Posts Tagged ‘“Isaac Babel”’

The publisher...

Some of you may recall my visit to the innovative Parisian publishing house of Le Bruit du Temps and it’s founder, Antoine Jaccottet, during my recent visit to Paris, during the cold, cold, cold snap of last February. I also spoke at the American University in Paris, and visited friend and colleague Daniel Medin.

Here’s a podcast that entwines them both:  Daniel interviews Antoine Jaccottet at “That Other Word,” a series of podcasts on literature and translation, the result of a collaboration between the Center for Writers and Translators at the American University of Paris and San Francisco’s Center for the Art of Translation.

...and his admirer

Said Daniel:  “It surprised me to learn that it was a small press in France doing the complete works of Zbigniew Herbert … that it was a small press in France doing the completeIsaac Babel, a volume even larger than the [Peter] Constantine one that appeared a decade ago in English , and that it was a small French press discovering books like the Julius Margolin‘s gulag memoir, and bringing them to life.  And I wanted to meet this editor, because of the interesting books he was selecting, because of the variety.”  Now you will have a chance to meet him, too.

But first, you’ll get Daniel’s quick overview of this month’s Book Expo America in New York City, where “Russia was the country of honor this year,” he said. He and Scott Esposito discuss a range of contemporary authors and books, including Mikhail Shishkin‘s Maidenhair, which will appear in English this October; Polish author Marek Bieńczyk’s Transparency;  Julius Margolin’s gulag memoir, Voyage au pays des Ze-Ka; and Dalkey Archive Press’ Contemporary Georgian Fiction.  

Their interests do not lie entirely east of the Vienna: they also discuss Éric Chevillard’s Prehistoric Times and his Demolishing Nisard.

Then, on to Antoine Jacottet.  On the perils of translation, the French publisher said:  “You do well what you know a little. I worked myself as a translator. I might mention my father [Philippe Jaccottet] was – is still – a well known translator.  For me, it has always been very important to be attentive to the quality of translations. When we began the press, my idea was: if you are a very small press and if you want to publish works that you think are masterpieces, one way of doing it is to order a new translation, and then you have to find a good translator for it. It’s not always easy, but  I think it’s the part of my job that fascinates me most.”

The podcast 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.

I was in the U.K. when Grisha Freidin gave his talk in the “How I Think About Literature” series last fall, but Isaac Babel‘s biographer sounds characteristically feisty in Luke Parker‘s account:

 “What is the difference between what I write and what Babel wrote? The difference is I have footnotes,” says Gregory Freidin, Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures and expert on Russian writer Isaac Babel. “What we do here is falsifiable. What he does is not falsifiable. You don’t like Babel, write your own.”

Babel in 1920

A little background on Grisha from my article two years ago:

As a teenager in the mid-1960s, Gregory Freidin moved with his family to a rough side of Moscow, to what he described as a neighborhood notorious “for its Jewish thieves, counterfeiters and dealers in stolen goods.” He had entered “the Jewish underworld.” In short, the Soviet kid discovered Isaac Babel’s world.

Freidin is now perhaps the world’s foremost scholar on Babel, the Russian-Jewish short story writer, playwright and journalist. He is throwing a spotlight on the writer who described the horrors of war and the gangsters of Odessa with trademark irony and acute observation. 

Grisha’s lifelong exploration of literature was fueled, as described in Parker’s account, by the longing for that “other story” which “he had suspected, even in his Stalinist childhood, might exist outside the walls of his Moscow tenement”:

This “other story” fuelled his search for the wellsprings of literature’s affective power – a power that in 1962 erupted with the publication of Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. Although a “pretty thin book, a long short story really,” nonetheless “it for a moment outweighed the Kremlin and the mighty Soviet state.” Ivan Denisovich permitted millions publicly to mourn the victims of the Gulag, forcing the Kremlin into a tactical show of penance before the people: a Soviet civil society had been born, producing an effect “greater than 9/11.” It was to explain events such as these, showcasing literature’s moments of extraordinary power, that Grisha turned in his work to the fields of cultural anthropology, the sociology of religion, and psychoanalytic theory.

You can read a short account of the talk here.  Or, for that matter, you can read Grisha talking about his  enthusiasm for Babel in my account here:

“He created archetypal stories about modern Jewish childhood, about intellectuals and violence, the violence that accompanied Russia’s transition to modernity and the revolution in which Russia’s Jews were both uplifted and victimized,” said Freidin. …

“Babel is a writer who forces you to confront yourself,” said Freidin. “Babel makes art out of unsettling your point of view by irony. You have to follow his game and test your own ability to follow his ironic twists and turns.”

The violence in this pacifist writer continues to fascinate Freidin: “He was probably, to my mind, the greatest writer to portray violence, as it were, without judgment – and at the same time show its horror, and beauty, and the great pleasure people get from violence, while somehow sneaking in his pacifism as well.”

Or, for a third option, watch my video interview with Grisha below:

Isaac Babel

Literary conferences are mostly staid affairs, opportunities for academics to exhibit themselves.  But not always.

I discussed Elif Batuman’s book a few days ago here.  Her new book, The Possessed: Adventures With Russian Books and the People Who Read Them, was reviewed yesterday in the Los Angeles Times here.  Clearly, I should have made an effort to attend The Enigma of Isaac Babel: International Conference, held almost exactly six years ago.  A few highlights from that memorable event:

“Babel in California” tells how Batuman fell in love with Isaac Babel, the most electric of Russian writers, then shows that idealized literary love bumping up against actual life in the hilarious, chastening shape of a Babel conference at Stanford organized by her mentor, the great Babelogist Grisha Freidin. Batuman helps with an exhibit and discovers in the bowels of Stanford’s Hoover library a true wonderland of previously hidden connections between Babel and the 1933 movie “King Kong.” She’s sent to the airport to pick up Babel’s second wife and one of his daughters, two tired Russian women who keep firing questions about the McDonald’s Happy Meal toy, a tiny stuffed Eeyore wearing a tiger suit, hanging from the mirror of the car that Batuman is driving.

Conference panels end in pandemonium; Russian scholars, upset by the presence of two Chinese filmmakers preparing a script from Babel stories, mutter “We don’t mess with your ‘I-Ching’ “; and there’s a dinner “straight out of Dostoyevsky” in which Batuman and Freidin get the evil eye from a vain English translator in whose acclaimed Babel collection edition they have discovered mistakes. Yet even this isn’t the marvelous climax of the dinner, which comes when Babel’s daughter by his first wife stares at Babel’s second wife and shouts “THAT OLD WITCH WILL BURY US ALL.”

The writer, Richard Rayner, describes Babel as “the most electric of Russian writers.”  Not sure it’s the adjective I would have chosen (more electric than, say, Tsvetaeva?)  I wrote about Grisha Freidin’s work on the doomed Soviet writer today here.  See what you think.

The upshot:  Rayner praise’s Batuman’s “dazzling flair and originality”:  “If Susan Sontag had coupled with Buster Keaton, their prodigiously gifted love child might have written this book.”