BOW.

15 Comments

• James says:

  June 18, 2011 at 6:16 pm

  WOW.

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• Chris O. says:

  June 20, 2011 at 2:43 pm

  Who am I bow­ing to?

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• Glenn Kenny says:

  June 20, 2011 at 3:11 pm

  That would be M. Raymond Queneau.

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• bill says:

  June 20, 2011 at 3:18 pm

  Oh him! I picked up one of his books, based on your occa­sion­al very pos­it­ive men­tions. It’s THE LAST DAYS – good place to start?

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• Glenn Kenny says:

  June 20, 2011 at 3:23 pm

  Not bad, but not ideal; I’d say “Zazie,” “Pierrot,” “The Bark Tree” or even “Exercises in Style” are bet­ter. “Last Days” is not quite so form­ally adven­tur­ous, though if I recall cor­rectly has good inside-baseball stuff on the lives and loves and fac­tions of the surrealists.

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• William Friedfood says:

  June 20, 2011 at 4:06 pm

  Oh dear: http://twitter.com/DwightGarner/status/82845953123561472

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• That Fuzzy Bastard says:

  June 20, 2011 at 4:49 pm

  @ William: Except that Metcalf, so ter­rible when writ­ing about cul­ture, just wrote a fant­ast­ic piece about philo­soph­er of eco­nom­ics Robert Nozick. Proving, I guess, that skills are not trans­fer­able to every area of endeavor.

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• bill says:

  June 20, 2011 at 5:09 pm

  Okay, Glenn, what about TLOOTH as a start­ing point for Harry Mathews? I picked that up at around the same time, and for the same reasons.

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• Glenn Kenny says:

  June 20, 2011 at 5:20 pm

  @ Bill: Absolutely not. CIGARETTES.

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• bill says:

  June 20, 2011 at 5:37 pm

  Well god­dam­nit!

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• Chris O. says:

  June 20, 2011 at 9:56 pm

  Thank you. Seed has been planted.

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• nrh says:

  June 20, 2011 at 11:34 pm

  I just wish there were some dif­fer­ent trans­la­tions of Queneau avail­able, the Barabara Wright ones that we’ve got avail­able (I’ve been assured by French speak­ing friends) do not do him justice. Of course the same goes for Perec. And so on.

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• James says:

  June 21, 2011 at 3:09 am

  You might have some quite hard-to-please friends, nrh. The Barbara Wright ver­sions of Queneau I’ve read are of course not per­fect (no trans­la­tion is), but inso­far as a trans­la­tion can do justice to an ori­gin­al, they’re closer to Oliver Wendell Holmes than Simon Cowell.

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• Glenn Kenny says:

  June 21, 2011 at 7:17 am

  Indeed, nrh, some­times our French friends like to make us feel bad. Wright’s trans­la­tions are old enough that she was able to con­sult with Queneau him­self on more than one of them. I’ve dipped into the ori­gin­al French of “Exercises in Style,” and, just as with Perec’s “La Disparation,” that work can­not be trans­lated so much as it has to be trans­posed; the trans­la­tion is by neces­sity even more of a cre­at­ive work than it might have been under “nor­mal” cir­cum­stances. I think Wright acquit­ted her­self pretty well. As did Gilbert Adair for “A Void,” whose ori­gin­al of course con­tained, for example, no allu­sions to Lionel Bart (whose first name is of course not men­tioned in Adair). In any event, there’s noth­ing like look­ing into the ori­gin­als to spruce up one’s French read­ing skills…but for all but the super-fluent I think grap­pling with Perec’s “Alphabets” will be a nearly insur­mount­able challenge…

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• nrh says:

  June 21, 2011 at 10:32 am

  And, of course, it’s amaz­ing that all these books are avail­able in trans­la­tion and still in print from New Directions, Dalkey Archive, etc.

  Reply