EDWARD GAUVIN

The latest work available in English by Belgian Jean-Philippe Toussaint is this slim and handsome essay collection, translated by yours truly, that clocks in at an attractive 90 pages. Select essays have previously appeared in different form in The White Review and Gulf Coast. Dalkey Archive Press will follow up Urgency and Patience with the fourth and final novel in Toussaint’s Marie tetralogy, Nue.

Jean-Philippe Toussaint (1957 – ) is a Belgian writer and filmmaker whose books have been translated into more than twenty languages. The author of nine novels, he is the winner of numerous literary prizes, including the Prix Médicis in 2005 for his novel Running Away, and the Prix Décembre in 2009 for The Truth about Marie, the two middle books of the Marie tetralogy.

Eight years ago now (whoa!) I was one of the lucky young translators to get an ALTA Travel Fellowship. It was good money, huge encouragement at a precarious and impressionable time, and a great entrée into the world of literary translation by way of a conference that still manages to gather many of the country’s best literary translators each year for shoptalk, drinks, fascinating panels, and general comradery.

This coming fall, October 28-31, the conference will be in Tucson, with a theme of Translation & Traffic. This is not a conference that happens in a warm city very often, so seize the day (the last one I remember was Pasadena 2009). The $1000 should cover airfare and lodging from most places in the U.S.

Applications are now being accepted for the 2015 ALTA Travel Fellowship Awards.  If you’re a newcomer to translation, no matter your age, you should try your hand! Each year, four to six fellowships in the amount of $1,000 are awarded to beginning (unpublished or minimally published) translators to help them pay for travel expenses to the annual ALTA conference.  (When I applied, I had two lit mag credits and a handful of comics to my name.)

At the conference, ALTA Fellows are invited to read their translated work at a keynote event, giving them an opportunity to present their translations to an audience of translators, authors, editors, and publishers from around the world.

ALTA Travel Fellowships are funded by a combination of member dues and private donations, often generously provided by established translators and other devoted supporters of literary translation. If you are interested in learning more about how you can support this important program, please contact Managing Director Erica Mena at erica@literarytranslators.org

Applications must include:

• a cover letter explaining your interest in attending the conference
• current CV / resumé
• up to 10 pages of translated work (poetry or prose, double spaced)
• the corresponding original language text

The judges for the 2015 ALTA Travel Fellowship are Italian translator emeritus Geoffrey Brock, who teaches at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville;  Jennifer Croft, Founding Editor of The Buenos Aires Review and 2015 NEA Translation Grantee; and poet Sidney Wade, editor at Subtropics and professor at the University of Florida Gainesville.

SUBMIT HERE by June 1st on Submittable!

Hear ye, hear ye! The fifth and latest issue of The Black Herald, bilingual gem of the Parisian literary scene, has arrived. Brainchild of Blandine Longre and Paul Stubbs, it is packed to the gills with work by exciting talents past, present, and future: David Gascoyne, Olive Moore, Egon Bondy, Rosemary Lloyd, Pierre Cendors, Andrew Fentham, Peter Oswald, Charles Nodier, Alistair Ian Blyth, Bensalem Himmich, Eurydice Antolin, Afonso Cruz, Heller Levinson, Anne-Sylvie Homassel, Philippe Annocque, David Spittle, Cécile Lombard, Jos Roy, Michael Lee Rattigan, Victor Segalen, César Vallejo, Anthony Seidman… and a never-before-published interview with Emil Cioran!

I am proud The Black Herald has chosen to feature my translation of Yves et Ada Rémy’s story “The House of the Nightjars,” from their classic volume of interconnected tales, Les Soldats de la mer [The Soldiers of the Sea]. Something between an alternate history and a midsummer night’s fantasy, it was first published in 1968 and has been multiply reprinted since.

Here’s an excerpt:

All the rest is but the noise of war now, squadrons passing at a gallop in the streets, teams hauling field guns and artillery carriages with their ironshod wheels, a din a thousand djinns could not have equaled; all the rest is but the noise of war now with cannons thundering beyond the hills, rising smoke, chasseurs à pied coming and going and fleeing, regiments moving off in tight columns, heavy and invincible and dissolving in the smoke of battle uphill from town as you watched war’s dishevelments from the dormer windows, your heart in your throat, eyes brimming with tears, and the wind flung that mad, bitter, venomous odor of burnt powder all over town; all the rest is but the noise of war now with soldiers in red uniforms, or blue, or green, running through the fields and up the hillsides, coming and going, up and down—like nightjars, child, flying toads, goatsuckers, in braying flocks. All the rest is now but the mad and wondrous face of war.

Husband and wife Yves and Ada Rémy are writers, filmmakers, and utterly charming people, who together have authored short stories, radio plays, and three other novels, one of which, La Maison du Cygne [The House of the Swan] won the Grand Prix de l’Imaginaire at Utopiales in 1979.

SelfMadeHero is delighted to announce the publication of PABLO, which explores Picasso’s  formative years amongst the bohemians of Montmartre, including Apollinaire, Max Jacob and Gertrude Stein. Winner of the Grand Prix at France’s RTL Graphic Novel Awards, PABLO, written by Julie Birmant and illustrated by Clément Oubrerie, is the latest in SelfMadeHero’s Arts Masters series, which to date includes the highly praised Rembrandt and Vincent.

The third volume of Frederik Peeters’ cosmic SF saga Aama, The Desert of Mirrors, now available for your reading pleasure. Things really speed up in this, the penultimate chapter, and Peeters’ depiction of the planet Ona(ji) under the organic influence of the evolving Aama remains disturbing as ever. Don’t miss it!

I recently had the pleasure of translating Du vide plein les yeux, the third novel by the young Parisian crime writer Jérémie Guez. Guez was born in Paris in 1988, and has already been hailed as the rising star of contemporary French noir. His two previous novels Balancé dans les cordes and Paris la unit were awarded the 2013 SNCF du Polar and 2012 Plume Libre prizes, respectively.

Eyes Full of Empty, as I’ve titled it, is the third novel in Guez’s Parisian trilogy, but the books don’t share a single protagonist. You can read more about it here, at the publisher’s site. Unnamed Books is a terrific new LA press devoted to “unlikely protagonists, undiscovered territories and courageous voices.”

Translating this noir was a fascinating exercise in contemporary slang. Guez knows Paris and his people inside and out. Like much of private eye fiction, this novel offers a cross-section of society, from high life to low, with astute observations about race and class.

The annual Words Without Borders Comics Issue ran in February, but thanks to the miracle of the interwebs, it’s still available to be greedily perused! Check out an excerpt from Black Spring, the memoir of Cuban political refugee Alejandro González Raga as told to author Maxence Emery and illustrated by Thomas Humeau. Raga was a victim of the titular event, a 2003 dissident crackdown. The excerpt covers Raga’s childhood among citizens block committees, and the free flowering of adolescence cut short by government repression.

Over at Guernica, an excerpt from Walking Wounded: Uncut Stories from Iraq and Afghanistan, by Olivier Morel and artist Maël. It’s a graphic novel companion piece to the documentary On the Bridge, which tracks the repercussions of PTSD on several soldiers returned from the front. It was a privilege to work on this sensitive and searing book of graphic journalism.

I hope to translate more of Xavier Mauméjean, the current reigning French master of the reimagined or “alternate” history, that SF subgenre. In January, he contributed “Cinépanorama” to Words Without Borders’ theme issue on alternate histories, guest edited by Gabriel Saxton-Ruiz. It seeks to answer the question: what if Alain Delon lost an eye during military service in Indochina and never became a movie star? Here’s an excerpt:

In your hotel room on Boulevard Rochechouart, you flip through the magazines. One photo at a time, so your eye won’t get tired. It takes you until late in the night. There’s no such thing as an innocent gaze. So you slip on your trenchcoat, headed for Pigalle. Smuggled cigarettes, gold-plated bracelets fallen from a truck, junk you pawn off on the gigolos just to seem in the know. Not that you’re diving into any fishy-smelling sidelines—the only thing you want to smell is Romy Schneider’s perfume. Pretty girl. You could’ve had her. A quick double espresso at the bar by the drag queens, maybe a croissant. Next to you, the mailman’s peeling his hard-boiled egg. Half of it disappears in one bite. You look away. The yolk’s yellow circle reminds you of an eye.

Xavier Mauméjean has a degree in philosophy and science of religions. He has won the renowned Rosny Award (the most important French award for science fiction) in 2005 and 2008. Mauméjean is also the author of short stories and radio plays for France Culture (winning the Grand Prix de la Radio in 2014), and works for television and cinema. He lives in the North of France, with his wife and their daughter, Zelda.

Jean-Philippe Toussaint’s brief essay “For Samuel Beckett” is available online as a complement to Gulf Coast‘s Winter 2015 issue. Here’s an excerpt:

In the early ’80s, I wrote Samuel Beckett a letter. I explained that I was trying to write, adding that he was probably often sought out by strangers, and so rather than asking him to read my work, suggested instead we play a game of correspondence chess with, at stake, a play I’d written. If I won, he’d read it and give me his opinion. If he won, I’d read over my own play at my leisure. I closed my letter with these words: “Just in case, 1. e4.” By return post, Samuel Beckett replied, “Black resigns. Send the play. Sincerely. Samuel Beckett.”

JEAN-PHILIPPE TOUSSAINT (1957 Р) is a Belgian writer and filmmaker whose books have been translated into more than twenty languages. The author of nine novels, he is the winner of numerous literary prizes, including the Prix M̩dicis in 2005 for his novel Running Away, and the Prix D̩cembre in 2009 for The Truth about Marie, the two middle books of the Marie tetralogy. These essays are taken from the collection Urgency and Patience, forthcoming next spring from Dalkey Archive Press.