______. Notes from the Air: Selected Later Poems. New York: Ecco, 2007.
______. Selected Prose. Edited by Eugene Richie. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004; Manchester, U.K.: Carcanet Press, 2004.
______. Where Shall I Wander. New York: Ecco, 2005.
Ashbery, John, and Mark Ford. John Ashbery in Conversation with Mark Ford. London: Between the Lines, 2003.
Bennett, Guy, 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.
Crase, Douglas. “The Prophetic Ashbery.” John Ashbery. Modern Critical Views. Edited by Harold Bloom. New York: Chelsea House, 1985. 127–43.
Englert, John. “John Ashbery: Bard’s ‘Literalist of the Imagination.’” The Bard Observer, May 17, 1991. http://inside.bard.edu/campus/publications/archive/pdfs/OB91_05_17.pdf.
Flood, Alison. “Nobel Judge Attacks ‘Ignorant’ US Literature.” The Guardian, October 1, 2008. www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/oct/01/us.literature.insular.nobel.
Hickman, Ben. John Ashbery and English Poetry. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012. 27–53.
Kermani, David K. John Ashbery: A Comprehensive Bibliography. New York: Garland Publishing, 1976.
Lehman, David. The Last Avant-Garde: The Making of the New York School of Poets. New York: Doubleday, 1998.
Mathews, Harry. “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 Unpublished typescript.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.
Reverdy, Pierre. Haunted House. Translated by John Ashbery. Brooklyn, N.Y.: Black Square Editions and the Brooklyn Rail, 2007.
Roffman, Karin. “The Art of Self-Education in John Ashbery’s Childhood Diaries.” Raritan: A Quarterly Review 30, no. 4 (Spring 2011). 94–116.
Shapiro, David. John Ashbery: An Introduction to the Poetry. New York: Columbia University Press, 1979.
Sweet, David LeHardy. 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.
Towery, Micah. “Google Translates Poetry.” THEthe poetry (blog). December 5, 2011. www.thethepoetry.com/2011/12/google-translates-poetry/.
Warner, Marina, ed. Wonder Tales: Six French Stories of Enchantment. Translated by Gilbert Adair, John Ashbery, Ranjit Bolt, A. S. Byatt, and Terence Cave. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1996.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
As editors, we have received help in gathering and selecting the works in this book from many sources. Foremost, of course, are John Ashbery and David Kermani, whose invaluable Comprehensive Bibliography of works as early as 1943 and up to 1975 saved us years of searching through archives. Both of these dear friends read drafts of the introduction and provided us with insightful suggestions in our revisions. They guided and encouraged us as we worked on this book. The online Ashbery Resource Center of the Flow Chart Foundation, which they conceived of initially as an extension of Kermani’s bibliography, is essential for any study of Ashbery’s life and work.
Many other poets, writers, artists, and scholars in New York and in Paris have worked over this decade with Ashbery, Kermani, and us, often in various capacities at Flow Chart. We wish to thank all who gave time and energy to this project. Micaela Morrissette initially located in the Flow Chart Archives many of the texts that appear in this book. Olivier Brossard and Claire Guillot hosted us in France, and Olivier co-organized the Ashbery in Paris conference and helped us contact French poets whom Ashbery had translated. Olivier also co-edited the Artery edition of Martory’s Oh, lac / Oh, Lake. Karin Roffman read a draft of the introduction and shared with us her detailed research into Ashbery’s childhood. We are also grateful for help over the years from many of Ashbery’s friends and assistants, especially Ava Lehrer, Marcella Durand, Adam Fitzgerald, Jonathan Boyd, Emily Skillings, and Timothy O’Connor.
Our research at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris was made sweeter by the hospitality of Denis Demonpion and Amy Roarke; the archives at Harvard’s Houghton Library were graciously made available to us by Leslie Morris. Librarians at the Bibliothèque Nationale were immensely cooperative, both with helping us to access the collections and with operating necessary machinery. The poet and publisher Stanley Moss was instrumental in bringing Pierre Martory’s two poetry collections The Landscape Is Behind the Door and The Landscapist, with Ashbery’s translations, to the wider public; John Yau and the editors at Black Square Press brought out not only a beautiful edition of Ashbery’s translation of Reverdy’s Haunted House, but also Serge Fauchereau’s Complete Fiction, translated by both Ashbery and Ron Padgett; and Ashbery’s translations of The Recitation of Forgetting by Franck André Jamme, as well as Jacques Dupin’s essay on Giacometti. In Britain, Patricia Scanlon at Artery Press produced Ashbery’s translation of Martory’s Oh, lac / Oh, Lake, with monotypes by Francis Wishart. Anne Talvaz, poet and translator, found the Martory introduction to Henry James’s Washington Square and assisted John with translation questions. The painter Trevor Winkfield located a Martory poem that appeared long ago in his journal Juillard. Robert Weil at Norton gave us Ashbery’s version of Rimbaud’s Illuminations; and all have generously shared selections from those publications for inclusion in this volume. George Silver, the brother of the photographer Walter Silver, gave us permission to print the photograph of young Ashbery in Paris that appears here.
Our colleagues at Pace University and the United States Merchant Marine Academy have also supported the long effort of editing this book: We have been helped immeasurably by support from both institutions for our project and by the librarians’ assistance with interlibrary loans. Our gratitude goes especially to Thomas Breidenbach, Martha Driver, Laury Magnus, Josh Smith, Charles North, Steven Goldleaf, and Walter Raubichek, for their encouragement, advice, and friendship. Wai-Wan Lam worked tirelessly typing early drafts of texts from many pale and tiny-fonted copies.
Our work on the manuscript progressed significantly due to our participation in three important conferences over the last decade: the John Ashbery Festival coordinated by David Lehman at the New School for Social Research, New York, in April 2006; later that same April, the Juniper Festival’s Ashbery celebration coordinated by Dara Wier, at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst; and “John Ashbery in Paris,” an international conference coordinated by Olivier Brossard, Abigail Lang, Vincent Broqua, and Antoine Cazé, at the Université Paris 7 Diderot LARCA (Laboratoire de Recherche sur les Cultures Anglophones), during March 11–13, 2010 (for the conference blog, please see http://johnashberyinparis.blogspot.com/). We are most grateful for being invited to present our work in progress at these gatherings of poets and scholars, whose enthusiasm for John Ashbery’s work was truly inspirational.
BIOGRAPHIES OF TRANSLATOR AND EDITORS
JOHN ASHBERY was born in Rochester, New York, in 1927. He earned degrees from Harvard and Columbia, and went to France as a Fulbright Scholar in 1955, living there for much of the next decade. His many collections of poetry include Quick Question (2012); Planisphere (2009); and Notes from the Air: Selected Later Poems (2007), which was awarded the 2008 International Griffin Poetry Prize. Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (1975) won the three major American prizes—the Pulitzer, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award—and an early book, Some Trees (1956), was selected by W. H. Auden for the Yale Younger Poets Series. The Library of America published the first volume of his collected poems in 2008. Active in various areas of the arts throughout his career, he has served as executive editor of ARTnews and as art critic for New York magazine and Newsweek; he exhibits his collages at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery (New York). He taught for many years at Brooklyn College (
CUNY) and Bard College, and in 1989–90 delivered the Charles Eliot Norton lectures at Harvard. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters (receiving its Gold Medal for Poetry in 1997) and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and was a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 1988 to 1999. The winner of many prizes and awards, both nationally and internationally, he was awarded two Guggenheim Fellowships and was a MacArthur Fellow from 1985 to 1990; most recently, he received the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters from the National Book Foundation (2011) and a National Humanities Medal, presented by President Barack Obama at the White House (2012). His work has been translated into more than twenty-five languages. He lives in New York. Additional information is available in the “About John Ashbery” section of the Ashbery Resource Center’s website, a project of The Flow Chart Foundation, www.flowchartfoundation.org/arc.
ROSANNE WASSERMAN’S poetry books include Apple Perfume (1989), The Lacemakers (1992), No Archive on Earth (1995), and Other Selves (1999), as well as Place du Carousel (2001) and Psyche and Amor (2009), collaborations with Eugene Richie. Both John Ashbery and A. R. Ammons have chosen her work for the series Best American Poetry. She has written many articles on New York School poets and other writers, including an interview with Pierre Martory and a memoir of Ruth Stone in American Poetry Review, and a feature on Ashbery’s home in Hudson, New York, for Rain Taxi’s online A Dream of This Room: A Created Spaces Portfolio of Works on John Ashbery’s Textual and Domestic Environments, edited by Micaela Morrissette (2008). Also with Richie, she edited two collections of Ashbery’s translations of Martory’s poems: Every Question but One (1990) and The Landscapist: Selected Poems (2008). Together, they run the Groundwater Press, whose latest publications are Gerrit Henry’s posthumous poetry collection, The Time of the Night (2011), and Tom Breidenbach’s The Wicked Child / IX XI (2013). She studied with Stone at Indiana University, and with David Ignatow at Columbia University’s School of the Arts. As an editor at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, she helped create many books and exhibition catalogues, including Metropolitan Cats and Eliot Porter’s Intimate Landscapes. Her doctorate in English is from the CUNY Graduate Center, where she also studied Greek. She teaches at the United States Merchant Marine Academy, Kings Point, New York.
EUGENE RICHIE’S collections of poems include Moiré (1989) and Island Light (1998), as well as Place du Carousel (2001) and Psyche and Amor (2009) with Rosanne Wasserman. With Edith Grossman, he cotranslated Jaime Manrique’s Scarecrow (1990) and My Night with Federico García Lorca (1996, 1997, 2003). He has edited John Ashbery’s Selected Prose and three collections of Ashbery’s translations of Pierre Martory’s poems: Every Question but One (1990) and The Landscapist: Selected Poems (2008), with Wasserman; and Oh, lac / Oh, Lake (2008), with Olivier Brossard. He has published articles on New York School poets and co-edited, with F. B. Claire and Stephen Sartarelli, two anthologies of poetry and fiction. He studied at Stanford University with Donald Davie and Al Young, and with Manuel Puig and Mark Strand at Columbia University. He has studied the craft of translation with Gregory Rabassa and Suzanne Jill Levine. At New York University, he earned an MA and a PhD in comparative literature. He is Director of Creative Writing in the Pace University English Department in New York City.
ALSO BY JOHN ASHBERY
POETRY
Turandot and Other Poems
Some Trees
The Tennis Court Oath
Rivers and Mountains
The Double Dream of Spring
Three Poems
The Vermont Notebook
Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror
Houseboat Days
As We Know
Shadow Train
A Wave
Selected Poems
April Galleons
Flow Chart
Hotel Lautréamont
And the Stars Were Shining
Can You Hear, Bird
Wakefulness
The Mooring of Starting Out: The First Five Books of Poetry
Girls on the Run
Your Name Here
As Umbrellas Follow Rain
Chinese Whispers
Where Shall I Wander
A Worldly Country
Notes from the Air: Selected Later Poems
Collected Poems, 1956–1987 (edited by Mark Ford)
Planisphere
Quick Question
FICTION
A Nest of Ninnies (with James Schuyler)
PLAYS
Three Plays
ESSAYS AND TRANSLATIONS
Reported Sightings: Art Chronicles, 1957–1987
Other Traditions (The Charles Eliot Norton Lectures)
Selected Prose
Pierre Martory, The Landscapist: Selected Poems
Arthur Rimbaud, Illuminations
Collected French Translations: Poetry (edited by Rosanne Wasserman and Eugene Richie)
PERMISSIONS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint the following material:
Antonin Artaud, “Correspondence with Jacques Rivière,” translated by John Ashbery. Original French from Préambule. Correspondance avec Jacques Rivière. L’ombilic des limbes. Le Pèse-nerfs. L’art et la mort. Textes et poèmes inédits in Œuvres complètes, Volume 1, Tenth Edition. Copyright © 1960. Reprinted by permission of Éditions Gallimard.
Georges Bataille, “Eponine,” translated by John Ashbery. Original French from L’Abbé C., in Œuvres complètes, Volume 3. Reprinted by permission of Les Éditions de Minuit S.A.
Giorgio de Chirico, “On Silence,” “Courbet,” “The Engineer’s Son,” “The Survivor of Navarino,” Selections One and Two from Hebdomeros, “That Evening Monsieur Dudron…,” “It Was Something Like…,” and “Monsieur Dudron’s Adventure,” translated by John Ashbery. Translated and reprinted by permission of Fondazione Giorgio e Isa de Chirico.
Salvador Dalí, “The Incendiary Fireman,” translated by John Ashbery, from ARTnews Annual 33 (October 1967) and “De Kooning’s 300,000,000th Birthday,” translated by John Ashbery, from ARTnews 68, no. 2 (April 1969). Both © Salvador Dalí, Fundació Gala–Salvador Dalí, Figueres, 2013.
Jacques Dupin, “Texts for an Approach” from Giacometti: Three Essays, translated by John Ashbery and Brian Evenson. Copyright © 2003 by John Ashbery and Brian Evenson. Reprinted with permission.
Jean Hélion, “Figure,” translated by John Ashbery, from Art and Literature 1 (March 1964). Copyright © 2013 by Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY / ADAGP, Paris.
Michel Leiris, “Conception and Reality in the Work of Raymond Roussel,” originally in Raymond Roussel and Michel Leiris, Épaves, précédé de “Conception et réalité chez Raymond Roussel.” © 2004 Pauvert, départment des éditions Fayard 1972, 2000.
Pierre Martory, “Introduction to Washington Square by Henry James,” translated by John Ashbery. Reprinted by permission of Éditions Denoël.
Raymond Mason, “Where Have All the Eggplants Gone?,” translated by John Ashbery, from ARTnews 70, no. 7 (1971). Copyright © 1971. Reprinted with permission.
Henri Michaux, “Introduction to an Exhibition Catalogue” (Robert Fraser Gallery, London, 1963), translated by John Ashbery. Original French from Œuvres complètes. Copyright © 1990. Reprinted by permission of Éditions Gallimard.
Marcelin Pleynet, “The Image of Meaning,” translated by John Ashbery. Original French “L’image du sens” from Tel Quel, no. 18, été (Summer) 1964. Reprinted with the permission of the author.
Pierre Reverdy, The Haunted House, translated by John Ashbery (Brooklyn: Black Square Editions, 2007). Original French Risques et périls (1930) in Œuvres complètes, Volume I, edited by Étienne-Alain Hubert. Reprinted by permission of Flammarion, Paris.
Iannis Xenakis, “The Cosmic City,” translated by John Ashbery. Original French from Musique. Architecture. Reprinted by permission of Editions Parenthèses.
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
18 West 18th Street, New York 10011
Translations copyright © 2014 by John Ashbery
Introduction and selection copyright © 2014 by Rosanne Wasserman and Eugene Richie
All rights reserved
First edition, 2014
Owing to limitations of space, all acknowledgments for permission to reprint previously published and unpublished material can be found here.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Collected French Translations: Prose / [translated by] John Ashbery; edited by Rosanne Wasserman and Eugene Richie. — First edition.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-0-374-25803-0 (hardcover)
1. French prose literature—Translations into English. I. Ashbery, John, 1927– translator. II. Wasserman, Rosanne, 1952– editor of compilation. III. Richie, Eugene, editor of compilation.
PQ1278 .C65 2014
844—dc23
2013033017
www.fsgbooks.com
www.twitter.com/fsgbooks • www.facebook.com/fsgbooks
eISBN 9780374709976
Jacket art: Details of collages by John Ashbery: Moon Glow, 2008 (16 × 16 ¼ in.); Chutes and Ladders III (For David Kermani), 2008 (18 ½ × 18 3⁄8 in.); Mannerist Concerns, 2008 (16 3⁄8 × 16 ½ in.). Courtesy of Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York.
*This article was published in the French review L’Arc in 1962. I wrote it in English and it was translated into French by a friend, the late Michel Thurlotte. My original text seems to have disappeared, so that for the purposes of this publication I have had to translate it from French back into English.
*For pictures of these three Dresden figurines, see “Introduction to Raymond Roussel’s Documents to Serve as an Outline,” Selected Prose, by John Ashbery, ed. Eugene Richie (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004; Manchester, U.K.: Carcanet Press, 2004), 51–52. (Eds.)
Collected French Translations: Prose Page 44