Collected French Translations: Prose

by Ashbery, John

  One may illustrate this by walking. When we walk in the street, what presents itself to us, the multiplicity of signs which offer themselves to us (the car sign, the black sign, the black-car sign, the four-door sign, the black four-door-car sign, the yellow sign, the wheel sign, the black four-door-car-with-yellow-wheels sign, etc.) and among which we move, ourselves a sign, is practically infinite. And what brings it about that we are walking in the street is not the single vision of each sign considered separately, or in a discursive mode, what brings it about that we are walking in the street is the fact that we are living what we see … that we are thrusting ourselves forward with each sign, that we are compromising ourselves in a meaning for which walking, the fact of walking, is itself only a sign. When we walk, or, to drop the metaphor, when we live, the world is not a spectacle, it is a meaning, the meaning which we compromise, in which we are compromised and of course overwhelmed … If we agree on that, we may then ask ourselves what happens when, as with the majority of works with which we are familiar and which are proposed to us as models, the world is offered as a spectacle, as a well-known reality which unrolls before our eyes (or as a mysterious reality but mysterious with relation to a well-known reality) … What then is given to us to experience in that fiction which truth, as we all know, is stranger than? What is then given to us to experience is, as a certain school of journalism says, real-life experiences; the fixed image of a reality which would be outside us and which we are asked to approve … the image of a reality which we can very easily understand and refuse. It is the same with all conventional literature, with any conventional work of art, whether it be artificial or, to use a once-fashionable word, committed. Why are “committed” works, even those of talented artists, ineffectual? Simply because in these works real-life experiences refer back to a thought which must be recognizable, which each of us must be able to adapt for himself … and that this recognition instead of committing and compromising within meaning liberates a meaning (that of experience) which is then lost in the continually rebegun reality which meaning gives to be experienced. That is, because they are not “to be experienced” but are rather “experienced,” these experiences distract us much more than they instruct. As with emotions, as with tears, as with all thought of a reality which offers itself as already experienced, they erase what they teach. Artaud sums this up admirably when he speaks of “that faculty we have of deducing thoughts from our acts rather than identifying our acts without our thoughts.”

  The newness on which I have here attempted to cast some light forces us in fact to completely reconsider the notion of a work. The work as we know it often presents itself as the final outcome of the thought of our civilization and claims to cover over all those that preceded it (Mallarmé as well as Joyce) … On the contrary, the newness which preoccupies us places the work in interdependence, or, as Michel Foucault says, in a network, with all works of the past and future … A network into which history falls and disappears. “Committed” only in the sense that it is compromising, it finds its justification only in writing … not the image of a thought-up experience, but the thought of the image of meaning … considering, of course, that this meaning whose image is thought can only be compromised and compromising, that it cannot be discovered without immersing oneself in a thinking experience, without thought’s being able to create itself in its image, continually duplicating it, as it were. Now the question is important enough to be dwelt on: This meaning can in no way have what we call a precedent, a duplicate: It is what is being made, it ceases to be what is made. To be more precise we should say that the work as image of meaning offers itself as the thought of the work as image of meaning.

  To return to a previous point, my reading of the signs I perceive (walking in the street, for example) is viable only if I don’t exhaust it, if I don’t reduce these signs, if I take them with those I don’t perceive. Consequently, if I want the work I am creating to appear to the reader as to be lived and not as lived, this work will have to present the same margin of ambiguity with which I was able to perceive and read it myself … This supposes of course that there are only two kinds of perception: that of reading and that of writing; it presupposes a reader for every writer, a writer for every reader. To develop this point: When we are about to be faced with a given work, the ambiguity of the meaning of the reading to be proposed to us, the choice of a certain number of meanings left at our disposal (either by the juxtaposition of words seemingly foreign to one another, or by a typographical layout allowing the text to be read vertically)—this choice of one reading among others, the attention it requires and the subjectivities it brings into play, will make of us no more the absentminded and drowsy author who lulls his intellectual comfort with the droning of a fable, but the author committed to the core of a revealing reality wherein choice supposes exclusions which reveal and compromise as much as the choice.

  When I raised a little while ago the question of the myth of committed literature, I wanted not only to arouse its partisans and to contrast two literary genres, but to accentuate one of the aspects of this new notion of a work which is especially close to me. It is in fact impossible to separate the writing which tries today to illuminate this fundamental experience from that crucial commitment within meaning … toward which we are drawn by the works which place writers and readers on the same footing and which, showing that liberty consists in knowing that we choose our derangements, introduce a thought which for each sign evokes the totality of the languages with which we act on language. To commit the world (reading) to this reality (writing) is to understand that one does not cure the illness by striving to make its symptoms disappear (whether this method of striving to make the symptoms of noncommunication disappear be classical or avant-garde: whether it take the form of psychological conventions, the convention of serial music, or the farce of Lettrism). To understand what speaking means, and that misunderstandings involve what joins as much as what separates, that noncommunication remains alive at the heart of the message, that it is its dynamics; to refuse the set of rules agreed on … is to be what is written (what is read), the pole which furtively fixes the thought of an image already assailed by everything that can contest it and that justifies it, is to be this sign which thrusts mystery aside and speaks what is written; it is to be what is written, it is to be what happens.

  Nothing more than this preoccupies me today. Is poetry involved? No doubt, if poetry is linked to what preoccupies us.

  Art and Literature 4 (Spring 1965).

  Notes

  “CURIOUS RESEMBLANCES”: JOHN ASHBERY TRANSLATES FRENCH PROSE

  1. For information about the published translations, we have relied primarily on David Kermani’s annotated bibliography of the poet’s early work: David K. Kermani, John Ashbery: A Comprehensive Bibliography (New York: Garland Publishing, 1976). We have also used the annotated searchable catalogue of the Ashbery Resource Center archive (www.flowchartfoundation.org/arc/home/catalogue/).

  2. The introduction that follows is in part abridged from the introduction in Collected French Translations, Volume 1: Poetry, but also offers other insights, particularly into Ashbery’s encounters with French prose. For a more detailed chronological discussion of his life and work within the French language and its literature, please see the poetry volume.

  3. Thanks to John Ashbery, David Kermani, and Karin Roffman for these and following details, from private conversations, January 1 and 2, 2012.

  4. Ashbery, “John Ashbery,” Bookworm, KCRW, interview by Michael Silverblatt, May 21, 2009, www.kcrw.com/etc/programs/bw/bw090521john_ashbery.

  5. Ashbery, unpublished diaries, transcribed by Karin Roffman, e-mail of January 3, 2012.

  6. Roffman, conversation; Ashbery, “John Ashbery,” Bookworm; Ashbery, conversation.

  7. For details on Ashbery’s self-education as recorded in his childhood diaries, see Karin Roffman, “The Art of Self-Education in John Ashbery’s Childhood Diaries,” Raritan: A Quarterly Revi
ew 30, no. 4 (Spring 2011), 94–116.

  8. John Englert, “John Ashbery: Bard’s ‘Literalist of the Imagination,’” The Bard Observer, May 17, 1991, 7, inside.bard.edu/campus/publications/archive/pdfs/OB91_05_17.pdf.

  9. Ashbery, “Obituary for Pierre Martory,” Selected Prose, ed. Eugene Richie (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004; Manchester, U.K.: Carcanet, 2004), 270.

  10. Ashbery, “Appearing on Belgische Radio en Televisie, Brussels (date unknown),” interview, Pennsound, accessed December 2, 2011, writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Ashbery.php.

  11. Ashbery, “Growing Up Surreal,” ARTnews 67, no. 3, May 1968, 41.

  12. “I think that it was at that moment I realized I wanted to be a Surrealist, or rather that I already was one,” as Ashbery says in his 1995 “Robert Frost Medal Address,” Selected Prose, 246.

  13. Ashbery, “John Ashbery,” Bookworm.

  14. David LeHardy Sweet, Savage Sight/Constructed Noise: Poetic Adaptations of Painterly Techniques in the French and American Avant-Gardes, North Carolina Studies in the Romance Languages and Literatures, no. 276 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 231.

  15. Jed Perl, “A Magically Alive Aesthetic,” Conjunctions 49 (2007), “John Ashbery Tribute,” ed. Peter Gizzi and Bradford Morrow, 366.

  16. Pierre Reverdy, Haunted House, trans. Ashbery (Brooklyn, N.Y.: Black Square Editions and the Brooklyn Rail, 2007).

  17. Ashbery, “Appearing on Belgische Radio.”

  18. See, e.g., Ashbery, “Introduction to Raymond Roussel’s ‘In Havana,’” Selected Prose, 54.

  19. David Lehman, The Last Avant-Garde: The Making of the New York School of Poets (New York: Doubleday, 1998), 126, 219n.

  20. David Shapiro, John Ashbery: An Introduction to the Poetry (New York: Columbia University Press, 1979), 29.

  21. Ashbery, Preface to Selected Prose, v.

  22. Wallace Stevens, “From Adagia,” Wallace Stevens: Collected Poetry and Prose, ed. Frank Kermode and Joan Richardson (New York: Library of America, 1996), 914.

  23. Micah Towery, “Google Translates Poetry,” THEthe poetry (blog), December 5, 2011, www.thethepoetry.com/2011/12/google-translates-poetry/.

  24. Ashbery, private conversation.

  25. Lehman has other details in Last Avant-Garde, 147.

  26. Ashbery, “Contributor’s Statement,” special issue on “Poetry and Translation: Interchanges,” Mantis 2 (2001): 45.

  27. Guy Bennett and Béatrice Mousli, eds., Charting the Here of There: French and American Poetry in Translation in Literary Magazines, 1850–2002 (New York: New York Public Library/Granary Books, in association with the Book Office of the Cultural Service of the French Embassy in the United States, 2002), 114.

  28. Shapiro’s John Ashbery: An Introduction to the Poetry is a good place to start.

  29. “John Ashbery Interviewing Harry Mathews,” The Review of Contemporary Fiction 7, no. 3 (Fall 1987), 44.

  30. Bennett, 114.

  31. Ashbery, Collected Poems 1956–1987, ed. Mark Ford (New York: The Library of America, 2008), 48.

  32. Ashbery, Notes from the Air: Selected Later Poems (New York: Ecco, 2007), 67.

  33. Ashbery, “Appearing on Belgische Radio.”

  34. Douglas Crase, “The Prophetic Ashbery,” in John Ashbery, Modern Critical Views, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House, 1985), 142.

  35. John Ashbery and Mark Ford, John Ashbery in Conversation with Mark Ford (London: Between the Lines, 2003), 45.

  36. Ashbery and Ford, 45.

  37. Ashbery, “John Ashbery: An Interview,” interview by David Remnick, Bennington Review 8 (September 1980), 16.

  38. Shapiro, 154.

  39. Ashbery, Collected Poems, 884.

  40. Ashbery, Collected Poems, 9. Ashbery offers, with this kind of self-contradictory statement, a version of the philosophical puzzle known as G. E. Moore’s paradox, a problem of logic considered by Ludwig Wittgenstein; see Ben Hickman, John Ashbery and English Poetry (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012), 27–53.

  41. Ashbery, Notes from the Air, 249.

  42. “Jerboas, Pelicans, and Peewee Reese: Marianne Moore,” review of Tell Me, Tell Me: Granite Steel, and Other Topics (New York: Viking Press, 1964), from Book Week 4, no. 8 (October 20, 1966), in Ashbery, Selected Prose, 86.

  43. Ashbery, Selected Prose, 86.

  44. Marina Warner, Glossary, Wonder Tales: Six French Stories of Enchantment (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1996), pp. 231–32.

  45. Harry Mathews, “Introduction to a Reading by John Ashbery and Pierre Martory,” Dia Center for the Arts, New York, October 5, 1993, unpublished typescript, Flow Chart Foundation, Hudson, N.Y.

  46. Alison Flood, “Nobel Judge Attacks ‘Ignorant’ US Literature,” The Guardian (October 1, 2008), www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/oct/01/us.literature.insular.nobel.

  MARIE-CATHERINE D’AULNOY (1650–1705)

  THE WHITE CAT

  1. Rodillardus: Bacon-gnawer, the name of a cat borrowed by La Fontaine from Rabelais; see “The Rat’s Council,” Fables II, 11. (Warner)

  2. Minagrobis: An echo of La Fontaine’s Raminagrobis in “The Rat Leagues,” Uncollected Fables, which were only published posthumously in 1696, i.e., not long before Mme d’Aulnoy wrote her tale. Grobis: Old French word for a haughty cat. (Warner)

  3. Martafax: Another echo of La Fontaine, “The Battle of the Rats and the Weasels,” in which the doughty warrior rats are called Artarpax, Psicarpax, and Meridarpax. Fables IV, 6. (Warner)

  4. Lhermite: Another nod in the master fabulist’s direction, cf. “The Rat Who Retired from the World,” Fables VII, 3. (Warner)

  5. Tilting at the ring: In this chivalrous variation on the tourney, the contestants do not drive at each other with lances lowered, but at a hoop or ring (often beribboned). (Warner)

  6. Sinbad: John Ashbery’s only “liberty” with the text, which has “Perroquet” for the parrot’s name. As The Arabian Nights were soon to appear in Antoine Galland’s influential translation (1704–17), Sinbad seemed an apt anticipation. (Warner)

  ALFRED JARRY (1873–1907)

  FEAR VISITS LOVE

  1. The French is bagatelles; bagatelle, besides meaning “trifle,” is also a slang word for the vagina. (Trans.)

  2. Toile tombe, “planting falls,” a pun on Fear’s previous words, étoiles tombent, “stars fall.” (Trans.)

  3. A play of jour de cave, “cellar window,” and jour, “understood,” de souffrance, “day of suffering.” (Trans.)

  4. Espion means both “spy” and “window mirror,” a device enabling one to see visitors outside from within. (Trans.)

  5. Throughout this speech and Fear’s next one there is punning on the words mer, “sea,” and mère, “mother.” (Trans.)

  6. There is a play here on the words divaguer, “to divagate, wander from the point,” and vagues, “waves.” (Trans.)

  RAYMOND ROUSSEL (1877–1933)

  AN UNPUBLISHED NOTE

  1. “Read to bray,” a pun on libraire, “bookseller.” (Trans.)

  2. “Amid this lacquered furniture, these gloomy curtains and canopies, / Dance, make love, blue lackey, laugh to venture blushing words.”

  The two lines are almost identical phonetically. By an odd coincidence, Breton, who couldn’t possibly have known of this letter, quotes this same couplet in his preface to Jean Ferry’s “Essay on Raymond Roussel,” attributing it to Charles Cros and citing it as a precedent for Roussel’s linguistic experiments. Breton however gives ris, the familiar imperative of the verb rire, to laugh, rather than Roussel’s rit, the third-person singular, which here makes no sense grammatically. The lines were published in an article by Charles Cros in his Revue du monde nouveau (April 2, 1874), but according to the editors of the Pléiade edition of his works, are “undoubtedly not by him.” They formed the first and fourth lines of a quatrain; the two inner lines are similarly constructed “totally rhyming” verses. The article satirizes the formal s
trictures of the Parnassian poets. (Trans.)

  DOCUMENTS TO SERVE AS AN OUTLINE

  Introduction to “In Havana,” by John Ashbery

  1. 1962.