Ronee ponee ponee ponee
Monee ponee ponee monee
Jonee jonee ioyonee
Jonee jonee iouonee
Jy iy ioudonee
Donee jonee ioydonee
Monee jonee ioudonee
Donee jonee ioudonee
Ronee ponee ioudonee
Monee tonee ioudonee
Tonee tonee monotonee
Monotonee, monotonee
Ponee, tonee, ponee, tonee
Jonee tonee ioudonee
Joydonee jonee honee
Honee, Honee mojodonee
Mojodonee ioudonee
Donee, donee ioudonee
Ioudonee, ioudonee
Ioudonee monotonee
Ponee pontee pontee piousse
Ponte piousse mono piousse
Piousse, piousse, piousse, piousse
Piousee, piousse, piousse, piousse
Jiousse, iousse, piousse piousse
Piousse iousse ioudonesse
Ioudonesse ponte piousse
Piousse tiousse miousse iousse
Miousse iousse tiousse piousse
Piousse tiousse ioudonesse
Ioudonesse tiousse piousse
Miousse tiousse pontee piousse
Pontee piousse tiousse iousse
Miousse iousse, iousse, iousse
Tiousse piousse miousse iousse
Iousse miousse pontee iousse
Ponte tiousse, ponte piousse
Piousse, piousse, piousse, piousse.
Piousse, piousse, piousse, piousse.
Je suis iousse mes pas piousse
Iousse, iousse, iousse, iousse
Miousse, miousse, miousse, miousse
Je suis iousse, je suis iousse
Je suis miousse, je suis miousse
Je ecris tres malle mais je veux vous dire que je vous aime. Je vous aime mon chere Cocto. Coc, coc, to, ne pas le coc. Je suis coc vous ette un coc. Ne pas coc, ne pas coc coc, coc, coc ne pas un coc. Je suis coc, je suis coc. Coc, coc, coc, je suis un coc. Coc, coc, coc, je suis un coc. Mon coc et ton coc tu un coc mais pas un coc. Je suis coc tu un coc. Nous ommes coc, vous ette un coc. Coc, coc, coc, cet un coc. Coc iyage ne pas un coc. Coc, coc, coc, ne pas un coc. Coc, coc, coc, cette un coc. Je suis coc mes pas un coc. Pas un coc est un moge. Mogi, cogi, togi, jogi. Migi, gigi, gi gi, rigi. Tchigi, tchigi, tchigi, rigi. Tchigi, rigi, rigi, tchigi. Migi, tigi, tigi, tigi. Jagi, jagi, jagi, jagi. Je suis russe pour ça je dis que je suis ja. Ja, moi, moi est ja. Iia, jia, jia, jia. Tia, tia, tia, tia. Mia, mia, mia, mia. Mia, mia ne pas miou. Miou, tiou, miou, tiou. Tiou miou, tiou miou. Miaou, Miaou, miaou, mia. Mia ou mia ne pas miaou. Miaou miaou pas mia. Tia miaou mes pas moi. Toi moi est un chat. Chat un chat mes pas toi. Je suis chat mes pas toi. Toi un pate mes pas moi. Mois un pate sent toi. Toi, toi, toi, toi. Je suis chat me pas toi.
Avec mes amitie pour un homme me pas Cocto.
Waslaw Nijinsky.
TO JESUS
In this letter Nijinsky begins by saying that he is Jesus—“Je suis gèsue”—but then becomes more interested in the similarity of the sounds sue and suis.
—J.A.
Au Gèsue
Je suis gèsue
Je suis gèsue
Je suis gesue
Je suis gesue
Je suis un sue
Je suis un sue
Je suis je suis je suis je suis
Suis je suis je suis je suis
Je suis suis je suis suis je
Je ne veux pas sent je suis
Je me suis je suis je suis
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
JOAN ACOCELLA, author of Mark Morris (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), is the dance critic of the Wall Street Journal. She also writes for The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books. She is at work on a biography of Mikhail Baryshnikov. Her edition of THE DIARY OF VASLAV NIJINSKY: Unexpurgated Edition is forthcoming from Farrar, Straus & Giroux.
Expressing strong emotion through simple and concise language, ANNA AKHMATOVA’s (1889-1966) love lyrics made her popular before the Revolution. After the Bolshevik takeover in 1917, she refused to abandon Russia, although her works were not allowed to be published for many years. In her later poems, she became the voice of the collective suffering of her people, who lived through war, revolution and the Stalinist Terror.
ESTHER ALLEN is currently translating a novel by Marie Darrieussecq tentatively titled Gone, which will be published by the New Press.
JAROSLAW ANDERS is deputy chief of the Polish Service of the Voice of America. Among his translations are Barbarians in the Garden by Zbigniew Herbert, Rondo by Kazimierz Brandys and Subtenant by Hannah Krall.
CAMILLA BAGG is the daughter of Mary Butts. She is currently editing a number of Butts’s unpublished works in collaboration with Nathalie Blondel.
DJUNA BARNES |1892-1982) is best known for her novel Nightwood (1936), a tragic novel about the gay expatriate life in Paris during the 1920s, which was acclaimed by T. S. Eliot, Dylan Thomas and others. Barnes’s many works also include Ryder and The Antiphon. She was also an accomplished journalist, artist and playwright. Djuna Barnes, “Eighteen Poems,” copyright © 1998, The Authors League Fund as literary executor of the Estate of Djuna Barnes.
THOMAS BERNHARD (1931-1989) was a novelist, playwright and poet whose works include Gargoyles, Correction, Woodcutters, The Lime Works, Wittgenstein’s Nephew, The Loser and, most recently, a collection of plays, Histrionics, and of stories, The Voice Imitator. The winner of many distinguished prizes, Bernhard, who lived in Austria, is widely considered to be one of the most important writers of his generation.
ELIZABETH BISHOP (1911-1979) is now generally regarded as one of the principal American poets of the century. In her lifetime, she won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. Her books include The Complete Poems 1927-1997, The Collected Prose and The Diary of Helena Morley. Edgar Allan Poe & the Jukebox: Uncollected and Unfinished Poems, edited by Alice Quinn, will be published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in the fall of 1999.
Born in 1907, French novelist, critic and theorist MAURICE BLANCHOT has published more than twenty-five volumes, many of which have been translated into several languages. He began his career as a journalist in the 1930s and went on to write the short, enigmatic works designated as “Récits,” such as Death Sentence, When the Time Comes and The Last Man. He has profoundly influenced more than two generations of French writers and thinkers. Blanchot lives near Paris.
NATHALIE BLONDEL is Mary Butts Research Fellow at Oxford Brookes University, England. She is the editor of With and Without Buttons: The Selected Stories of Mary Butts and the author of Mary Butts: Scenes from the Life (McPherson), the authorized biography. She is currently preparing an edition of Mary Butts’s journals for Yale University Press.
HERMANN BROCH (1886-1951) was born in Austria but after the 1938 annexation fled to England and later to the United States. Among Broch’s masterpieces are the novels The Sleepwalkers, The Death of Virgil, The Spell and The Guiltless. Few of his theoretical writings have appeared in English, with the notable exception of Hugo Hofmannsthal and His Time: The European Imagination 1860-1920. In 1950 he was nominated for the Nobel Prize.
One of the greatest writers of the twentieth century, novelist and playwright MIKHAIL BULGAKOV (1891-1940) is known for such novels as The Master and Margarita and The White Guard and the plays The Days of the Turbins and Flight. Born in Kiev, he moved to Moscow in 1921 and spent virtually the rest of his life there.
MARY BUTTS (1890-1937), English Modernist woman of letters, was the author of novels, poems, essays, stories, historical fiction and autobiography. “Fumerie” forms part of the ongoing project to bring her unpublished writings into print. Her short story “The Master’s Last Dancing” (The New Yorker) and the essay “Bloomsbury” (Modernism/Modernity) appeared earlier this year.
TRUMAN CAPOTE (1924-1984) established himself as one of America’s foremost writers with the publication of Other Voices, Other Rooms. Among his oth
er works are A Tree of Night, The Grass Harp, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, A Christmas Memory and perhaps his most famous book, In Cold Blood. Capote’s unfinished novel, Answered Prayers, was published posthumously in 1987.
CONSTANTINE P. CAVAFY (1863-1933), the renowned Greek poet, was born in Constantinople, but spent most of his adult life in Alexandria, Egypt, the city that provides a background to so many of his poems. Cavafy’s Collected Poems (Princeton) was translated by Edmund Keeley.
ANTON CHEKHOV (1860-1904) is often referred to as the father of the modern short story, and his work as a dramatist is equally important. His classic plays The Cherry Orchard, The Seagull, Three Sisters and Uncle Vanya are among the most performed in the world.
Born in Transylvania, E. M. CIORAN (1911-1995) was the son of a Christian orthodox priest. He started to publish in Romania in 1932 and lived the next two years in Germany as a sympathizer of the Nazi regime. In 1936, he moved to France, where his philosophical work earned him praise as a great stylist of the French language. Cioran’s books translated into English include Anathemas and Admirations, The Trouble With Being Born, A Short History of Decay and History and Utopia, all translated by Richard Howard. He lived in Paris until the end of his life. E. M. Cioran, Cahiers 1957-1972, copyright © 1997 Editions Gallimard, to be published by Arcade Press.
PETER CONSTANTINE has written seven books on the languages and cultures of the Far East. His most recent book of translations, Six Early Stories by Thomas Mann (Sun & Moon), was awarded the 1998 PEN/Book of the Month Club Translation Prize. Some of the Chekhov stories in this issue are scheduled to appear this fall in The Undiscovered Chekhov: 38 New Stories (Seven Stories).
LOUIS COUPERUS (1863-1923) wrote eighteen works of long fiction, of which The Books of Small Souls and Old People and the Things That Pass are among the most well known. He was a celebrated writer during his own lifetime, both in his native country of The Netherlands and abroad.
JOHN C. DAVIS teaches translation at the British Council, Athens. Earlier this year, his translations of medieval Greek texts were read by Alan Bates at the Byzantine Festival in London, while his translation of a lament on Constantinople was set to music by John Tavener.
LYDIA DAVIS is the author of Break It Down and The End of the Story, as well as Almost No Memory (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). Almost No Memory has just appeared in paperback from Ecco Press. She has translated numerous books from French by writers including Maurice Blanchot, Michel Leiris and Pierre Jean Jouve.
VOLODYMYR DIBROVA is a Ukrainian writer and translator now teaching at Harvard University. His book Peltse and Pentameron appeared in English translation in 1996, published by Northwestern University Press. Himself a fiction writer and playwright, Dibrova has also translated Beckett and Ionesco into Ukrainian.
DUNCAN DOBBELMANN is a writer and translator who lives in Brooklyn. He is currently writing his dissertation on George Oppen at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.
FYODOR DOSTOEVSKY (1821-1881) is one of the most influential novelists of the last century, the first to explore the psychology of character as a principle of composition. Among his major works are Poor Folk, Notes from the House of the Dead, Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, The Possessed and The Brothers Karamazov.
MICHAEL EMMERICH graduated from Princeton University in June. He has studied in Japan at the Kyoto Center for Japanese Studies, and will return to Japan in April to pursue a graduate degree. This is his first publication.
KYRIL FTTZLYON translated Constantine Baustovski’s autobiography, The Restless Years, from Russian and The Memoirs of Princess Dashkov from French as well as works by Leo Tolstoy and Anton Chekhov. He writes for The New York Times Book Review, The L.A. Times Book Review and the Times Literary Supplement. He lives in London.
JEFF FORT is a graduate student in comparative literature at the University of California at Berkeley. He is completing a dissertation on Kafka, Blanchot and Beckett.
SARAH FUNKE is currently cataloguing the Nabokov family collection of his works for Glenn Horowitz Bookseller, New York.
SUSAN GILLESPIE has published translations of work by, among others, Theodor Adorno and industrialist Robert Bosch. She is director of the Institute of International Liberal Education at Bard College.
ZINAIDA GIPPIUS (1869-1945) is the foremost Russian female Symbolist writer. After the Bolshevik Revolution, she left Russia for Paris, where she lived and wrote until her death. Among her works available in English are Between Paris and St. Petersburg: Selected Diaries and Selected Works of Zinaida Gippius, both edited and translated by Temira Pachmuss (University of Illinois Press).
ANNETA GREENLEE teaches Russian language and literature at City University of New York and New York University. Zinaida Gippius is the subject of her doctoral dissertation.
PHILLIP HERRING is professor emeritus of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and lives in Austin, Texas, where he works at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center. He is the author of Djuna: The Life and Works of Djuna Barnes (Viking Penguin).
GITTA HONEGGER is chair of the Department of Drama at the Catholic University of America, and is the American representative of the Thomas Bernhard International Foundation. She is completing a book on Bernhard, Whereof One Cannot Speak … The Making of an Austrian, to be published by Yale University Press.
RICHARD HOWARD is a poet and translator. He teaches in the Writing Division of the School of the Arts, Columbia University.
EUGÈNE IONESCO’s (1909-1994) many remarkable works include Rhinoceros, The Bald Soprano, Jack or the Submission, The Chairs, Antidotes, as well as other plays, memoirs, children’s books, and even a satirical biography of Victor Hugo. In his later years, he tried his hand at the plastic arts.
YASUNARI KAWABATA (1899-1972) was born in Osaka, Japan. The author of dozens of novels, including Snow Country, The Sound of the Mountain, Beauty and Sadness, The Lake and The Master of Go, and of hundreds of short stories, he was the first Japanese author to receive the Nobel Prize in literature. He died near his home in Kamakura, four years after he accepted the prize.
MICHEL LEIRIS (1901-1990), early French Surrealist, poet, novelist, ethnographer, art critic and memoirist, was the author of many works including the four-volume “autobiographical essay” Rules of the Game, Manhood and the massive chronicle L’Afrique Fantôme. He lived for most of his life in Paris.
NORMAN MANEA is writer in residence and Francis Flournoy Professor in European Studies and Cultures at Bard College. Author of The Black Envelope, among other works, his next book, Variations on a Self-Portrait, will be published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux.
SUSAN MATTHIAS, a translator of modern Greek literature, has had works published in the Harvard Review and the Journal of Modern Greek Studies. She is studying for her Ph.D. in comparative literature at New York University.
BRADFORD MORROW is the editor of Conjunctions and author of four novels, Come Sunday, Trinity Fields, Giovanni’s Gift (all published by Penguin) and The Almanac Branch (W. W. Norton), which was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award. In May 1998, he received an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He teaches at Bard College.
ROBERT MUSIL (1880-1942) was the author of two novels, Young Törless and the epic The Man without Qualities, a number of short stories and miscellaneous pieces, two plays, The Visionaries and Vinzenz, and a considerable number of important essays on European culture. Born in Austria-Hungary, he lived in Berlin and Vienna, then fled to Switzerland, where he died.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV (1899-1977) was born in St. Petersburg and educated in French and Russian literature at Trinity College, Cambridge. Nearly two decades in Berlin and Paris yielded a substantial body of Russian work. His work gained international recognition with Lolita in 1955 and he wrote the masterpieces Pale Fire in 1962 and Ada in 1969, as well as dozens of other remarkable works.
VASLAV NIJINSKY (1889-1950) came to national fame as a principal dancer in Serge Diaghilev’
s Ballets Russes. After a falling out between the two men—who had lived openly as lovers for some time—Nijinsky struggled to build a career on his own. From 1912 to 1913 Nijinsky produced three ballets—The Afternoon of a Faun, Jeux and The Rite of Spring (to Stravinsky’s score). In December 1917, Nijinsky, the most famous male dancer in the Western world, moved into a Swiss villa with his wife and three-year-old daughter and began to go insane.
BURTON PIKE is professor of comparative literature and German at the Graduate School of the City University of New York. His most recent work was as co-translator, with Sophie Wilkins, of Musil’s The Man without Qualities (Knopf). He also co-translated, with David S. Luft, a collection of Musil’s essays, Precision and Soul (University of Chicago), and edited the volume Robert Musil: Selected Writings (Continuum).
The Milanese poet ANTONIA POZZI (1912-1938) died by her own hand. She left behind several hundred poems, none of which was published during her lifetime.
MINNA PROCTOR is a fiction writer and translator. Her translations of Federigo Tozzi won the 1997 PEN Renato Poggioli Award for a translation in progress. Her translation of a collection of Tozzi’s stories will be published by New Directions.
MARCEL PROUST (1871-1922) was the author of Les plaisirs and les jours; an unfinished novel, Jean Santeuil, first published in 1954; translator of John Ruskin’s The Bible of Amiens and Sesame and Lilies; and, most famously, author of the masterpiece À la recherche du temps perdu.
ALICE QUINN is the poetry editor of The New Yorker as well as an editor in the fiction department.
ROBERTA REEDER is the author of Anna Akhmatova: Poet and Prophet, published by St. Martin’s Press in 1994. She is also editor of The Complete Poems of Anna Akhmatova, published by Zephyr Press, which is now available in a new enlarged edition published in 1997.
GEORGE SEFERIS (1900-1971) is best known for his poetry, but he also was an influential critic of modern Greek literature. His Complete Poems of George Seferis (Anvil) was translated by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard. Seferis won the Novel Prize for Literature in 1963.
Born in Argentina, OSIAS STUTMAN has lived in New York since 1972 and is a scientist by trade (professor of immunology at Cornell and the Sloan Kettering Institute). His Spanish translation of the poetry of Djuna Barnes will be published in Barcelona by early 1999.
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