“You know what we used to do with peppermint sticks? You stick it in half a lemon, and you suck it. Very good.”

Elizabeth Bishop was a sucker for candy canes. Who knew?

Ploughshares has republished its 8,000 word interview with the poet George Starbuck, first published in 1977.  The interview feels pretty much unedited, replicating the twists and byways a conversation can take, as if the editors were reluctant to let even the tiniest bit go. And some things couldn’t be described: “The laughter is quick, sharp, deep. No way to transcribe it.”

My favorite bit is about her friendship with Marianne Moore, dating back to Bishop’s collegiate days:

EB: Actually, I didn’t tell her I wrote for a long time. … I guess she must have known by the time I graduated. Even then—I suppose this was a little odd even then—we called each other Miss for about three years. But I admired her so much.

She had a review of Wallace Stevens that I don’t think she ever reprinted. I went over there, to Brooklyn. She waved me through the back door (the elevator wasn’t working). And she had two of those baskets for tomatoes, just filled with papers. Two bushel baskets. And these were the first drafts of this rather short review. You can see how she worked.

She asked for rhymes. (Photo: Carl Van Vechten)

She had a clipboard that she carried around the house to work on a poem while she was washing dishes, dusting, etc.

Now all her papers, or almost all, are in the Berg Museum in Philadelphia. … the exhibit of manuscripts was marvelous. If ever you want to see examples of hard work, it’s just perfect.

She wrote a poem about the famous racehorse, Tom Fool. The man who arranged the collection had done a beautiful job, in glass cases: dozens of little clippings from the newspapers and photographs of the horse. And then the versions of the poem. It goes on and on and on. The work she put in!

GS: I’d be fascinated to see how she did those inaudible rhymes—whether that came first or kept changing. How that figured.

EB: She was rather contradictory, you know. Very illogical. She would say, “Oh—rhyme is dowdy.” Then other times, when she was translating La Fontaine, she would ask me for a rhyme. If I suggested a rhyme, she would be very pleased. She liked that ballad of mine [“The Burglar of Babylon” –ed.] because it rhymed so well. She admired the rhyme Many Antennae. You could never tell what she was going to like or dislike.

GS: That was the other thing about “The Moose.” There’s that nice casual little six-line stanza, but you establish different interlocking ways of making at least a couple of pairs of rhymes out of the six lines.

EB: I thought it would be regular, but that turned out boring. It seemed almost like a ballad. The first stanza was what I thought of first, and then it just seemed to go. It was so funny, Octavio read it when it was published somewhere. He talks about rhyme a lot. Then he read the first stanza aloud and he said, “Oh, it rhymes! Oh it rhymes some more! Rhymes and rhymes and rhymes!” Robert Lowell is always saying, “I like rhyme.” He tries to go back to rhyme but doesn’t. Says he can’t seem to do it any more. His first poems violently rhymed. You—you’ve written sestinas. Rhymes. I’ve always thought I’d write a villanelle.

GS: But you did…

EB: Finally did. Never do it again.

He loved mice. (Photo: Walter Albertin)

And this tidbit about E.E. Cummings:

GS: You seem to write more and more kinds of poems but without exhorting yourself to be suddenly different.

EB: Ha. I know I wish I had written a great deal more. Sometimes I think if I had been born a man I probably would have written more. Dared more, or spent more time at it. I’ve just wasted so much time.

GS: Would it have been extra works in other genres?

EB: No.

GS: Long poems?

EB: No. One or two long poems I’d like to write, but I doubt that I ever will. Well, not really long. Maybe ten pages. That’d be long. I read Robert Penn Warren’s Collected Poems. He wasn’t lazy. And Cummings.

Oh. I did know Cummings. When I lived in the Village, later on, I met him through a friend. He and I had the same maid for two or three years. “Leave a little dirt, Blanche,” he used to say to her. Blanche finally left them. They wouldn’t put traps down for the mice. Mrs. Cummings told her a story about how there was a little mouse that would come out and get right on the bed. They would lie in bed and watch her roll up little balls of wool from the blanket, to make her nest. Well, Blanche was appalled.

GS: Was he sparing the mice on humanitarian, vegetarian principles?

EB: Oh no. Cummings just loved mice. He had several nice poems about mice. He adored them. He used to…

Well, I haven’t said anything profound.

I have, among my books somewhere, I have the Time-Life book she was commissioned to write about Brazil, in which, according to Starbuck, she writes “such wonderful bright clear stories from the history of Brazil.” I’ll have to find it.

The rest of the Ploughshares interview here.  And my own post on Bishop, as remembered by Dana Gioia and Thom Gunn (as well as my own visit to her Brazilian home) is  here.

Translation is the poor stepchild of literature – academics get more applause for producing their own books, not for translating the writing of others; for writers, it’s a distraction from their own work and not terribly well remunerated. Hence, a welter of books never appear on the international stage the way they deserve.

So it’s cheering to see a venture like the Paris-based Le Bruit du Temps, a publishing house crowded in one large room in one of the more picturesque neighborhoods in a city that has plenty of them.  Founder and director Antoine Jaccottet has a desk in one corner; his collaborator, Cécile Meissonnier, has a desk on the other side.  Pictures of Osip Mandelstam, Isaac Babel, and others are stuffed into the edges of a large mirror – they are the real masters here. The window next to it gives a clear view on a plaque indicates that James Joyce finished Ulysses across the street here, on rue du Cardinal Lemoine in the Latin Quarter.

Antoine Jaccottet, son of the poet and translator Philippe Jaccottet (who translated Goethe, Hölderlin, Mann, Mandelstam, Góngora, Leopardi, Musil, Rilke,  Ungaretti, and Homer into French), worked for 15 years at the famous French publisher Gallimard, publishing classics, before he broke out on his own for a shoestring enterprise in 2008. The tight-budge endeavor, however, produces elegantly designed, finely crafted volumes.

Masterpieces don’t die, he says, but they can get lost in the noise of time.  It’s the job of publishers to rediscover them for the public, and what better place than the small adventurous publishers who have a freedom and esprit not usually tapped by large publishing houses.

As I gaze over the offices teeming bookshelves, I notice an entire shelf of W.H. Auden in English.  He’s one of the house’s authors.  Le Mer et le Miroir … Auden in French? How does he come across?  It’s difficult, Antoine admits, for the French to “get” Auden’s sensibility.

He’s also published  Zbigniew Herbert in French, Lev Shestov‘s Athens and Jerusalem, the complete works of Isaac Babel, and Henry James‘s The Ambassadors.  Even Shakespeare‘s (cough, cough) Henry VIII.

Mandelstam is, in a sense, the reason for the place.  The title of the publishing house itself – “the noise of time” – is taken from the title of Mandelstam’s prose collection, which includes perhaps his most autobiographical writing.  Antoine had been taken with the Russian poet in the 90s, and the translations and biography by the eminent scholar Clarence Brown.  One of the first books the house published was Le Timbre égyptien (The Egyptian Stamp).  The Ralph Dutli biography will be published this month.  (The house published Dutli’s poems in 2009).

A piece of old France

Le Bruit du Temps’ books by and about Mandelstam illustrate an underlying principle at the house:  Antoine publishes works that develop and deepen recurrent themes like a symphony.  In 2009, he published published Browning’s L’Anneau et le Livre, republished G.K. Chesterton‘s out-of-print 1903 Robert Browning (Chesterton’s first book), Elizabeth Barrett Browning‘s Sonnets from the Portuguese and Henry James‘s Sur Robert Browning. That’s probably more Browning than Elizabeth Barrett ever saw.

Literary journalism, apparently, is as much in a crisis in France as it is here – the media often publishes book blurbs intact, and critics are famous for not reading the books they review.  So how do people hear about books?  Often, they don’t, he says.

As I leave, Antoine gives me a little souvenir of my visit, the publishing house’s brand new Le Bruit du Temps, a slim and elegant volume, fresh from the press.  What could be more fitting?

He also shows me a rarely seen landmark as he shows me the door – at the back of the courtyard, between the buildings, in the soft sunlight of the late afternoon, the ancient Paris city walls of  Philippe Auguste, the oldest surviving city walls, about the time of the poet Marie de France.

Postscript on 3/16:  Nice mention on the University of Rochester’s “Three Percent” blog over here.

Home away from home – rue de Richelieu

So much to say, so little time to say it.  I have been to the Kultura offices in Maissons Laffitte – that’s the émigré publishing house and journal that indefatigably championed Polish literature-in-exile during the Communist years.  I have had a long conversation with the Antoine Jaccottet, founder of the remarkable Le Bruit du Temps éditions … well, he’s a little remarkable himself.

But it will have to wait. My last online hour is being spent at the Bibliothèque Nationale, Richelieu (I finally found out the reason for all the reconstruction and commotion – the BNF ‘splains it here).  Then, for my offline hours I am joining a few confrères from the American University for my last night in Paris.

Tomorrow, back to springtime and California … and all will be told.

Postscript 2/16 from Elena Danielson:

I love your posts from Paris!

One of my heroes (and there are not too many) is archivist-scholar Georges Bataille who hid Walter Benjamin‘s fragmentary manuscript of the Arcades Project in a restricted collection in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France when Benjamin fled the Nazi invasion and occupation.  What better hiding place? Benjamin perished on the border of France and Spain in 1940. The collected manuscript shards were finally published in the original German in 1982, and did not get fully translated into English until 1999. The unfinished nature of the work would not have bothered him since he preferred aura of  the scholar’s shoebox of notecards to the finished bound work. As he put it in the 1930s: “Today the book is already, as the present mode of scholarly production demonstrates, an outdated medium between two different filing systems.” I’m not sure whether I entirely agree with him on this point, but the world is going in this direction. He was among the first to see it…I felt that aura of Benjamin’s notes and Bataille’s preservation work in the reading room of the BnF…

I know, I know – I keep promising Paris.  But here’s a down-payment, while I figure out how to download my photos.  A colleague recently sent me this youtube video from last April’s “A Company of Authors.”

Included in this excerpt from the day-long event are authors Gabriella Safran, Humble Moi (a.k.a. Cynthia Haven), Abbas Milani, and Ian Morris presenting our recently published books.  That’s Gabriella’s Wandering Soul, my An Invisible Rope: Portraits of Czeslaw Milosz, Abbas’s Myth of the Great Satan/The Shah, and Ian’s Why the West Rules – For Now.

Writing quickly from Desk #39 at the BNF … more later

Just finished a long and exhilarating day at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France – its Galerie Mazarine is about the most opulent place one can imagine to spend hours going through manuscripts.

I am working at the Richelieu site of the BNF – the Mitterand site, I’m told, is less lavish, more functional. The BNF-Richelieu is currently under extensive renovation, and it’s tricky finding your way over the slippery snow to the side entrance on Rue Vivienne.  On the inside of the enclave, the guards are less zealous in their duties than their American counterparts – no sniffing dogs, strip searches, or interrogations.  They work on the assumption that a computer case is just a computer case until proven otherwise, and wave you on.

France makes up for its laissez-faire security with the rigorous procedures indoors: I had to fill out intrusive forms and get a private interview to register for my laminated BNF card with photo – then pay eight euros for the first three days.  (I’ll have to pay again on Saturday.)  It discourages the less determined.

It’s worth it, however. In the end, you get Galerie Mazarine.

At the end of a fruitful day, I must calm myself by contemplating the world’s most beautiful bookstores.  Fortunately, Flavorwire has just the ticket. It lists twenty of the world’s most beautiful bookstores here.

The most entrancing bookstore I have ever visited made the cut: the Librería El Ateneo Grand Splendid in Buenos Aires.  I’m not surprised. Wandering its aisles with my Argentinian friends was truly a mind-boggling experience.  The erstwhile theater boxes are reading rooms – perhaps for those trying to get away from the thousands of tourists that come to the bookstore every year.  Well, that’s one way to turnaround bookstore sales in a sagging industry.

Now, back to my Eiffel tower digs to work some more on the notes I have gathered today.

Geoffrey Hill: Intense

My internet connection in Paris has proven somewhat erratic, and right now I only have time to repeat a 15-year-old anecdote I heard at the American University of Paris’ Center for Writers and Translators.

I can’t promise it is true, but it certainly has the ring of authenticity.

After Geoffrey Hill gave a reading at Boston University, the usual Q&A followed.

Then, the question all poets detest – asked, perhaps by a journalist? “Where does your poetic inspiration come from?”

Only the question wasn’t that short.  Hill, apparently, became more and more intense as the question grew longer and longer and more flowery.  “Verbal adumbrations!” he kept insisting.  “Verbal adumbrations.”

Said the professor relaying the anecdote: “That phrase has stuck in my mind for 15 years.”

Now it’s sticking in mine.

More from Paris later.