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For Anne Dunn
CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
“Curious Resemblances”: John Ashbery Translates French Prose
Introduction by Rosanne Wasserman and Eugene Richie
Marie-Catherine d’Aulnoy (1650–1705)
The White Cat
Odilon Redon (1840–1916)
From To Oneself
Alfred Jarry (1873–1907)
Fear Visits Love
Raymond Roussel (1877–1933)
An Unpublished Note
From Impressions of Africa
Documents to Serve as an Outline
Note by John Ashbery
Introduction to “In Havana” by John Ashbery
In Havana
First Document
Second Document
Third Document
Fourth Document
Fifth Document
Sixth Document
Giorgio de Chirico (1888–1978)
On Silence
Courbet
The Engineer’s Son
The Survivor of Navarino
Selection One from Hebdomeros
Selection Two from Hebdomeros
That Evening Monsieur Dudron …
It Was Something Like …
Monsieur Dudron’s Adventure
Pierre Reverdy (1889–1960)
Haunted House
Antonin Artaud (1896–1948)
Correspondence with Jacques Rivière (1886–1925)
Henri Michaux (1899–1984)
Introduction to an Exhibition Catalogue
Michel Leiris (1901–1990)
Conception and Reality in the Work of Raymond Roussel
Salvador Dalí (1904–1989)
The Incendiary Firemen
De Kooning’s 300,000,000th Birthday
Jean Hélion (1904–1987)
Figure
Pierre Martory (1920–1998)
Introduction to Washington Square by Henry James
Raymond Mason (1922–2010)
Where Have All the Eggplants Gone?
Iannis Xenakis (1922–2001)
The Cosmic City
Jacques Dupin (1927–2012)
Texts for an Approach
Marcelin Pleynet (1933)
The Image of Meaning
Notes
Appendix: Chronology of First Publication Dates of Translations
Bibliography
Acknowledgments
Biographies of Translator and Editors
Also by John Ashbery
Permissions Acknowledgments
Copyright
“CURIOUS RESEMBLANCES”: JOHN ASHBERY TRANSLATES FRENCH PROSE
Introduction by Rosanne Wasserman and Eugene Richie
John Ashbery’s Collected French Translations are gathered into two volumes. This volume presents a selection of English translations of twenty-eight prose pieces composed by seventeen writers: not only masters of fiction, but also poets, playwrights, artists, musicians, and critics. The other volume is a bilingual collection of 171 poems written by twenty-four poets. Both volumes offer published translations long unavailable, as well as some previously unpublished works. As we identified, located, and edited these selections, Ashbery has guided our choices and helped us find materials. Each volume offers unique opportunities for insight into the wide and varied scope of French cultural influence on Ashbery’s work, over the decades of his productive and resonant career. This influence appears not only in his own poetry, but also in his responses to visual art, music, and cinema. Encountering these translations will open, for interested readers and scholars alike, windows into Ashbery’s relationship with many well-known French writers, artists, and cultural figures. Both volumes will also introduce several unfamiliar voices from the vast canon of French literature, writers who have been given special attention here by one of our most distinguished American poets.
We have included here all of the fiction that Ashbery has translated and published before, but we have selected the essays, choosing, for example, among pieces from a large group of articles originally published in Art and Literature and ARTnews. In addition, some of Ashbery’s translations of Raymond Roussel remain in manuscript in the Ashbery Resource Center archives of the Flow Chart Foundation; these pieces are currently being prepared for publication by Ava Lehrer. And, most recently, Ashbery has translated the prose piece by Pierre Martory included here—the introduction to a 1954 French translation of Henry James’s Washington Square.
The French originals that Ashbery used for these translations came from libraries, bookstores, his own and his friends’ collections, and manuscripts; also, some pieces were given or assigned to him when he was asked to translate works. Due to considerations of length, this volume is not bilingual. However, many of the original French prose works are currently quite easily available, if a reader wishes to explore further. The Appendix offers a chronology of the first publication dates of every translation in the two volumes, as an aid to scholars who might want to compare Ashbery’s translation work with the publication dates of his own poetry and prose. In addition, full bibliographical information about the English translations and any reprints appears at the end of each author’s selection. We have consistently used for this book only the latest of Ashbery’s available drafts of any published or unpublished translation.1
Ashbery and French
Ashbery’s engagement with the French language and its literature spans nearly eighty years.2 As a child in upstate New York, Ashbery read French fairy tales in English, including the masterworks of Charles Perrault, and among his earliest encounters with French itself were entries in a children’s encyclopedia, the 1923 edition of The Book of Knowledge. He had a glimpse into the lives of Europeanized Americans through his grandfather Henry Lawrence’s cousins, Paul and Lillian Holling. These siblings lived for decades in France and England, sending letters to the Ashbery household and fascinating gifts to the little boy. They had returned to the United States briefly in 1929, then repatriated to the family hometown in Pultneyville, New York, in advance of World War II.3 The worlds that these stories, books, and associations invoked stayed with him throughout his life, creating a sense of French literature as “a place of romance and pageantry, and all the things one wants”4—an enraptured description of his choices in these volumes, spanning centuries from Marie-Catherine d’Aulnoy’s magical story “The White Cat” to the synchronic, cinematic poetries of Pascalle Monnier.
Even in his teens, Ashbery’s French-language skills were impressive. His cousin Paul Holling’s sometimes off-color French books were not too advanced for the precocious adolescent. At fifteen, he writes in his diary, on May 15, 1943, after spending an evening at a neighbor’s house, which had belonged to the Hollings and which still housed some of Paul’s European possessions: “I was over there tonight … reading Chansons de Bilitis in the French. Nana said, ‘Wouldn’t the Hollings be pleased if they knew you could read French Novels!’ I felt like answering: ‘Not if they knew the ones I pick out to read.’”5 He also resorted to recording his more private experiences in French, which his mother, Helen, who was apt to look at his correspondence and diary, could not read; sometimes, to disguise cognates, he abbreviated French words or used puns to throw her even further off track. Clearly, th
e older generation never found him out: He duly records in his diary on July 28, 1943, that for his sixteenth birthday, his parents gave him a French dictionary.
Ashbery studied French as soon as he could, rapidly excelling in classes and exams at his upstate New York high school. In 1945, his first year at Harvard, he again took classes in French, as well as a course in elementary Italian; Harvard’s Houghton Library houses his notes, in French, for these classes. Later, during the summer of 1948, between his junior and senior years, he began to read Marcel Proust in translation, in preparation for a September course with Harry Levin: “Proust, Joyce, and Mann.”6
As an undergraduate at Harvard, he never abandoned his childhood program of learning on his own, choosing what he loved and what most interested him from whatever venues were available,7 building an eccentric and personal canon. The movies of Jean Cocteau were among his favorites, and he returned to movie theaters repeatedly to watch the 1950 film Orpheus, enchanted with the car radio that broadcasts surreal poetry by Cégeste in Hades, and with Jean Marais’s portrayal of Orpheus. As he told a student journalist at Bard College,
I’ve often been struck by a line from the Cocteau movie Orpheus. He was being examined by these three sinister judges, and one of them says, “What do you do,” and [Orpheus] says, “I am a poet,” and the judge says, “What does that mean?” to which Orpheus replies, “It’s to write and not be a writer.”8
During his college and graduate school years, he began also to read writers whom he has called “fringe” Surrealists, such as Pierre Reverdy,9 Guillaume Apollinaire, Max Jacob, and Raymond Roussel.10 “We all ‘grew up Surrealist,’” Ashbery has claimed.11 Even as a child, he immediately identified with the Surrealist paintings that he saw in a Life magazine article reviewing the Museum of Modern Art’s 1936 blockbuster “Fantastic Art, Dada and Surrealism” show;12 and he wondered “why there couldn’t be something like that in poetry.”13 At the same time, he was taking art classes at the Memorial Art Gallery in Rochester. This interface of art and poetry continued throughout his creative and working life: Certainly, Ashbery’s “derivation of a painterly poetics from a French tradition”14 owes a deep debt to his years (1960–1965) of writing art criticism in Paris for the International Herald-Tribune.
As a Fulbright scholar from 1955 to 1957, Ashbery lived first for a month in Paris, then took classes in Montpellier, and finally worked as a teaching fellow in Rennes, escaping to Paris as often as he could. Continuing to live in Paris after his Fulbright, he began writing as an art critic for the International Herald-Tribune in 1960. This journalism, as Jed Perl notes, discussing Reported Sightings, gave the poet a chance to inscribe his visions not only of artworks but of Paris itself:
Introducing a Toulouse-Lautrec show, he remarks, “The crowd waiting in the rain outside the Petit Palais museum in Paris rivaled the one queueing up for the latest Alain Delon movie on the Champs-Élysées.” The Petit Palais, the movie theater on the Champs-Élysées, the long lines of people, the dark-haired movie star, and the dwarfish fin de siècle painter somehow come together to paint a little portrait of Paris in 1964—and the portrait has a staying power.15
At the same time, he undertook editorships of important art and literature journals, all of which kept him focused on translations, not only of poetry and fiction, but also of articles about artists. As coeditor of the journals Locus Solus and Art and Literature, he was able to cast a wider net. Since he was responsible for getting issues together and to the printer, some of these translations were done primarily to fill up the pages of an issue. But these years were particularly productive in his canon-building. In Art and Literature, he published translations from the poetry and prose of Jacob, Antonin Artaud, Georges Bataille, Michel Leiris, and Marcelin Pleynet; as well as pieces by artists Odilon Redon, Giorgio de Chirico, and Jean Hélion, and by the composer Iannis Xenakis. While Ashbery’s engagement with Roussel is widely familiar, it may be a surprise to readers of this volume to find the tour-de-force of Reverdy’s Haunted House, reprinted here in its entirety,16 or passages from the Surrealist painter de Chirico’s novel Hebdomeros, which, as Ashbery has told us, he was reading for the first time while on the SS France en route to Le Havre in 1964. “It was so amazing,” he says; “I had never read anything like it before.”
Like Arthur Rimbaud’s writing, the idiosyncratic prose and poetry of the then-little-known author Raymond Roussel attracted the young American poet, in particular because of what Ashbery calls “the very striking absence of the author from his work.”17 Once Kenneth Koch had brought Roussel’s work to his attention, Ashbery researched it throughout France in the late 1950s, hunting down Rousselian materials for a possible doctoral dissertation in French literature at New York University.18 In fact, David Lehman describes how, in a 1956 letter to Koch, Ashbery joked about his enthusiasm for Roussel at the expense of other French writers:
One of the funniest moments in Ashbery’s Paris correspondence with Kenneth Koch occurs in an undated letter from 1956 whose salutation is “Dear Montcalm.” “I hate all modern French poetry, except for Raymond Roussel,” Ashbery proclaims. “Molière, Racine, and La Fontaine are the only truly modern French poets. I do like my own wildly inaccurate translations of some of the twentieth-century ones, but not the originals.”19
Ashbery is characteristically modest here about the success of his own hard work, while revealing the excitement he feels about the possibilities of translation. His claiming of three seventeenth-century writers as moderns clearly demonstrates how thoroughly grounded he felt in the French tradition, as well as the extent to which he recognized Roussel’s work as growing essentially from that same ground.
Another source for prose-poetry style was de Chirico’s writing; as the poet David Shapiro describes,
Ashbery was admittedly moved by the interminable digressions and flourishes of de Chirico, whose prose tends to burst out in terribly long sentences that go on for pages, and whose novels have but one character. The skena may change several times in de Chirico’s sentences, as in Ashbery’s, and the course of this sentence is as a cinematic flow.20
Ashbery’s later translations included many longer works, such as the wonderful fairy tale “The White Cat” by d’Aulnoy, which opens the prose collection here. During his Paris decade, 1955–1965, Ashbery met the editors of the journal Tel Quel and the members of its circle, with their interest in Lautréamont, Bataille, and Artaud. He also translated prose works by Artaud and Bataille, and sections of de Chirico’s Hebdomeros. Among other prose pieces that drew his interest are writings by Henri Michaux and Alfred Jarry, as well as pieces by Roussel, Salvador Dalí, Pleynet, and Raymond Mason, which he would translate and publish in ARTnews.
In his preface to Selected Prose, Ashbery says that his many critical articles and reviews collected there and elsewhere are the “results of an activity that has always been something more than a hobby, if less than a calling.”21 But who can doubt that something was calling him, over and over, in French? The sheer quantity of Ashbery’s translated texts, and the particularity of his choices, as reflected in this collection, permit Anglophone Ashberians to share his delight in the French authors whom he was called to translate, and reveal his dedication to a literature that he loves. The canon that Ashbery has built for over a half century, as he worked to develop a set of reference points, of tools to enhance the development of his own work and that of his friends, has opened American poetry and the arts to new methods and inspirations. Indeed, he has received significant honor as a French cultural ambassador, having been named by the French Ministry of Education and Culture a Chevalier de l’ordre des arts et des lettres in 1993, followed by induction in 2002 as Officier into the French Légion d’honneur. In 2011, he received the Medal of Honor from New York University’s Center for French Civilization and Culture. Ashbery’s commitment to French literature clearly deserves such recognition. His translations move American writers and readers closer to Wallace Stevens’s concept tha
t “French and English constitute a single language.”22 And, for those readers whose experience of French may be limited, he is a guide with exceptional taste and fresh perspective. As Micah Towery has asked, “Why do we want to read Ashbery’s translations of Rimbaud? I see two motivations: The first is to read Rimbaud without learning French; the second is to read Ashbery reading Rimbaud.”23
Ashbery and French Prose
As with his art criticism and many of the essays and reviews in his Selected Prose, Ashbery was often given pieces to translate through his work assignments, although he preferred to choose pieces because he liked someone’s work and wanted to call attention to it. Nevertheless, not all of his translations were his own choices. As a paid professional in the early 1960s, he translated a scholarly study of Herman Melville by the Sorbonne professor Jean-Jacques Mayoux; unfortunately, the book had many uncited quotations from Melville translated into French, for which Ashbery had to locate the originals, forcing him to purchase many English-language works by Melville. He also put into English an essay on the modernist Swiss sculptor Alberto Giacometti by Jacques Dupin, the French poet and art critic, which is included in this collection. In fact, Ashbery relates that he once met Giacometti on a train from Basel, Switzerland, to Paris; a while after the artist had been seated across from him, Ashbery noticed that he was looking in his direction and sketching with his finger on the arm of his seat. Eventually, Ashbery spoke to him, and the two discussed Roussel, whom Giacometti greatly admired (after this brief conversation, however, the artist no longer sketched him).24 The delights of Dupin’s essay include quotations from Giacometti’s evocative, poetic journals.
Furthermore, not all of Ashbery’s paid translation work was literary: Dell once hired him to translate two pulp detective novels. He worked under a translator’s pseudonym, Jonas Berry, which he used since its sound approximated the way the French pronounced his name. Of these books, Champagne obligatoire by Nöel Vexin (titled by Dell as Murder in Montmartre) and La Biche by Geneviève Manceron (The Deadlier Sex),25 Ashbery says that he “was obliged” by the demands of Dell’s American detective novel market “to add some soft-core sexy passages.”26 The poet had, not long before this job, just written his own detective-story spoof, his play The Philosopher.
Collected French Translations: Prose Page 1
