complete books (or book-length collections of different writers' works).

Harvey Milk Day + Translation: Guillaume Dustan

Happy Harvey Milk Day!

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Five years back, after learning of his death, I wrote about Guillaume Dustan (1965-2005), the enfant terrible of late 20th century French gay male literature. I won't restate all of that here, except to note that around the age of 30, he began publishing a series of novels, drawn directly from his life, that placed him squarely at the center of the French autofiction movement, in which autobiography and fiction are so closely merged that they unsettle the question of genre. Dustan published 8 or 9 books, most of them fiction but several works of philosophical essays, especially on the topic of queerness, before his death, from an accidental drug overdose. He was also an editor for Balland's now extinct Rayon Gay line--which I also wrote about on here, and which is how I first learned about and had a brief email exchange with him, getting clearance for a translation--and a film producer and actor. Dustan's first three books, only one of which, Dans ma chambre (In My Room) from 1996, has been translated, are pulse-like accounts of his very active sex-and-love life, but they are also shorn of sentimentality; the concise, speedy, casual prose paints a rich picture, often full of feeling, without evoking affect in the usual ways. In 1999, he published the novel Nicolas Pages, which was somewhat of a departure. Denser, more full of anecdotes, digressions, and self-analysis and philosophizing, it takes up Dustan's pursuit of and relationship with the eponymous, younger author and conceptual artist,
Nicolas Pages (1970-, at right), who had only a few years before, in 1997, published his first book, Je mange un oeuf, which I've I translated a portion of.  I subsequently did translate some of Dustan's novel, and realized this week, while teaching a unit on conceptual writing and rereading the works of Rob Fitterman, Tan Lin, and many others, that one way to think about Pages' first novel, and a good deal of the more chronologically-grounded, stylistically flat or affectless, verisimilitudinous works like Pages, would be as a form of documentary realism, or conceptual fiction. Pages, as I noted is a conceptual artist, but as far as I can tell, I haven't seen that link made in US criticism, though Pages and Dustan are frequently linked to Bret Easton Ellis, whose influence is evident in their work, and whom both approvingly cite repeatedly. (Other writers whose names have been evoked in relation to both are Renaud Camus, Hervé Guibert, Céline, and the American queer master Dennis Cooper.) One great aspect of reading and translating Dustan's Nicolas Pages was seeing his appreciation of Pages' first book stated so clearly and forcefully in the opening pages of the novel; I have long wondered if it was just me who saw validity in what Pages was doing. Now that Goldsmith and company are big, perhaps there will be more appreciation for at least some of their counterparts, especially Pages and the late Dustan, overseas.

Illinois: Can't Touch This + Some Lit Links

(Updated with YouTube video below)

One of the big non-Super Bowl buzzes yesterday was the suggestion that New York governor David Paterson was going to resign, because of a sex-related scandal, which the New York Times was set to reveal today, only Paterson denied he was resigning, he met with the NY state Democratic caucus in a closed-door session to tell them he wasn't resigning or something like that, and no Times article appeared. My thought was, if the man did not commit a crime and his actions involved his private life, why should anyone care? Evidently some in the media are still hot and bothered by, as the British wonderfully call them, "sex romps" and
"sex rows," but given all the other crises this country faces, and the Woods/Sanford/Ensign/Spitzer/Craig, etc. scandals, does anyone really care about Paterson's love life or who he shtups, especially if his wife doesn't? At least for now, no, it seems, and so Love Gov #2 will remain in office, until he loses his primary to Andrew Cuomo, and heads off for fun and assignations in the sunset.

But--New York has nothing on Illinois. As I told C today, yesterday, political theater unfolded in a Chicago bar during the Super Bowl half-time when Illinois's newly elected Democratic nominee for Lieutenant Governor, Scott Lee Cohen offered his "resignation"--let me stop there, and repeat, "nominee" for Lt. Gov.--by which I mean, he was dropping out of the race, leaving his slot open for the Democratic gubernatorial nominee, current governor Pat Quinn, to replace him. Quinn had replaced the impeached Rod Blagojevich, aka Blago, who tried to sell Barack Obama's former Senate seat to the highest bidder. Blago, remember, was elected twice after the departure of George Ryan, who is now in jail on multiple corruption charges.

Now, you may ask, why did Scott Lee Cohen, who was only selected for his candidate slot by voters over several different party-annointed hacks a few weeks ago, decide to "resign"? Why was he in tears, at the Hop Haus bar, with his family around him and son lying in his lap, announcing in the midst of the 44th Super Bowl, that for the good of the "people of Illinois" and the "Democratic Party," that he was stepping down? Why did most of the Congressional Democrats, and many other party brokers, want this millionaire pawnbroker (I'm not making this up), to remove himself so as not to sink Quinn's chances in the general election (against who knows which Republican, since that race has still not been declared)?

French Essay/l'essai français + Art & Project Bulletin @ MoMa

Recently I finished and sent off a draft of an essay I'd been working on for a good portion of the summer. I don't actually write that many essays, especially because I find the process very time-consuming and difficult, no matter how rewarding the final product, but what was significant and different this time was that the Canadian journal I wrote it for publishes in French only, and so after I was asked to submit something, based perhaps on my praise of and fascination with Taïa, I decided and then agreed to write it in French rather than in English, to be translated by me or someone else later on. It was, to put it simply, a challenge, or rather a series of them, and that, I think, more than anything else, made me determined to complete it.

The first involved reading and taking notes on the book, Abdellah Taïa's Une mélancolie arabe (Seuil 2009, Taïa at left, from thehumpdaycrew.blogspot.com), which hasn't been translated into English yet. (One of his earlier books, L'armée du salut is now available in English as Salvation Army. If I had the time, I'd be willing to attempt it.) Taïa's French fortunately is fairly straightforward and contains little slang, so getting through the book wasn't hard. Moreover, the novel, though sometimes exasperating in its protagonist's sentimentality and self-dramaticization, was nevertheless engagingly provocative and broached a lot of issues that would serve further discussion. The second involved constructing an argument in relation to the journal issue's theme, which was the Théâtre de la Cruauté, which I read as referring directly back to the original version proposed by French visionary playwright and activist Antonin Artaud (1896-1948). I'd read a little of Artaud's work before, and enough about him, primarily I believe via Susan Sontag, and I knew something about his successors, such as Peter Brooke, to have a general idea of what his two manifestos on the Theater of Cruelty were saying, but I figured I ought to read the actual texts themselves, in basic scholarly fashion, before I began trying to tease out a relationship between Taïa's novel and Artaud's ideas. I did so, first in French and then in English, to make sure I wasn't misunderstanding them, and what struck me as always was the slippage in meaning between the original and the translation, though the gist remains. In Artaud's case, I think the gist is what's most important, since he was trying to get away from texts in and of themselves, towards a more experimental, gestural and visual theatrical experience, one in which a deeper metaphysics, and thus, he believed, an authenticity, might be accessed.

I saw several routes into this connection between Taïa's novel and Artaud's (at right, Guardian UK, Getty/Martinie/Roger Viollet) theories, and worked through them, particularly around the frequent deaths and almost-deaths that occur in Taïa's book, every major crisis portending or transforming into a confrontation with la mort, and their links to la cruauté as Artaud defines it. But it wasn't until I came across some commentary by the critic Peter Sloterdijk that I was able to formulate a way of reading Taïa's work, via's Immanuel Kant's 3rd critique readings of the sublime (though Sloterdijk reroutes the Kantian reading, as Jacques Rancière does, via Jean-François Lyotard), to suggest a melancholic ethics of becoming that the protagonist was engaging in. Then there was the third challenge, which was the most difficult of all: writing an essay in French. I have to make clear that I haven't written anything beyond letters or email in French since I was in high school. In fact, the last time may have been one of those French essay contests that the local Alliance Française sponsored, and I believe I wrote one describing Marseille, a city I have still never set foot in. The gulf between a high school essay and one written for an adult journal, however, is vast, so I did take the added step of reading some contemporary French journal and magazine essays, in order to get a grasp of essayistic idioms, and I realized that it was going to be an uphill climb. For just as it is often a struggle for most native English speakers who find themselves at someone's college to write a coherent and convincing essay on a given topic in English itself, so it is in French, especially for someone who is not a native French speaker and who in fact when encountering French mainly is translating it into English. What I especially strove to do was think in French, as much as possible, so as to be able to put those thoughts, in idiomatic French syntax, on the page.

A challenge that arose out of this one was vocabulary, and in particular, the difficulty of selecting certain words that had differing shades of meaning in the two languages, or that did not exist at all in French. To give one example, French has two words for knowledge, la connaissance (from connaître, to know someone, to be familiar with, from the Latin cognoscere, to know, akin by root to English to know, but also the noun, ken, a vista) and le savoir (from savoir, to know something, know how, from the Latin sapere, to taste of, have the scent of, be wise, discern, akin to the English words "savor" and "savory," both of French (Norman) provenance) At several points, I had to decide that it was la connaissance, based in part of la reconnaissance (recognition) that the protagonist Abdellah had gained, rather than le savoir, even though my initial tendency was often to choose the latter term, in part because of past readings of Michel Foucault (such as his 1988 interview, titled "Le Gai Savoir," for example, with its ironic, double-entendre riff on Nietzsche). Abdellah's knowledge is a knowledge of himself, rather than a learning or a knowing how, though when the latter is salient, I use the latter term.

Then there are English words for which there are no direct French equivalents (and vice-versa, of course, such as double-entendre, which English imported wholesale). French, from what I could tell, does not have an exact term for awe, one of the emotions produced by the sublime (or the Kantian sublimes to be exact). French has words that combine fear and reverence (la crainte, fear, apprehension from the verb craindre, to fear, be apprehensive about, being one), and astonishment (l'étonnement, astonishment, surprise, quite close to English), but not one that captures the melding of the two. So I used a compound term, la crainte mêlé d'admiration, which doesn't exactly capture the condensed power of "awe," but approaches it. But then it wasn't so much the response generated by the sublime as the recognition in life of sublimity creating a deeper sense of our mortality and the consequent sense of the aesthetic and the ethical that I was after, so the exact translation was less important, perhaps, especially since the sublime is le sublime and the ethical and ethics are both l'éthique in French.

All of which is to say that I have finished the French essay (or at least a draft), sent it off to the editor, and now have a deepened appreciation for anyone who does this sort of thing regularly, as well as for Taïa's book and the French language. When the essay is published, if there's a link, I'll provide it, so that you can read it yourself. And perhaps I'll send it to Abdellah Taïa as well.

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While I didn't manage to get to the pricey Museum of Modern Art before the In & Out of Amsterdam conceptual art show was there--the Monday I and a friend had planned to go, MoMa was closed, so we ended up at the Met--I did finally get up there, on Columbus/Peoples of the Americas Day, no less, and saw the tinier, residual Art & Project Bulletin show. The exhibit presents the Art & Project Gallery Bulletin's entire 156-issue run, stretching from 1968 to 1989, as well as artworks by the European, American and Japanese artists who'd appeared in its pages and within, without or on the gallery's walls, literally or figuratively. Some, like the controversial performance artist-photographers Gilbert and George (above right, Sydney Morning Herald) are now quite well known, though I hadn't realized how they'd begun their careers, staging live durational performances as human statues and causing a sensation as a result. Others, like Robert Barry, are less well known but should be central to any discussion of contemporary art practice, which draws heavily from the conceptual well. What the show makes clear is that Art & Project's founders, Dutch artists Gert van Beijeren and Adriaan van Ravesteijn, created a vital nexus in the translantic conceptual art movement, putting Amsterdam on the map alongside New York, Los Angeles, London, Tokyo, and other important sites in the development of an important vein of artmaking that remains central to contemporary practice.

I should add that reading the In & Out of Amsterdam show catalogue, which picked up after the show, I learned that the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, that city's major venue for 20th century art and one of my favorites, was a key institutional site in the trans-Atlantic late 1960s conceptual revolution, much as MoMa, in its earlier years, had been for a much earlier generation of artists. I also hadn't known that it was MoMa's legendary black curator, Kynaston McShine (what a name!), whose 1970 "Information" show introduced conceptual art as a major contemporary trend, and later curated shows on Marcel Duchamp, Robert Rauschenberg, Joseph Cornell, and Andy Warhol, among others. He is still there, now as Chief Curator at Large, and co-curated the 2007 40-year-retrospective show of sculptor Richard Serra's work. Some photos and a video.


The explanatory plaque

The bulletins on display

A Daniel Buren striped strip--seeing this made me smile with glee. Buren once covered large sections of the interior of the uptown Guggenheim Museum with these, and also placed them all about Paris, London, and other sites. This is the first time I'd ever seen one up close.

Lawrence Weiner piece

David Robilliard drawings (the ones on the right show Gilbert and George)

And a video of David Askevold's "Catapult" (1970), Super8 film transferred to video

And, as I said, I passed the parade, so here's a photo:

Cuba's Gay Rights March + Writers' Collaboration & Resistance in Vichy

Slowly and assuredly the academic year clanks to its end. I'm pretty much dragging myself around at this point, which is one of the reasons for the absence of posts. The other has been my bouncing around between cities; that too will end when mid-June rolls around. But back to academe, so far I've learned that both of my seniors honors project advisees, fiction writer and foodie Taylor Dearr, and literature student, singer and poet Harris Sockel, were both approved for departmental honors, and pending the college's decision, both will receive them when they graduate in a few short weeks. So congratulations to Taylor and Harris! Congratulations as well to all of the university's creative writing (all of whom I worked with this fall as honors director) and literature honors students who will be receiving departmental honors this year. (Once the school year's complete, I'll be posting congratulatory sentiments for all the undergraduate and graduate students.)

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Often I'll come across something in one of the papers I regularly scan and note it for a future blog post on here, only to not get around to it because of one thing or another, but I can always count on Reggie to buzz me with an email that gets me thinking. He recently sent links to two articles I'd seen, on Cuba's first Gay Pride March, which Cuban National Assembly head Ricardo Alarcón opened with a welcoming addressed. The event was organized and staged last Saturday under the aegis of the National Center for Sex Education [Centro Nacional de Educación Sexual (CENESEX)], headed by Mariela Castro, the visionary daughter of President Raúl Castro. Mariela Castro, who led a conga line at the event, has become a leading force for LGBTQ equality in Cuba, and has been pressing the Cuban National Assembly to pass one of the most far-reaching LGBTQ rights bills in the world; it would recognize same-sex unions, including inheritance rights, and also allow easy gender changes on the government's ID cards whether or not trans people underwent trans surgery, which became free after a 2008 law that she championed. It does not, however, allow same-sex couples or gay people to adopt children, nor does it use the word "marriage" in relation to same-sex unions. Currently Cuba does not permit any national LGBTQ organizations, and as recently as 2004 the police were still conducting raids on and harassing gay venues, though this has abated of late. (Historically, in a number of Communist states homosexuality has been viewed as a bourgeois activity and counter-revolutionary, and in the post-Revolutionary period not only did Raúl Castro and others allegedly kill gays, but the government under Fidel instituted a policy of "re-education" camps, which were disbanded by the late 1960s.) The bill will be considered later this year and possibility of its passage is unclear, but Mariela Castro does have her father's ear and support and apparently Alarcón's as well.

Here's an interview she gave to a Russian TV station. I still mean to post my fourth set of notes about Cuba, which will include my thoughts and experiences concerning LGBTQ issues during my trip.

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A week ago I went to see the "Between Collaboration and Resistance: French Literary Life Under Nazi Occupation," at the New York Public Library," which Edward Rothstein reviewed last month in the New York Times, and it got me thinking about the other notion of collaboration, the perjorative one, which this exhibit presented in vivid material form. I found myself mulling not only the trajectories of the many figures who belonged to or participated in the official Resistance or engaged in unofficial resistances, but also reflecting on odious figures like Maurice Barrès and Robert Brasillach, who openly embraced the Germans, fascism and anti-Semitic, and tragic cases like that of Irène Nemirovsky, a brilliant Russian-French Jewish writer whose work not only included notorious pre-War anti-Semitic portraits but who attempted to save herself by publishing her work in anti-Semitic magazines and pleading her case to Marshall Henri Pétain himself (both she and her husband died at Auschwitz). One of the most remarkable pieces in the exhibit is the original manuscript of her two novellas that constitute Suite Française, which her daughter did not find stored in a trunk until many years later; its publication met with almost universal praise.

What the exhibit demonstrates is that the reality was not black-and-white; there were writers who actively fought not only the French regime but the German one; figures whose perspective shifted during the war years; writers who worked clandestinely while overtly giving little to no sense of their opposition; and others, like Jean Cocteau, who accommodated the Vichy regime and were able to work productively without great censure (during the Vichy years Cocteau produced two books of poetry, a novel, a screenplay, three plays, and a book of criticism on El Greco, giving lie to his reputation as the "Frivolous Prince"). A bit surprising and upsetting were the expressions of excitement, by otherwise non-right-wing figures like Paul Valéry, at France's defeat, and the possibility of "something new," mirroring the belief in an awakening and renewal that some notorious German figures (Martin Heidegger comes to mind) felt upon the Nazi takeover of the German government. My thoughts echo Rothstein's; as I walked through the exhibit I found myself thinking especially about when the valences and ethics of silence in the face of the world's horrors, and when silence could not be chalked up as anything but a form of collaboration, which is to say; how writers and other creative figures have subverted officialdom and registered resistance and protest, sometimes in very subtle ways; the dangers of ever allying fully with any politicians (as opposed to being skeptical and critical even when they share ideological affinities) or political movements; and how the events of of this period, and the lessons we might draw from them, are still applicable today.

The entrance exhibit

The exhibit (one of Valéry's daybooks is on the left)

Christian Dotrement, "Postcard to Paul Eluard"

Editions Balland Le Rayon series: Mort

During an overseas trip a few years ago, I picked up several books, by Erik Remès, Nicolas Pages, Djallil Djellad, and Michel Zumkir, which were all published by French publisher Éditions Balland, under their le Rayon (the Ray) gay fiction line. The editor of the series was a writer I in my ignorance had never heard of, though he was already zooming down the path of becoming one of the most notorious and exciting figures in contemporary French publishing: Guillaume Dustan. I grabbed these books because I'd asked one of the people working in the bookstore, Les Mots à la Bouche, who the most interesting younger French gay writers were, and he pointed me towards a table stacked with Rayon's colorful, eye-catching volumes. I also grabbed Rachid O.'s Chocolat Chaud, published by Gallimard. 

Whenever I've been fortunate enough to travel I've looked for new work by (younger) black or LGBT or black LGBT authors, since it's usually the last to be translated. Though none of the authors were from sub-Saharan Africa or the Caribbean or Latin America--which is to say, black Francophone people as I'd mentally constructed them--Djellad and O. were among the few Maghrebi (from north Africa) presences in this new gay wave. My original goal was to read and translate all of these works--but of course translation is tough work! I did make some headway with O., Pages, Djellad, and Zumkir, and eventually contacted Balland via e-mail to inquire about publishing the translations of the Swiss artist and writer Pages's novel Je mange un oeuf (I Eat an Egg for Breakfast) in an American literary journal. In my translation I'd gotten furthest with it. 

Who responded? Not a foreign rights representative, as with Gallimard, but the editor-in-infamy himself, Guillaume Dustan! I had sort of expected a snappish exchange with the author of the laceratingly ironic and anti-sentimental autofiction Dans ma chambre (translated into English and published by Serpents Tail), Je sors ce soir, Plus fort que moi, and Nicolas Pages, but he was both professional and pleasant, and stated that I needed to have whatever journal that agreed to publish the work contact Balland to square things away. Doing the translations, he made clear, were okay. I gathered that he actually could speak and write English well (as is the case with nearly every non-U.S. author I've translated), but didn't want to and wouldn't, so our correspondence was in my faltering and too formal written French. 

Okay, so I had this e-mail exchange with Dustan, whoop-de-doo. Well, in the interim, I've tried repeatedly to place the selections from Pages's novel...but no one will touch them. (Pages has since written two others, spent time in the US working with Nan Goldin, and been immortalized, as I noted above, by Dustan, in the eponymous volume that won the Prix de Flore in 1999.) I thought this might be because the translations weren't that good, but I did have several readers and speakers of French review them and they thought they were on target and lively enough. (I refuse to believe that people in the literary world have caught the virus of Francophobia, and rather think the work is just not sophisticated enough.) 

The Pages novel is a breezy, highly repetitious diary of his activities, from waking (je me reveille) to sleeping (je me dors, je me couche), with a heavy emphasis on cruising guys, having sex, smoking pot, hitting clubs, obsessing over his health, and eating raclettes (a Swiss delicacy). The prose style pulses, like strobe lights (or the techno music that hovers beneath its surface), à la post-modern Pater. Pages jaunts all over the place--across his native country of a thousand years of peace, to London, Paris, Mykonos, etc.--and subtly details an ethics of living and art-making that parallels, in many ways, gay men's all over the world, but more closely Dustan's. In fact, Dustan appears to have incorporated elements, down to the prose style itself, of Pages's novel into his novel Nicolas Pages, which differs, however, in its greater formal complexity, thematic depth, and overall chattiness and bitchiness. 

Where Pages's novel steadily opens onto the (his) self, Dustan's encompasses the (his) world. So I couldn't publish the Pages pieces, though I've subsequently applied for grants (about which I'm extremely doubtful about my chances of getting any funds) to continue translations of Djellad and O., because it struck me that, for a variety of reasons, especially right now, providing Americans and other English speakers access to original texts by (LGBT) Muslims living in a hostile Western (a/k/a French) society might be helpful in fostering greater knowledge and understanding--and perhaps even one means to a dialogue. But when I went to contact Dustan again, I learned that he was no longer the editor of the Rayon series, and woe betide, it no longer existed. Balland was still offering the books for sale, but the line was gone. In fact, they'd effectively wiped it from their Website.

Then, last fall, on the online Nouvel Observateur, I read that Balland itself had to file for bankruptcy. (This despite its great success in publishing Eve Ensler's The Vagina Monologues, among other works.) Many of the books have found publishers, but Rayon was significant for blazing a path in publishing a wide range of younger, out, sometimes controversial, and usually very talented French authors, as well as notable foreign authors. I do intend to keep translating these works, I guess as private projects, though perhaps I will find a publisher for some of them. Pages' novel has since been republished--this is now the third time--by J'ai lu. It's definitely got something going for it. Or take Patrick Thévenin's word: "I remember the first time I read this book, I said to myself that this book only spoke about me. When, in fact, this book spoke only about Nicolas Pages himself, or another. But the important thing was that it spoke so well about me. And I thought that books that spoke so well about me, or about anyone else, were far too rare." 

At any rate, maybe I'll even get to Dustan's works too. He, by the way, has published about 4 or 5 new works since our e-mail exchange, including his most recent nonfiction work, Premier essai: chronique du temps présent [First essay: Chronicle of the Present Times] (Broché, 2005), and Dernier roman [Last Novel] (Flammarion, 2004).