Monthly Archives: March 2010

the Salon of Anything is Possible

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On this the penultimate day of the Salon du Livre, I have translated for your reading pleasure this excerpt from Christophe Claro's sketch of the book fair, collected in Le Clavier Cannibale (Ed. Inculte, 2009), which I hope he won't mind my citing here:

Why should a book not lead one to commit a crime, when it has so often led its author to the gallows? How can a book be innocent? Who hasn't dreamt of a book who would change his life? Why must it be changed for the better? [...] Let's rename the Salon du Livre the Salon of Anything is Possible. Let us stroll down the aisles while saying to ourselves that on each square inch of table sleeps a work which could drive us to rape, kill, fall in love, eat oranges, churn up the foundations, or become president. Let us lift up the veil (it's outlawed anyway now) and concede the power of the book. Let us bow down before the magnificent or dreadful consequences of reading.  Think of Sade, think of Villepin, think of Cadiot, think of Asimov or Adorée Floupette… doesn't matter which flask as long as you get drunk. To each book its own crime or virtue.

French literatures

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Litterature-monde  Have been home sick with some kind of sinus thing, missing the Salon du Livre this weekend– so instead of giving you the kind of hardheadedhard-nosed reporting you’ve come to expect from us here at Maîtresse, I’ve translated an interesting piece that ran in Le Monde this week in connection with the book fair: “Pour une littérature en langues françaises.”

This is a subject I find myself thinking about more and more, and clearly the problem is more than just semantic. It has to do, I think, with a basic human need to classify, which seems to have become a prerequisite for understanding– as if we can’t understand a writer’s work until we have contextualized him somehow.  But in the (dare I say post-) post-colonial context the literary and political milieu of French and Francophone literature has become more complicated. We need a new way of classifying writers who weren’t born and raised in the Hexagone but who persist in writing in French anyway– and the best way to reclassify them may be to declassify them, as Christine Rousseau argues here.

“Pour une littérature en langues françaises” [For French literatures*], by Christine Rousseau (Le Monde, March 25 2010)

Hardly had the ripples caused by the Salon du livre francophone begun to still, in March 2007, when a brick was hurled into the pond, in the form of a manifesto entitled Pour une littérature-monde en français (“For a world literature in French”), written by Jean Rouaud and Michel Le Bris, the founders of the Etonnants voyageurs festival [which takes place in St-Malo every day].  Signed by 44 writers, including JMG Le Clézio, Tahar Ben Jelloun, Edouard Glissant, Amin Maalouf, Maryse Condé, Lyonel Trouillot and Nimrod, the manifesto announced the birth of a world literature in the French language, and, consequently, the death of francophonie [Francophone literature].

At first glance, the change of moniker was laudatory, as the term “francophone literature” was a bit dubious. As Alain Rey revealed in 2006, in the book section of Le Monde, on the occasion of the Salon du livre consecrated specifically to Francophone literature, the term “Francophonie” “is a sort of hot potato that countries, powers, and artists pass around with conflicting intentions.”

It is true that it covers over greatly differing realities.  Initially a geolinguistic distinction– the term was created in 1880 by the geographer Onésime Reclus, in a specifically colonial context– the term was politicized after the independences of 1965, and then of course [became] literary and artistic. But now it must be said that the word, with all its connotations, seems too narrow when faced with a sphere [of influence] that extends beyond the auspices of the Organisation international de la francophonie (OIF) [International Francophone Organization].  For we find writers outside the habitual francophone zones (African, Caribbean, North American, Middle Eastern, and Asian), such as Boualem Sansal, Gary Victor, Nelly Arcan, Charif Majdalani or François Cheng, others like Milan Kundera, Hector Biancotti, Anne Weber or Jonathan Littell, who have each chosen French as their language of expression.  Their French is a language that they have often forged whilst very much in contact with another language, in very different historical, political, social and economic contexts.

The literature we call francophone isn’t singular but plural.  Playing with its boundaries– where else to classify Dany Laferrière, a Canadian originally from Haiti, or Yasmina Traboulsi, who is a Brazilian-Lebanese?– it brings us another vision of the world often obscured if not totally negated by French literature. But it also undoes the ancient organizations of genre. It’s enough to make booksellers– and indirectly, readers– dizzy, so much are they used to classifying authors by their geographic origins, in the Francophone aisle as in that of French literature. Their Anglo-Saxon counterparts, on the other hand, classify all works written in the English language by alphabetical order.

One foot in, one foot out. Such would seem to be the fate of francophone writers.  Despite the efforts of Abbé Grégoire, who in De la littérature des negres (1808), composed a lively plea to recognize a foreign literature in the French language.  Two hundred years have passed and the problem has remained more or less the same.

Of course, the most optimistic would argue that many editorial efforts have been made to made this literature better known, by publishing them, n the best cases, in the general collections, and in the worse, in reductive (even ghettoizing) collections like “Continents noirs” at Gallimard. At the same time, we’ve noticed a significant rise, over the last few years, in francophone authors being awarded the major national prizes– especially in 2006, which saw Jonathan Littell receive the Goncourt and the Grand Prix du roman de l’Académie française, Alain Mabanckou won the Renaudot, Nancy Huston the Femina and Léonora Miano the Goncourt des lycéens.

Was it the direct effect of the celebration of francophone culture that made its mark on 2006? It is true that, encouraged by this crop of winners, Jean Rouaud and Michel Le Bris, a year later, wrote Pour une littérature-monde.** Somewhat over the top, slightly naive and certainly partisan in its vision of literary history (amongst those attacked indirectly are Claude Simon and Georges Perec, “inventor of a literature without an object”), this combative text took as its aim the “Center,” that is Paris, its consecrating authority, its hardened literary milieu and its narcissistic writers, in order to better exalt the victorious return (after decades of “gulag poetics”) of writers from the periphery. Unfortunately, as Camille de Toledo remarked with regret in his pertinent essay “Visiter le Flurkistan” (PUF, 2008) as seductive as this manifesto may be politically, its effects are limited because of its war-like posturing, opposing two literatures and aesthetics which have only ever nourished each other in dialogue. An opportunity has been wasted to think about these literatures together. We ought not to pit them against each other, especially not when the only valid label we can use for either of them is doubtless that of Literatures in French.

*My translation hasn’t retained the structure of the original French, which refers to the structure of Le Bris and Rouaud’s essay. Other translation suggestions welcome.

**The original manifesto appeared in Le Monde on March 15, 2007. It was later expanded into a book-length essay and published by Gallimard that same year. To read an excerpt (in English) by the acclaimed Francophone writer Alain Mabanckou, click here (PDF).

I, Translator

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This came in my Google Buzz folder this morning via Charlotte Mandell– a thought-provoking New York Times op-ed on human versus machine translation, by David Bellos: 

But what of real writing? Google Translate can work
apparent miracles because it has access to the world library of Google
Books. That’s presumably why, when asked to translate a famous phrase
about love from “Les Misérables” — “On n’a pas d’autre perle à trouver
dans les plis ténébreux de la vie” — Google Translate comes up with a
very creditable “There is no other pearl to be found in the dark folds
of life,” which just happens to be identical to one of the many
published translations of that great novel. It’s an impressive trick for
a computer, but for a human? All you need to do is get the old
paperback from your basement.

And the program is very patchy.
The opening sentence of Proust’s “In Search of Lost Time” comes out as
an ungrammatical “Long time I went to bed early,” and the results for
most other modern classics are just as unusable.

[...]

However, to play devil’s advocate for a moment, if you were to take a
decidedly jaundiced view of some genre of contemporary foreign fiction
(say, French novels of adultery and inheritance), you could surmise that
since such works have nothing new to say and employ only repeated
formulas, then after a sufficient number of translated novels of that
kind and their originals had been scanned and put up on the Web, Google
Translate should be able to do a pretty good simulation of translating
other regurgitations of the same ilk.

(Contemporary French novels of adultery and inheritance? Who can he be talking about?)

Book review Bingo!

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Earlier this week the Examiner made up what sounds like the most fun game since Boggle: Book review Bingo! First Michelle Kerns compiled a list of the top twenty most annoying clichés used by book reviewers. Then she decided to up the ante and created a series of Bingo cards to allow us all to take part "in the joy of artificially inflated, knee-jerk, ultimately
meaningless book reviews.  Clichés have never been so much fun."

Bingo

But my own personal pet peeves aren't on the list! (I'm sure I've grumbled about these before but don't feel like researching my archives…) So in case you do a follow-up, Michelle, I would add:

1. "So-and-so does this-and-that and reminds us what it is to be human."

    Like I'm going to read the writer's work and go "Oh that's what it is to be human… Wow. I've been doing it wrong."

2. "So-and-so will be read for as long as the language endures."

    The protagonist of Nicholson Baker's The Anthologist will back me up here. Reading Ted Roethke on Louise Bogan, Baker writes

    And then he says the Big Thing. He says that Louise Bogan’s poetry will last ‘as long as the language survives.’ There it is. This was in one of the last review he wrote. It was what he hoped would be true of his own poetry.
    Her poems will last as long as the language–ah, yes. That used to be, in the nineteenth century, a much-employed piece of literary praise. Macaulay used it several times. He said, for example, that Byron’s poetry ‘can only perish with the English language.’ Mark Twain said that Uncle Tom’s Cabin would ‘live as long as the English tongue shall live.’ Many lesser nineteenth-century reviewers used it. And it’s a fearful phrase–it’s an Ozymandian phrase. Because you have to ask: How long, in fact, will the English language last? Not that long maybe. Another three hundred years? (221)

It's still a much-employed piece of literary praise. You'll also find variants of it: I've stopped counting how many times a critic has assured me that a particular writer will be read "as long as there are readers" and "as long as there are books."

Thing is– that time may come sooner than we would like. So let's stay away from these pre-fabricated words of praise, shall we, and try to engage with our writers right here and now?

Rumi-rama

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Rumi3 So I'm teaching this class about the foundations of basically all of world culture, which, as you can imagine, occasionally requires that I read way outside the habitual boundaries of my curiosity. Recently, I have been immersing myself in reading about Sufi mysticism, Sufi poetry, and the life and work of the Ur-whirling dervish, the 13th century Persian poet Jalâl al-Din Rumi. I'm working with the translations done by Franklin Lewis almost ten years ago, in a text called Rumi Past and Present, and the poems are really fascinating. 

But here's the thing, and this is maybe foolish of me to own up to: I never heard of Rumi before I was told I had to teach him.  Which is strange, because I'm just learning that apparently in the late 90s Rumi was the most-read poet in America.  So claims Lewis, and WS Merwin confirms this in his 2002 review in the New York Review of Books:

Franklin Lewis notes at the beginning of his exhaustive study of Rumi that on November 25, 1997, in the Christian Science Monitor, Alexandra Marks pronounced Rumi the best-selling poet in the United States. Professor Lewis's book, with its careful attention to Rumi's life and teachings, and to his reputation from his own time until the end of the late millennium, includes in the introduction a marveling survey of the fervor surrounding Rumi's name in recent decades. In a section entitled "Rumi-Mania" he writes of large, enthusiastic audiences at readings of versions of Rumi's poems by the contemporary American translator Coleman Barks, "who, more than any other single individual, is responsible for Rumi's current fame." By the late 1990s that fame, in a variety of forms, had become established in contemporary popular culture, in which Rumi was claimed as a forerunner of New Age aspirations, of heterosexual and homosexual eroticism, and of current manifestations of a quest for ecstasy. (The subtitle of Barks's most recent volume, The Soul of Rumi, is A New Collection of Ecstatic Poems.)

In case this phenomenon has escaped anyone it is worth repeating a few among Franklin Lewis's collection of highlights. According to William Davis in The Boston Globe of March 30, 1998, "spiritually driven commuters now unwind to audiobooks of Rumi's poetry as they sit in traffic jams…." And in New York, in that year, some four hundred people a day (celebrities among them) at the Jivamukti Yoga Center were doing "spiritual aerobics to a background beat that sometimes mixes rock music and readings of Rumi…." He enumerates concert recitations with live music on stage, and CD recordings.

Is this true? How did I miss this? I remember the late 90s as being a particularly touchy-feely New Age-y kind of time, but I always assumed that was my own personal shame, having to do with how old I was and the crowd I hung out with. Now I'm looking back to my late adolescence in a new light: I was a victim of a phenomenon emanating from the cultural hegemony of Deepak Chopra!

I can see why Rumi would have mass appeal; the poetry could be read in a way that emphasizes its sentiment of good-will and passionate pluckiness (see here, for example); but it could also be said that such populist readings attempt to  de-Islamicize Rumi.  In the Times Higher Education Supplement, Shusha Guppy writes

[C]ertain writers have attempted to "excise Islam from Sufism", as Lewis puts it, and present it as a "philosophy" and "pseudo-spiritualism". Lewis cites the late Idris Shah's The Sufis , as a notable example, in which God is almost totally absent.

This approach appeals to the modern mind, which finds the idea of a deity hard to accept, while longing for some spiritual basis to human existence. Sufism seems to be spirituality without pain. Yet Masnavi is often a commentary on the Koran: a quarter of the book, about 6,000 lines, are direct parapharases of Koranic verses. In Persia Masnavi has become "the Persian Koran", and the poet's popularity has soared since the 1979 revolution, perhaps because Rumi's ecumenical, gentle mysticism, with its focus on love and the tolerant spirit of Islam, contrasts with the official insistence on the minutiae of ritual observance and the oppressive use of the sharia.

Rumi is the only required text on our syllabus this semester; the rest was pretty much up to my discretion. I wonder what my students will make of it– I hope we'll be able to read Rumi anchored within the context of Rumi (he was a preacher, after all) and to read his work as a spiritual text, steering clear of pseudo-spiritual sentimentalism. 

And now, for your reading pleasure, I share with you one of my favorites in Lewis's translation:

Top of the morning, you're already smashed–
  Yes you are, you tied your turban crooked!
I swear to God, all night last night til dawn
  You were drinking– pure wine, undiluted:
It’s plain in your eyes, your cheeks, your color
  The sort you are– wouldn’t put it past you.
Give the tipplers some of what you tasted
  O Guardian of all created blessings

Today the lion prowls around for prey
  The vale and mountain tremble at the thought
From him you’ll not escape by running!
  Submit like head-bowed lover and you’re saved.
You will live on in blissful safety
  Once you are joined to his eternal realm

Run away from all this talk, run sixty leagues,
  You’re at sixes and sevens in talk’s trap