BOW.
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WOW.
Who am I bowing to?
That would be M. Raymond Queneau.
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?
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.
Oh dear: http://twitter.com/DwightGarner/status/82845953123561472
@ 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.
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.
@ Bill: Absolutely not. CIGARETTES.
Well goddamnit!
Thank you. Seed has been planted.
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.
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.
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…
And, of course, it’s amazing that all these books are available in translation and still in print from New Directions, Dalkey Archive, etc.