We’d love to include comments and questions and topics from everyone else, so if you have any thoughts or reactions, you can email them to me (chad.post [at] rochester.edu), post them in the comments section below, share them on Twitter with #RTWBC, or post them to the I’ll collate everything that I can find and try and work it into the conversation.

To get things started I thought I’d put together a short post with some info about both of the books covering some of the topics I plan on bringing up with Tom.

I still haven’t finished this, but I’m absolutely loving it. Stylistically it reminds me of Celine and Antonio Lobo Antunes with the grounded rants and general disdain for everything. Of the two books I’ve read recently that touch on Spain’s economic collapse, this is definitely the more forceful and direct. At its core, this book is a chronicle of the shittiness that the collapse brought about, with everyone losing their money, their jobs, their future.

This is all centered around Esteban, the narrator for most of the book, who ended up stranded in this small Spanish town, running his father’s carpentry shop. In hopes of finally getting something substantial for himself, he invests a ton of money into his friend’s construction business, which promptly goes bust. As a result, he has to fire everyone, and it’s their voices interspersed throughout the text that really drive home the bleakness of the situation. (Talking about the structure of this book—the rant with the interspersed monologues, the relationship between Esteban’s memories, the card game, and the swamp—will be really interesting as well.)

One of the things that struck me—especially in contrast to a different book I was reading concurrently with this and then put aside—is how honest and true the despair running throughout this book seems. These characters just want a decent life—enough money to feed their kids and to make it to the end. But that’s all been taken away from them by unseen (for the most part) sources and now their futures are incredibly hopeless. This is so much more powerful than books in which the author constructs really contrived situations with which to batter the characters. Nothing in On the Edge feels contrived to me.

I also want to talk with Tom about the humor. To me, the rants can be pretty funny, turning from a sort of bleak observation into something more charged, self-reflexive and playful. What else can you do when everything’s turned to shit but rant in an entertaining fashion?

A couple weeks back, I received an email from a reader praising the book for how compelling the writing is and how it gets right to the heart of the pain of being human. She included a few choice quotes, which I think are worth sharing:

Sometimes it’s the biggest, heaviest things that are the easiest to move. Huge stones in the back of a truck, vans laden with heavy metals. And yet everything that’s inside you—what you think, what you want—all of which apparently weighs nothing—no strong man can lift that onto his shoulder and move it somewhere else. [. . .]

In day-to-day living, you’re constrained by your kids, by your wife; if it wasn’t for them, you’d do all kinds of crazy things, but when you’re in really deep trouble, when you reach that final tipping point, the very opposite happens: it is precisely your wife and kids who make you do the crazy thing that, before, they seemed to be stopping you from doing.

We tend to think that people’s true nature comes out at decisive moments, when the going gets tough, when they’re pushed to the limit. The moment for heroes and saints. And yet, strange though it may seem, at such moments, human behavior is usually neither exemplary nor encouraging. The group who elbow their way to the head of the line where the concert tickets are being handed out; the spectators who flee the burning theater, trampling over the weaker members of the audience . . .

It’ll also be interesting to compare by Mara Faye Lethem, with by Aaron Thier.

Mara Faye Lethem’s review opens with:

On the Edge is not a book you want to read in fits and starts. It is an anti-tweet, a brick of dense prose, that 70-year-old uncle who corners you at a holiday party, grabs you by the lapels and demands you hear him out. Your eyes sometimes glaze over, and you occasionally have to wipe a fleck of whitish spit off your face, but once you give yourself over to his story, you find there are plenty of rewards.

Whereas Aaron Thier’s is titled “On the Edge Gives No Pleasure.”

I’ve already written a couple things about Monospace, so instead of rehashing that all here, I just want to share most of what Charles Gabel posted in the Facebook Group:

So “The Scenery” not only has the footnotes, but from what I can tell by far the most concrete nouns. There’s an obsession of defining the space of the garden, and as the awesome translator Emma Ramadan wrote in one of the blog posts on 3%, it’s inseparable from the act of its own making. In these terms, I kept thinking of the garden as the already-failed arcadia, which suffers completely from its inability to exist, existing only in the flawed medium of language, of poetry (“First problem// a garden is never ideal” (61)) That said, “The Scenery” packs in as much concrete reality as it can, but somehow it’s never stable. Much like the lines aren’t definable in terms of singular tone or texture (I wish I’d underlined a good example of this), I could never fully picture any concrete space of a garden, no matter how many objects appeared or how much the poems talk about graphing the space and putting stuff in it. The definition itself is too insufficient to be confined to a poem, perhaps necessitating the footnotes?

It’s also the section with the most sense of longing, and erotic reaching toward another, the rose bed, etc. (Does this disappear as the book moves toward the later sections? Or did I not pick up on it?) The eros of the first section seems like a useful tension furthering the anxious lack that the book moves to resolve. The first page of “Repetitions” (p. 79) has zero concrete nouns, and seems to be more at ease with its own form; the footnotes are gone, it looks like a poem.

I guess I also want to mention the title, which appears throughout the book, I think as early as p. 16 (italicized as a title would be, maintaining the distance of the creation, the book’s object-ness, something that made me gleeful as a reader), and that it’s a type of typesetting where all the characters take up the same amount of space, which just awesomely sets up and furthers the text-garden-object association. Also, partly because the book’s original title in French is also Monospace, I went to google.fr, and the first association that came up (before the typesetting, which also came up) was a model of minivan. I’m not sure if that has anything to do with anything.

Again, if you have any thoughts or comments, send them in or post them wherever and we’ll try and address them next week on the podcast.

As always, anyone interested in participating in the Reading the World Book Clubs should feel free to email me their questions and comments. Or, if you’re more of a public sharer, feel free to post them in the comments section below, on Twitter at #RTWBC, or in the Facebook We’ll be talking about both of these books on our next podcast.

Chad W. Post: It might be due to the fact that I had been talking about Robbe-Grillet and Sarraute and Pinget earlier in the day before reading this, but I was reminded a bit of the nouveau roman when I was reading it. Something about the way the reader is put in the perspective of the creator, watching the creation come into being, seeing how the scene is set, so to speak. Do you know if this movement had a influence on Parian? Or are there other authors/ideas/movements that are more influential?

Emma Ramadan: While I would venture to guess that any French writer would have to be influenced by the nouveau roman movement to a certain extent, I would hate to speak for Parian in this case—but would be happy to email her asking if you’d like.

CWP: I think it’s interesting that there are no commas in the main poem. (Contrasted with the footnotes, which do have commas.) I found myself having to slow down, reread and parse the lines. I assume this is intentional and present in the original. Was this something that impacted your translation process? I really had to get used to it, as a reader, figuring out where to pause in the middle of lines—it was a bit of an adjustment.

ER: Oh man, the no commas thing. It did make translating this very difficult because it threw into confusion what the sentence structure was, whether a line was a list of adjectives or meant to be nouns modified by adjectives, etc. French can get away with that in a way, and I often felt like in places my translation was begging for commas. Where it was too confusing I sometimes reconfigured the sentences (I’m thinking of: “Wood piles and cardboard demarcate the zone enclosing a small mobile object position unknown compared to a bigger more stable object position known”). Sometimes I let the sentence be confusing if it seemed like it was just as confusing in French. I think there’s a certain aspect of confusion that’s purposeful here, since the narrator is figuring things out as she goes, piling things on, starting over. There’s a messiness to it that feels right. BUT—what was really interesting was that when I finally went and “translated” the index, I realized that she was indexing all the nouns in the book. And while it still remains a mystery to me why exactly she did that—to inventory the garden?—some parts suddenly became clear to me. Things I had previously decided were adjectives in a list were actually nouns! And so I was able to go back and fix some of those more confusing lines.

CWP: In your essay you mention that there are photographs at the end of the P.O.L. edition. What are those and why aren’t they in the La Presse one?

ER: There are two photos, they’re both the same, black and white of a tree and its leaves. I’m almost positive they were taken by Anne. But I actually couldn’t tell you why they’re not in the translation, either because Cole couldn’t get the rights, or because La Presse publications aren’t equipped for that kind of thing. Really not sure. For one of Cole’s translations, of Suzanne Doppelt’s Ring Rang Wrong (Burning Deck), Cole “translated” the photos from the original, taking photos of her own (at least, I know that was her plan). Maybe she felt it required something like that and we didn’t have the time. This was a very long response to say: I have no clue!

And next week, with winter break over and the kids back in school, I’ll have some time to post about our other RTWBC book, On the Edge by Rafael Chirbes.

As always, anyone interested in participating in the Reading the World Book Clubs should feel free to email me their questions and comments. Or, if you’re more of a public sharer, feel free to post them in the comments section below, on Twitter at #RTWBC, or in the Facebook We’ll be talking about both of these books on our next podcast.

In this book of prose poetry, the narrator goes through the steps of making a garden, and then making a world within that garden. In the first section she describes the scenery: the specific types and colors of plants, her maps, the lines she draws, the mud, the streams, her materials, the breeze, the bugs, the foliage, the animals, the lighting. Throughout, she constantly references herself, her methods, her triumphs and her failures. She describes her choices meticulously, and comments on her refusal to comment on her choices. She keeps track of what others say about her project, about her garden. She is painfully self-conscious. She describes her strolls, where she reaches her deepest state of contemplation, even the kinds of chairs she sits in. She describes you, the reader, the observer in her garden, perhaps a lover. She tells you how to build a garden like hers, and what you feel as the observer, what you’re looking for, waiting for. She is simultaneously instructing us (Watch what I copy to better understand how to do what you, like me, still don’t know how to do) and seducing us (Waiting to see you in the rose bed). She makes sure you realize the effect of every stylistic move she makes. With each development she hones her craft. This garden is for her as much as it is for us, the observers running through the garden. She has thought of everything we might want (Where can we go for fun/you say), and throws out what gets in our way (asparagus, carafe, shoes, debris, stuffed poultry).

Parian’s garden is a fiction of her fantasy, but it is not a completely fantastical place. There is filth (to emphasize the disgusting nature of the most repulsive places), there is disorder (the shaky heap is a hell), there is doubt (the smallest doubt dispels all sense and I respond). Parian is constantly starting over, throwing out old designs, beginning anew (I make a clean sweep). In fact, the second section of the book is called “I Begin Again,” beginning again with I begin again. Within this section Parian repeats the phrase I start over again and again. She is less hopeful (future variations/no one says that they hinge/on a chance of success), more careful, more cautious and more suspicious. There are more limits, there is more confusion. She becomes the garden’s painter, repeatedly bringing it back to white. She erases, she crosses out, she struggles (I repeat/that it’s not going anywhere).

The third and final section of Monospace is called “Repetitions.” Each page has fewer words, less detail. She continues to build and rebuild her garden, all the while she is still raking up everything to begin again. She repeats herself, substituting this never-ending cycle of building and tearing down for the conclusion she doesn’t have. At once a garden, map, painting, photograph, and finally a stage, Parian lowers the “curtain” over her book when she senses that we feel trapped There’s nowhere else to stray you say, not expecting applause (Hurry     dim the lights). The book has no real end; instead, Parian allows her work to keep cycling, her last words I start over.

Mirroring the construction of her garden, she carefully designs the mise en page. Parian uses footnotes in the first section, often giving the reader more information about her personal state, or more specifics about the tools, the colors, the lines. The page becomes a kind of grid, a controlled space where Parian shows off her organizational structure, her plan for the page, paralleling her plan for her garden, showing the reader how well she exercises control over the written space, drawing us into a different kind of map where we can feel the effects of her garden more directly. Within the text Parian gives us an idea of what she’s doing, letting us in on the secret that “the scenery takes form from our desire to describe it alone/so flat.” The project and the writing of the project cannot be separated, because the project only exists in the writing of it. Parian gives life to this garden through describing it, through telling us about it.

The text poses a lot of problems for a translator. Feeling in the dark for every word, piecing together what I was able to scrounge up, I attempted a fairly literal first draft. The language was stunted, stiff, verbose, clumsy. Many of Parian’s lines plainly didn’t make sense. Every word was a wall, every phrase a maze. Parian decidedly does not put commas where they belong, and in their absence, her long lists come off at first glance as a sprawling nonsensical phrase until you mentally draw in the pauses yourself. I didn’t understand why the words wouldn’t come out into the light, why their meaning stubbornly remained hidden in dark corners. The language she uses is slippery and grammatically confusing, and as I slowly lured everything over into English, not only was it gibberish, but it was unelegant gibberish. I was groping.

Until finally: a light. Parian’s original French is meant to be real aloud. The language flows and dips, stretches and silks, and its noise is undeniably beautiful. The words sound so good laced together, even when their meaning isn’t clear, is blurred or isn’t there to begin with. Parian forms her phrases based on sound, and so when I was bringing the words into English, my goal was to translate the sound of the words, the smoothness and the rhythm, the rhyme and the flow. The meaning of the words, or keeping the exact words she had used, was not the only thing of importance. Some could even be left behind, as long as the effect of their sounds was present in the translation.

Apart from the sound of the language, I encountered a few other recurring difficulties while translating Monospace. Parian often piles on word after word in one sentence, and the English translation of these heavy, almost formal, Germanic words was not smooth, as it was in the French. Parian also purposely avoids commas throughout the vast majority of her book, which sets a very fluid and at times confusing rhythm, which I tried to preserve in my translation.

Another difficulty I encountered was how to convey the dual or multiple meanings of a word. Parian uses the word plan, which can mean plan, map, project, and design, to name a few, nineteen times in Monospace. In each situation, it’s unclear whether she is describing a map, or a design, or something else; it’s also not clear whether the meaning stays the same throughout, or if she switches between meaning a map, a design, or something else. What I ended up doing was picking one definition based on either the context, or, more often, based on what sounded best in a given sentence. However, there was a situation where I decided I needed to incorporate both meanings of a certain French word. Towards the end of the book, scattered throughout Parian’s phrases is the word rideau, or curtain. From the beginning, the theme of the book and her project as a stage set is very present, and towards the end it’s as if she’s lowering the curtain on herself, expecting no louanges/applause, but bringing her final act to a conclusion in whatever way she can as a creeping crumbling seeps into the pages. On page 105, Parian uses the word fonce, which can mean either to dim [lights], to darken, to charge into or rush at, to have drive, to hurry up, and more. All the different definitions seemed equally important and relevant, and so instead of depriving the English reader of half the word’s meanings, I decided to incorporate two encompassing words, separated by a block of empty space: “hurry     dim the lights.”

Another example of this is the word ��é���ǰ�, the title of the first section of Monospace. ��é���ǰ� can mean setting, scenery, set, decoration, et cetera. These alternate meanings may seem similar, but they set the tone for two very different interpretations of what’s going on in Monospace. Throughout the work, Parian sprinkles words that reference a stage set, allowing the reader to take away a sense of Monospace and its project as the unwinding of a play, with a plot and an audience. At other points there are words that reference the work as a painting (I am its painter), or as a photograph (Retouching the photographs). Parian seamlessly fuses together different forms. Her work is saturated with different media—there are even photographs included at the end of Monospace. This trend is visible in her other work as well, and Parian is known for not limiting herself to any type of form, or type of expression within a given form. Parian’s body of work includes photography, video, lectures, and twelve books, in which she explores poetry, fiction, and even nonfiction—bordering on autobiography— in her most recent book La Chambre du milieu, written from the first person perspective of a child.

Her writing may look sparse, but it’s unbelievably rich. Through her explorations of sound, Parian takes on the task of writer, photographer, painter, and director. When asked about this aspect of writing Parian has said:

As a general rule, I prefer to call myself a “poet” only . . . which is to say that I busy myself (I think) in re-making the world (giving shape to [possible] worlds), which is to say re-reading the world (that which is available to me). And so I think the word “poet” is the best word for “artist”… So I don’t want to distinguish between the state of writer, photographer, videographer, etc., but my states are infinite (I exaggerate).

Monospace is an example of the kind of contemporary, experimental writing coming out of France from writers such as Parian who are pushing the limits of the poetry genre.

Beyond the margin
I make a dock out of planks
jump to the other side
assuming you followed me
diagonally

Parian steps outside of the supposed boundaries of the written space, constructs a path leading into some unknown potential area. She glances over her shoulder to see if she’s successfully taken us there, if we’re on board.

Before getting to that, just a reminder that anyone interested in participating in the Reading the World Book Clubs should feel free to email me their questions and comments. Or, if you’re more of a public sharer, feel free to post them in the comments section below, on Twitter at #RTWBC, or in the Facebook

Now, on to Monospace.

The Author.

There’s not a lot of information about Parian available online, at least not in English. There is this of her reading, and the short bio from the book itself:

Anne Parian was born in Marseille in 1964 and currently lives in Paris. She is the author of seven books of poetry and hybrid works; she is also a photographer and video artist.

Which, to be honest, is longer than the one I found at

Née à Marseille en 1964.

Exerce la psychanalyse à Paris.

Her first book, À la recherche du lieu de ma naissance came out in 1994, and her most recent, La Chambre du milieu, is from 2011. Monospace came out in 2007. That’s about all I’ve got.

The Translator.

From the book:

Emma Ramadan has a BA in Comparative Literature from Brown University and a Masters in Cultural Translation from the American University of Paris. Her translation of Anne Garréta’s novel Sphinx was published by Deep Vellum and her poetry has appeared in a number of journals. She recently spent a year in Marrakech translating works by the Moroccan writer Ahmed Bouanani and working with Dar al-Ma’mûn library.

A lot of people reading this will recognize Emma as the translator of Anne Garréta’s Sphinx. According to she’s translating another of Garréta’s books for Deep Vellum, Not One Day, which is slated for a 2017 release. Additionally, she’s also translating The Curious Case of Dassoukine’s Trousers by Fouad Laroui for Deep Vellum, and she’s helping put together an issue of Words Without Borders dedicated to Moroccan writing.

As the recipient of a 2013 travel fellowship from the American Literary Translators Association, she’s definitely one of the top up-and-coming translators of French writing. Her dual interest in Moroccan literature and more experimental texts is really interesting as well . . .

The Publisher.

La Presse is an imprint of Fence Books and is dedicated to contemporary French poetry and hybrid-genre work translated by English-language poets. We’re a nano-press; we publish one to three books a year.

If I’m not mistaken, this is all Cole Swensen. Which, given all the other things that she does, explains why they’re publishing only a couple of books a year. So far, La Presse has brought out fourteen titles, with translations by Keith Waldrop, Eleni Sikelianos, Jean-Jacques Poucel, and several other well respected translators.

The books are beautifully produced, well-edited, wonderfully translated. I’m more or less completely outside of the poetry world, but hopefully they’re well-received as well. It’s an impressive project.

The Book.

Here’s the jacket copy:

Monospace is, first and finally, the dream of a garden. There are so many gardens—there is, of course, the story of a perfect one—and perfectly lost. So these pages gather perfumes, trees, benches, buildings, colors, and perspectives all together. They arrange a terrain, a territory, a trench, a tableau. But how, among inevitable ruins, can we create a space that can only take form as it is being described? Monospace repeats the question: “How can we garden space into existence?”

That seems about right. I’m really at a loss about how to talk about poetry books, which is one reason why I wanted to start up this part of the RTWBC—hopefully some smarter people out there, who are more keyed into contemporary poetry, can help me come to better understand and appreciate it.

The book is broken up into three sections (or maybe four, if you count the list of items that prefaces the first one, or maybe five if you count the “Index”): “The Scenery,” “I Begin Again,” and “Repetitions.”

“The Scenery” includes a fair number of footnotes, right from the start. Most of the poem involves descriptions of a landscape, but with more of a focus on the intentionality of creating/describing this landscape.

For example, here’s a simple line from the beginning:

The unique use of frankly unstable seated postures²⁸

28. I prefer folding chairs
to rest or reflect
they perk me up
though they mock me with their garish colors

The second section, “I Begin Again,” does away with the footnotes, while ramping up the intentionality of the construction. (Again, this is my dumb interpretation/reading.)

First problem

a garden is never ideal

it resists the effects appearing without follow-through repeated with
joy

I begin again

the roots spreading out on each side I throw the whole so that it is
reflected
under the radar of perception

of interphenomena of drawings of stains
of style

“Repetitions” is a bit tighter, but similar:

Go off often without looking
or staying
would I look for it
now that I don’t believe it
by collecting comforts
without sufficient aid or ways
unstable
without the support
of that which we
carelessly remember

The book ends with a ten-page index that seems to list the appearance of every word in the book. “drawings: 36, 45, 61, 70, 87; dream: 105; dreams: 21,50,92.” I don’t know what to make of that, except that these are maybe the individual materials for making the “monospace”? (Again, dumb. Don’t read a lot of poetry. Trying my best.)

Another Notable Thing.

According to the note at the end, the book was designed by Erica Mena, who happens to the executive director of the American Literary Translators Association. That’s a nice connection.

So go out and and send along some comments, questions, interpretations, etc. And if you’re on Facebook, (Or use #RTWBC on the Twitters.)