Active Book Pitches

Active pitches (A Dreaming Hermit, Dolbreuse, Parisian Forces, The Air Trafficker, Notes from Underground)

A. Songes d’un Hermite (A Dreaming Hermit)

Louis-Sébastien Mercier’s 1770 novel Songes d’un Hermite is an encyclopedic portrait of the rotten situation in France two decades before the guillotines began to fall during the French Revolution. It is so preoccupied with being a cross-section of society it almost resembles one of those inset scientific diagrams from that same era: Diderot and d’Alembert’s watershed reference work, the Encyclopédie itself. As I pass this book onto editors, my sense is that the title should be A Dreaming Hermit because I wanted to emphasize the letter a. The text can first and foremost be read as a responses to—if not a slanted retelling—of the legend of Saint Anthony of Egypt—a man who has fled society and is beset by demons, if not ones of spirit then ones that in the light of the Enlightenment reasons he struggles with, are mere phantasmagoric memories. The twist being that this man thinks of grace but he is not perforce a holy man. It is an author dreaming a hermit, in any case—ones the narrator does not quite know how to be. The pervasive awkwardness of all his attempts to communicate makes France’s descent into violence palpable: as he is tormented by the reality of ossified class structure, of rank—separation of genders into impossibly compartmentalized units. I am preparing a scholarly edition that should be enticing to several different academic publishers.

Sample sentence: Un Hermite ne goûte pas toujours les charmes de sa solitude ; il a souvent à essuyer des moment de tristesse & d'ennui qui lui font regretter la société de ses semblables. 

My translation: A hermit does not always relish solitude; he often has to bear the fleeting sadness and boredom that lead him to miss the company of his kindred men.

 Parts of this sentence came right together. No flagrant anachronisms allowed. I had in my mind translator Lydia Davis, a goated stalking horse—in No Tomorrow she reworked an untranslated text into pseudo-eighteenth-century English that would be intelligible to late-twentieth-century readers. 

This sentence got tricky near the end when I reached a word that seemed direct but doesn’t map neatly onto English—the word “semblables.” Translations of a later (but still old) poem, “Au lecteur” by Baudelaire, have rendered “semblable” as “double, twin, likeness, like.” But can it be any of these when the word is plural? I thought of saying “peer,” but a search of the Eighteenth-Century Poetry Archive reminded me that this would be problematic to the extent that the term “peer” is overshadowed by the idea of a “nobleman of dignity.” As in the House of Peers. Peer as “person equal in dignity” is attested from 1300 or so according to etymonline.com. But does “semblable” mean “person who is alike in dignity? As one of the eighteenth-century French dictionaries featured on the site Dictionnaires d’autrefois states, semblables means “men like me.” In point of fact, to clarify, it turns out that “peer” as person from the same age group or cohort dates only to 1944.

I was of two minds—far from court, the narrator is still fixated on hierarchy and in the coming fantasy will imagine having a magic object that will allow him to make friends with a king. 

I was also enticed by the idea of “brethren”…but even this seems too inclusive and Gospel-y.

This was when I hit upon the idea of “semblable” as kindred spirit. A kindred is a relative, already well attested for centuries in texts like the King James in the Old Testament. A kindred spirit is someone who is like you—but not because of blood. It is a strategically vague word in many contexts. 

These letters are intended for the people who are as embittered or receptive to bitterness about the world as the narrator is in his own effusive way. “Kindred spirits” seemed both matter of fact and quietly grandiose. It’s a key to unlocking the voice of the narrator in English.

B. Dolbreuse, or, a Man of His Century Brought Back to Truth by Sensibility and Reason

Joseph-Marie Loaisel de Tréogate's meditation on love, war, and manhood is the sensual, memoiristic novel that a philosopher like Rousseau almost could have written if he were a little less into lecturing. Its descriptions of a passionate human mind manage to be both encyclopedically precise while expressing the in-the-moment flow of consciousness itself. The title, the last name of the hero, would appear to be a portmanteau of dolor/douleur (pain) and ténébreuse (shadowy). I am looking for a publisher who is interested in the scholarly apparatus I have assembled that brings the world of this work to life.

La Marquise étoit de ces femmes qui s'extassent au mot de conscience, & dont la vie entière est un tourbillon d'inconstance, qui ont le langage & tout l'extérieur du sentiment, qui aspirent, qui eurent des droits peut-être aux biens qu'il promet, qui se croyant de bonne-foi susceptibles d'une tendresse à toute épreuve, prodiguent les sermens d'aimer toujours avec les témoignages de la passion la plus vive & la plus sincère ; mais chez lesquelles l'imagination ne se repose jamais, & dont l'ame trop flexible & gâtée d'ailleurs par une mauvaise éducation, ne reçoit plus que des impressions fugitives. Sans former aucun desir injurieux à mon épouse, je me procurai des lumières sur le compte de la Marquise. Au premier abord , elle m'avoit paru faite pour ressentir & inspirer une passion : & malgré ma résolution de ne jamais violer la soi conjugale, je fus fâché d'être détrompé. 

Translation:

The Marquise was the type of woman who becomes rapturous at the word steadfastness and whose whole life is a whirlwind of fickleness, who possesses the language and the full edifice of sentiment, who breathes in the lofty air, and who perhaps gained a right to the goods sentiment promises, who believes herself to be of good faith, prone to tenderness in the face of each test, lavish oaths of love forever borne witness to with the most brisk and sincere passion, but in whom imagination never is at rest, and whose soul, too flexible and spoiled moreover by a bad education, no longer receives anything but fleeting impressions. Without forming any desire to injure my wife, I obtained some insights into the Marquise. At first sight, she seemed to me to be made to feel and inspire passion: and in spite of my resolve never to violate conjugal fidelity it displeased me to be pulled out of error. 

C. Puissances de Paris (Parisian Forces)

For the title of this translation of Jules Romains’s 1911 collection of prose poems, I resisted the arch silliness of the straight translation Parisian Powers. These poems crackle with the urge to x-ray a city; my title embellishes the word Paris with an element of surprise rent across the requisite stress pattern.

Sample sentence: “Courbe comme les formes qui excitent l’amour, et comme le bras qui cerne une taille avant de la serrer, elle paraît vouée à soi.”

“A curve like the shapes that inflame love, like an arm that studies a mass before squeezing; it seems devoted to oneself. […None of the city’s motion passes through it, but many end up there and make themselves comfortable.]”

At first it sounds like a mistranslation. But the improbable phrase, “It seems devoted to oneself” is the early Romains’s ethos and aesthetic in a sentence. He was the founder of the Unanimist movement. The work from his Unanimist phase early in his life seeks to suss out the little ways that participants in the flow of life become part of objects vaster than them, the ones that embrace the many.

D. Продавец воздуха (The Air Trafficker)

Aleksandr Belyaev's 1929 novel The Air Trafficker is a Soviet Russia boys' adventure story, notionally Stalinist propaganda about the fiendishness of capitalism in which a bourgeois villain attempts to destroy the world in order to revel in the possibilities of domination. The fact that when Nazis occupied the city where Belyaev was located during World War II and gave him a respectful funeral when so much of their end of life services were intensely cruel has everything to do with the fact that Belyaev taps into the fascination with technical precision and gadgetry common to boys' adventures around the world in the tradition of Jules Verne.  

Sample sentences, from chapter nine: "После бессонной ночи и волнений я чувствовал себя слабым и разбитым. Мне хотелось спать." - After a sleepless night and after the excitement, I felt weak and broken. Sleep was overtaking me." (This sentence after drama in an underground city of a supervillain, stands out to me because it mirrors the structure of the Russian. Instead of the facile straightforwardness of I was falling asleep, this sentence emphasizes that sleep is a force beyond the narrator that is autonomous and acting upon him. It reflects my overall strategy for the translation: to find that chipper, techne-minded voice so often found in Verne novels with a rendering that is attentive to the shape and texture of Russian thought itself.

E. Записки из подполья (Notes from Underground)

I do not quite feel compelled to tell a broad spectrum of people about my approach to translating this Dostoevsky classic at this time. It’s a witty and compelling strategy that rethinks many of the assumptions previous translators have adopted. I hope this thought is not too underground.