That Chance Element of Surprise: Get Your Opinion In Print - Por Favor!
by Tanya Mignon Parker
Tanya Parker has a place on the green employee payroll sheet of Left Bank Books. She is Francophone by association, with family in South Africa, Rwanda, Mali, Chad, Paris and Bruxelles – depending on where the war is, and how quickly you can flee.
Just over a year ago, I met Fabrice Rozie, the literary attaché
to the French embassy, at his office on Fifth Ave in New
York. It is a marble-encased shrine opposite the Metropolitan
Museum of Art, something Guy de Maupassant would laugh
about – the foyer dominated by a nude, white marble Greco-
Roman sculpture surrounded by marbled floors and walls.
On a small brass plaque, the building acknowledges itself as
the cultural division of the French Embassy. (I imagine
Maupassant would see the sculpture moving as others see it
inert).
I’m no stranger to the French. I learned the lingo early on in
Zimbabwe from Congo/Belgian/Parisian/Francophone
cousins who first taught me the cuss words, then the songs,
then the prayers and then later, my aunt and uncle intervened
and ameliorated the situation by sending me to proper
Grammar school.
At the embassy, I knew I would be meeting a diplomat and
had conjured an image of a staid, inert bespectacled man in a
collar. Rozie is anything but. He is bouncing off the walls,
dressed in jeans and a t-shirt with a youthful grin, tennis
shoes, and eyes full of humor, intelligence, mischief and
empathy. The next time I saw him in St. Louis, he was
wearing a mismatched suit and a hideous bowtie, an
idiosyncratic nod to any Francophile who took him or herself
too seriously. Behind this impressive homme de lettres is a
professor, play-write, and more recently, co-editor of a new
book, As You Were Saying: American Writers Respond to
Their French Contemporaries.
What Rozie imagined for As You Were Saying was simple
but brilliant: Let’s get over the myths of French elitism and
the “Ugly American” and focus on ideas we would all like to
explore because of our shared and brittle humanity. Let the
French writer begin a story and leave the American writer
with the job of finishing it!
Rozie assembled well-respected French and American
writers and translators who took on the challenge for free.
But he still needed a publisher willing to take the risk. He
found a good home with Dalkey Archive Press, known for
publishing literature in translation. Senior editor, Martin
Riker, calls Dalkey’s mission “to promote not just the [work
in] translation, but also the idea of translation.” He squeezed
the project in while moving himself from Colorado and the
press from Bloomington, Illinois to Urbana, Illinois. The
book becomes a reality this month when 15,000 copies are
released.
Some of the stories read like poetry, others force you to
think, and others leave you questioning. Marie Darrieussecq
and Rick Moody write about an ugly Frenchman who
undergoes a face transplant. Camille Laurens and Robert
Olen Butler examine the pain of waiting and losing. Lydie
Salvayre and Rikki Ducornet adapt an old French tale with
caustic wit.
My personal favorite is about a Bosnian refugee, who
because of his thick accent, is relegated to selling upscale
magazine subscriptions, (which belong in the northern
suburbs of Chicago) to a more sleazy part of town, where he
encounters a drunken priest with awful dandruff and his
playboy lover. Aleksander Hemon, who wrote the story with
French writer Philippe Claudel, was born in Sarajevo and
has lived in Chicago since 1992. His writing regularly
appears in McSweeney’s and he now has a place in the
annals of modern French writing! It doesn’t get better than
that.
In independent bookstores, surprising friendships come
about between authors, publishers and booksellers and that is
one good reason to find out exactly why a Bosnian refugee
would be so moved by his encounter with a drunken priest
and his playboy lover in the sleazy part of Chicago! (It is not
about the sex, stupid) Well, it’s sort of not about the sex!
The only thing missing is the reader. The reader is why any
of us exist at all!
And so, dear reader, marvelous reviews of the book are
inserted into this newsletter, BUT we would like to challenge
YOU to review the stories yourself. You after all, are the
audience we booksellers told Rozie, Riker and these writers
about. Only three percent of the 290,000 titles published in
the United States last year were translated works. In France,
where presumably the total number of titles published is
smaller, the percent of titles in translation is much higher.
And nearly forty percent of those translations are American
texts. So let’s show the French that readers in the heartland
of America are world readers, too. Buy the book. Read it.
And then, please send your reviews to info@left-bank.com
to be posted on our website.
Tanya Parker has a place on the green employee payroll sheet of Left Bank Books. She is Francophone by association, with family in South Africa, Rwanda, Mali, Chad, Paris and Bruxelles – depending on where the war is, and how quickly you can flee.
Just over a year ago, I met Fabrice Rozie, the literary attaché
to the French embassy, at his office on Fifth Ave in New
York. It is a marble-encased shrine opposite the Metropolitan
Museum of Art, something Guy de Maupassant would laugh
about – the foyer dominated by a nude, white marble Greco-
Roman sculpture surrounded by marbled floors and walls.
On a small brass plaque, the building acknowledges itself as
the cultural division of the French Embassy. (I imagine
Maupassant would see the sculpture moving as others see it
inert).
I’m no stranger to the French. I learned the lingo early on in
Zimbabwe from Congo/Belgian/Parisian/Francophone
cousins who first taught me the cuss words, then the songs,
then the prayers and then later, my aunt and uncle intervened
and ameliorated the situation by sending me to proper
Grammar school.
At the embassy, I knew I would be meeting a diplomat and
had conjured an image of a staid, inert bespectacled man in a
collar. Rozie is anything but. He is bouncing off the walls,
dressed in jeans and a t-shirt with a youthful grin, tennis
shoes, and eyes full of humor, intelligence, mischief and
empathy. The next time I saw him in St. Louis, he was
wearing a mismatched suit and a hideous bowtie, an
idiosyncratic nod to any Francophile who took him or herself
too seriously. Behind this impressive homme de lettres is a
professor, play-write, and more recently, co-editor of a new
book, As You Were Saying: American Writers Respond to
Their French Contemporaries.
What Rozie imagined for As You Were Saying was simple
but brilliant: Let’s get over the myths of French elitism and
the “Ugly American” and focus on ideas we would all like to
explore because of our shared and brittle humanity. Let the
French writer begin a story and leave the American writer
with the job of finishing it!
Rozie assembled well-respected French and American
writers and translators who took on the challenge for free.
But he still needed a publisher willing to take the risk. He
found a good home with Dalkey Archive Press, known for
publishing literature in translation. Senior editor, Martin
Riker, calls Dalkey’s mission “to promote not just the [work
in] translation, but also the idea of translation.” He squeezed
the project in while moving himself from Colorado and the
press from Bloomington, Illinois to Urbana, Illinois. The
book becomes a reality this month when 15,000 copies are
released.
Some of the stories read like poetry, others force you to
think, and others leave you questioning. Marie Darrieussecq
and Rick Moody write about an ugly Frenchman who
undergoes a face transplant. Camille Laurens and Robert
Olen Butler examine the pain of waiting and losing. Lydie
Salvayre and Rikki Ducornet adapt an old French tale with
caustic wit.
My personal favorite is about a Bosnian refugee, who
because of his thick accent, is relegated to selling upscale
magazine subscriptions, (which belong in the northern
suburbs of Chicago) to a more sleazy part of town, where he
encounters a drunken priest with awful dandruff and his
playboy lover. Aleksander Hemon, who wrote the story with
French writer Philippe Claudel, was born in Sarajevo and
has lived in Chicago since 1992. His writing regularly
appears in McSweeney’s and he now has a place in the
annals of modern French writing! It doesn’t get better than
that.
In independent bookstores, surprising friendships come
about between authors, publishers and booksellers and that is
one good reason to find out exactly why a Bosnian refugee
would be so moved by his encounter with a drunken priest
and his playboy lover in the sleazy part of Chicago! (It is not
about the sex, stupid) Well, it’s sort of not about the sex!
The only thing missing is the reader. The reader is why any
of us exist at all!
And so, dear reader, marvelous reviews of the book are
inserted into this newsletter, BUT we would like to challenge
YOU to review the stories yourself. You after all, are the
audience we booksellers told Rozie, Riker and these writers
about. Only three percent of the 290,000 titles published in
the United States last year were translated works. In France,
where presumably the total number of titles published is
smaller, the percent of titles in translation is much higher.
And nearly forty percent of those translations are American
texts. So let’s show the French that readers in the heartland
of America are world readers, too. Buy the book. Read it.
And then, please send your reviews to info@left-bank.com
to be posted on our website.
posted by Left Bank Books at 5:23 PM
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