{"id":275446,"date":"2009-12-10T15:00:00","date_gmt":"2009-12-10T15:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wdev.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent-dev\/2009\/12\/10\/europes\/"},"modified":"2018-04-16T17:15:13","modified_gmt":"2018-04-16T17:15:13","slug":"europes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/2009\/12\/10\/europes\/","title":{"rendered":"Europes"},"content":{"rendered":"

After having published Return to Calm<\/em>, Host Publications now offers us another book by Jacques R\u00e9da, also bilingual and also in Aaron Prevots\u2019s translation\u2014Europes.<\/i> If in an \u201cofficial\u201d way Europes could be called a \u201ctravel essay,\u201d the book\u2019s fluid character undermines this characterization. Recording the fleeting instants of the narrator\u2019s peregrinations, Europes includes essays on Portugal, Spain, Italy, Switzerland, Germany, Scandinavia and France\u2014one or two essays followed by one or more poems for each country. The poems are “po\u00e8mes de circonstance,”<\/em> that is, topical poems, in this case, poems on the countries described in the preceding essays, written in the tradition of Raymond Queneau: playful, silly, ironically rhymed.<\/p>\n

R\u00e9da is what the French call a fl\u00e2neur,<\/em> a roamer who enjoys his anonymous status in a city\u2019s labyrinth. When a fl\u00e2neur<\/em> crosses a border into a new territory he becomes a tourist. The difference between a fl\u00e2neur<\/em> and a tourist is that a tourist usually has a destination and certain goals\u2014“Today is Paris Disneyland, tomorrow Auschwitz.” R\u00e9da is that rare species of tourist-fl\u00e2neur;<\/i> more a traveler than a tourist, he doesn\u2019t entirely belong to the first category either, since as early as the eighteenth century it was common for travelers to have a project: that of letting themselves be formed<\/em> by the experience of travel. R\u00e9da wants to be neither formed nor informed by his travels, he simply has \u201cla bougeotte,\u201d as the French would say, i.e., he can\u2019t stay put.<\/p>\n

Although R\u00e9da\u2019s style is very literary, he is no snob, and he probably wouldn\u2019t mind being called a tourist. With complete lack of snobbery, he declares that he loves supermarkets \u201cfor themselves,\u201d a love only natural for someone who has grown up in poverty (after all, to despise richness is a luxury only the rich can afford). But this confession is immediately followed by an unexpected critical reflection: supermarkets are \u201ccounter-museums\u201d or \u201cmuseums of the instant,\u201d R\u00e9da says, \u201cwhose instants are accessible, consumable, nearly straightaway consumed but indefinitely renewable . . .\u201d<\/p>\n

As a fl\u00e2neur,<\/em> R\u00e9da is an heir to Baudelaire. As a true Frenchman, he doesn\u2019t simply record what he sees, as American writers usually do, but also analyzes it; yet I wouldn\u2019t say that he writes in the tradition of, say, Sartre, or de Beauvoir (I am thinking of their writings on their travels to the States), whose critical impulse is to seize the unknown in the Other and freeze it through their aphoristic pronouncements. Neither a lover of exotic experiences\u2014R\u00e9da prefers to stay in his European milieu rather than look for spicy otherness through some eco-tourist agency\u2014nor a nostalgic ruminator for the good old days, R\u00e9da is a lover of trains\u2014that is, of rhythmic movement and chance encounters\u2014of temporary estrangement, and strangely familiar places. The only contemporary writer I can think of who belongs to the same family is John Taylor, an American who lives in France, whose Some Sort of Joy<\/em> has recently come out in a French translation. <\/p>\n

R\u00e9da\u2019s style is an homage to the long sentence made of complex clauses with subordinates that intricately follow each other\u2014a perfect mastery of grammar as a logic-machine. At the end of the sentence you experience the climactic joy of a detective who has discovered the criminal. The long, complex sentence is, alas, an endangered species, at least in this country, where \u201ceconomy\u201d of style or so-called \u201cminimalism\u201d is synonymous with \u201cgood writing,\u201d when in fact it is often simply laziness of thinking. <\/p>\n

Reading R\u00e9da, the bilingual reader is also struck by something else: R\u00e9da is a very ironic writer, but you have to read him in French in order to realize that. This is not because Prevots\u2019s translation is not good enough\u2014it is a perfectly good translation\u2014but because what we call irony is different in every language. The irony of French writers is more artificial than that of their American counterparts because, as in R\u00e9da\u2019s case, it represents the tone of a persona or a mask the author has put on, and the authorial masks we use are generally grounded in voices that have preceded us. In other words: our irony is never entirely \u201cauthentic\u201d\u2014rather it is a mimesis of the irony of other authors that have written in our language, and the reader can experience that irony because he can recognize the tone in his cultural repertoire. Contemporary American writers practice an irony that is more colloquial and more nihilistic in the sense that the authorial voice situates itself somewhere above good and evil, and is rarely self-ironic. R\u00e9da is self-ironic, which, of course, makes him funny. <\/p>\n

The last piece in the book, \u201cA Paris Crossing\u201d includes some metatextual commentary on the story\u2019s source, namely the fact that it had been initially commissioned by a so-called geographic tourism magazine, which, having asked for a piece in ten thousand characters, ends up rejecting it because it failed to comply with the magazine\u2019s editorial policy. We find this out both in the first paragraph and in a footnote at the end of the story. In the first paragraph, R\u00e9da lets the reader know that the magazine suggested to him to \u201ccross Paris in ten thousand characters,\u201d and he compares this editorial practice with the ethos of athletic competitiveness, adding: \u201cMoreover, I\u2019ve just squandered three or four hundred characters complaining about my fate.\u201d I am the kind of reader who gets a lot of pleasure out of these disclosures, all the more so when I imagine the editor of said tourism magazine reading the piece that makes fun his policies.<\/p>\n

I hate to sound didactic, but this a book that anyone who teaches French culture and literature should have.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

After having published Return to Calm, Host Publications now offers us another book by Jacques R\u00e9da, also bilingual and also in Aaron Prevots\u2019s translation\u2014Europes. If in an \u201cofficial\u201d way Europes could be called a \u201ctravel essay,\u201d the book\u2019s fluid character undermines this characterization. Recording the fleeting instants of the narrator\u2019s peregrinations, Europes includes essays on […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":292,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[67486],"tags":[29106,13786,29126,3426,29116,29096,29136],"class_list":["post-275446","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","tag-aaron-prevots","tag-daniela-hurezanu","tag-europes","tag-french-literature","tag-host-publications","tag-jacques-reda","tag-return-to-calm"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275446","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/292"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=275446"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275446\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":349976,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275446\/revisions\/349976"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=275446"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=275446"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=275446"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}