Ashbery John - John Ashbery: collected French translations. Prose

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For Anne Dunn

CONTENTS

Curious Resemblances: John Ashbery Translates French Prose
Introduction by Rosanne Wasserman and Eugene Richie

CURIOUS RESEMBLANCES: JOHN ASHBERY TRANSLATES FRENCH PROSE

Introduction by Rosanne Wasserman and Eugene Richie

John Ashberys Collected French Translations are gathered into two volumes. This volume presents a selection of English translations of twenty-eight prose pieces composed by seventeen writers: not only masters of fiction, but also poets, playwrights, artists, musicians, and critics. The other volume is a bilingual collection of 171 poems written by twenty-four poets. Both volumes offer published translations long unavailable, as well as some previously unpublished works. As we identified, located, and edited these selections, Ashbery has guided our choices and helped us find materials. Each volume offers unique opportunities for insight into the wide and varied scope of French cultural influence on Ashberys work, over the decades of his productive and resonant career. This influence appears not only in his own poetry, but also in his responses to visual art, music, and cinema. Encountering these translations will open, for interested readers and scholars alike, windows into Ashberys relationship with many well-known French writers, artists, and cultural figures. Both volumes will also introduce several unfamiliar voices from the vast canon of French literature, writers who have been given special attention here by one of our most distinguished American poets.

We have included here all of the fiction that Ashbery has translated and published before, but we have selected the essays, choosing, for example, among pieces from a large group of articles originally published in Art and Literature and ARTnews . In addition, some of Ashberys translations of Raymond Roussel remain in manuscript in the Ashbery Resource Center archives of the Flow Chart Foundation; these pieces are currently being prepared for publication by Ava Lehrer. And, most recently, Ashbery has translated the prose piece by Pierre Martory included herethe introduction to a 1954 French translation of Henry Jamess Washington Square.

The French originals that Ashbery used for these translations came from libraries, bookstores, his own and his friends collections, and manuscripts; also, some pieces were given or assigned to him when he was asked to translate works. Due to considerations of length, this volume is not bilingual. However, many of the original French prose works are currently quite easily available, if a reader wishes to explore further. The Appendix offers a chronology of the first publication dates of every translation in the two volumes, as an aid to scholars who might want to compare Ashberys translation work with the publication dates of his own poetry and prose. In addition, full bibliographical information about the English translations and any reprints appears at the end of each authors selection. We have consistently used for this book only the latest of Ashberys available drafts of any published or unpublished translation.

Ashbery and French

Ashberys engagement with the French language and its literature spans nearly eighty years.an enraptured description of his choices in these volumes, spanning centuries from Marie-Catherine dAulnoys magical story The White Cat to the synchronic, cinematic poetries of Pascalle Monnier.

Even in his teens, Ashberys French-language skills were impressive. His cousin Paul Hollings sometimes off-color French books were not too advanced for the precocious adolescent. At fifteen, he writes in his diary, on May 15, 1943, after spending an evening at a neighbors house, which had belonged to the Hollings and which still housed some of Pauls European possessions: I was over there tonight reading Chansons de Bilitis in the French. Nana said, Wouldnt the Hollings be pleased if they knew you could read French Novels! I felt like answering: Not if they knew the ones I pick out to read. He also resorted to recording his more private experiences in French, which his mother, Helen, who was apt to look at his correspondence and diary, could not read; sometimes, to disguise cognates, he abbreviated French words or used puns to throw her even further off track. Clearly, the older generation never found him out: He duly records in his diary on July 28, 1943, that for his sixteenth birthday, his parents gave him a French dictionary.

Ashbery studied French as soon as he could, rapidly excelling in classes and exams at his upstate New York high school. In 1945, his first year at Harvard, he again took classes in French, as well as a course in elementary Italian; Harvards Houghton Library houses his notes, in French, for these classes. Later, during the summer of 1948, between his junior and senior years, he began to read Marcel Proust in translation, in preparation for a September course with Harry Levin: Proust, Joyce, and Mann.

As an undergraduate at Harvard, he never abandoned his childhood program of learning on his own, choosing what he loved and what most interested him from whatever venues were available, building an eccentric and personal canon. The movies of Jean Cocteau were among his favorites, and he returned to movie theaters repeatedly to watch the 1950 film Orpheus , enchanted with the car radio that broadcasts surreal poetry by Cgeste in Hades, and with Jean Maraiss portrayal of Orpheus. As he told a student journalist at Bard College,

Ive often been struck by a line from the Cocteau movie Orpheus . He was being examined by these three sinister judges, and one of them says, What do you do, and [Orpheus] says, I am a poet, and the judge says, What does that mean? to which Orpheus replies, Its to write and not be a writer.

During his college and graduate school years, he began also to read writers whom he has called fringe Surrealists, such as Pierre Reverdy, owes a deep debt to his years (19601965) of writing art criticism in Paris for the International Herald-Tribune.

As a Fulbright scholar from 1955 to 1957, Ashbery lived first for a month in Paris, then took classes in Montpellier, and finally worked as a teaching fellow in Rennes, escaping to Paris as often as he could. Continuing to live in Paris after his Fulbright, he began writing as an art critic for the International Herald-Tribune in 1960. This journalism, as Jed Perl notes, discussing Reported Sightings , gave the poet a chance to inscribe his visions not only of artworks but of Paris itself:

Introducing a Toulouse-Lautrec show, he remarks, The crowd waiting in the rain outside the Petit Palais museum in Paris rivaled the one queueing up for the latest Alain Delon movie on the Champs-lyses. The Petit Palais, the movie theater on the Champs-lyses, the long lines of people, the dark-haired movie star, and the dwarfish fin de sicle painter somehow come together to paint a little portrait of Paris in 1964and the portrait has a staying power.

At the same time, he undertook editorships of important art and literature journals, all of which kept him focused on translations, not only of poetry and fiction, but also of articles about artists. As coeditor of the journals Locus Solus and Art and Literature , he was able to cast a wider net. Since he was responsible for getting issues together and to the printer, some of these translations were done primarily to fill up the pages of an issue. But these years were particularly productive in his canon-building. In Art and Literature , he published translations from the poetry and prose of Jacob, Antonin Artaud, Georges Bataille, Michel Leiris, and Marcelin Pleynet; as well as pieces by artists Odilon Redon, Giorgio de Chirico, and Jean Hlion, and by the composer Iannis Xenakis. While Ashberys engagement with Roussel is widely familiar, it may be a surprise to readers of this volume to find the tour-de-force of Reverdys Haunted House , reprinted here in its entirety, or passages from the Surrealist painter de Chiricos novel Hebdomeros , which, as Ashbery has told us, he was reading for the first time while on the SS France en route to Le Havre in 1964. It was so amazing, he says; I had never read anything like it before.