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This is the second of the two volumes of
Ashbery's French translations that Carcanet have recently published. It's an
interesting companion to the volume of poetry, with a useful introduction
from the editors, although some of the material is repeated from the poetry
volume. Here are twenty-eight prose pieces by seventeen different writers,
some of which have been long unavailable, and several from unfamiliar voices.
There are pieces of fiction along with selected essays originally published
in Art and Literature and ARTnews. Unlike the volume of poetry, this is not a
bilingual edition as many of the original French works are easily available.
The Introduction goes through some biographical detail of Ashbery's
relationship with French translation and includes the best piece of advice
that a writing tutor can give a student: 'To write and not be a writer'. More
on this later. There's also some detail about Ashbery's first encounter with
the prose of Giorgio de Chirico's novel Hebdomeros, which greatly influenced his own prose poetry,
and of which there are substantial selections here.
I have to say a great thanks for that generous inclusion of de Chirico, for
two reasons: firstly, I had never read these pieces myself and they are, as
Ashbery himself has said 'So amazing É I had never read anything like it
before'. But, secondly, they are the stand-out pieces in a book that is
really a rattle bag of material. Other than the fact that Ashbery translated
it all, and that they are in French, there is very little rhyme or reason to
the collection, which ranges from Marie-Catherine D'Aulnoy's seventeenth
century fairy tale 'The White Cat', through Odilon Redon's abstruse
philosophising, to a short play by Jarry of Ubu Roi fame. There are long excerpts from Raymond
Roussel's 'Documents To Serve As An Outline', which strike me as broadly un-translatable given Roussel's arcane codification and punning,
most of which is lost in translation. But the Giorgio de Chirico is fabulous,
with its expansive, graceful, emergent sentences, its encompassing
intelligence and its imaginative range that puts the more contrived
surrealism of others in the shade:
Of these signs the most
characteristic in my opinion was
that the shepherds had
already fled into the mountains and,
although night had not
yet descended completely on the
countryside, one could
now see their bonfires burning from
peak to peak, which
reminded certain folk of the means
used by prehistoric
tribes to communicate news across
vast deserts untrodden by
human feet, wherein lions, as
though harnessed to
invisible chariots, wandered in
perfectly symmetrical
couples hunting the antelope
with gentle eyes.
(from 'The Engineer's Son')
The work here from Pierre Reverdy, on the other hand, reminds me of the worst
excesses of surrealist technique, in which free floating signifiers float so
free of any tangible meaning that they become nothing more than the
pretentious play of signification in the regressive mirror of
meaninglessness: ''The screw propellers of humankind sometimes trick the
hypnotic surveillance of the inner lighthouse to come and beat the ashes of
ennui'. What is going on here beyond the impossibility of meaning and the
gauche exercise of banal juxtaposition? Such works endlessly explore what
those poststructural theorists called 'the expression of non-logical truths'
or, as Noam Chomsky puts it, 'Colourless green ideas sleep furiously'.
Neither do I have time for the excerpts here of Antonin Artaud's self-pitying
correspondence with editor Jacques Rivière, from 1923-4, in which Artaud
indulges his 'frightful; illness of mind', ending with his poem 'Cry', which
Rivière had rejected from the Nouvelle Revue Franaise. With very good reason. It's dreadful.
What I do have time for, on the
other hand, are some very interesting articles on painting by Jean Hlion;
'What is figuration then? It is looking for and keeping your path between
proud, obvious Creation and the Void whose dizziness affects us all. The
painter works on horseback, the reins of colour in his hand, his head in the
wind of ideas, his eyes wide open on the world. Without knowing what his goal
is to be.' As with Ashbery's own advice to 'Write and not be a writer', this
sounds like very sound advice for a painter, or indeed a writer, and
prefigures Hlion's conclusion: 'A certain brilliance in the result Ð that is
the trap. Avoid itÉ Then, without regrets, and singing as loud as you can,
work inside it, with broad, precise strokes, until a real work of art is
born, no longer seductive, but with everything enunciated on the highest
level of your mind.' My own colleague, the novelist Sam North, has a metaphor
for this 'dis-enchantment' of the self that a painter or writer needs to
have: he calls it 'removing the asses head', as in A Midsummer
Night's Dream in which Titania is
bewitched in to believing that everything she sees is beautiful, and that
Bottom in the donkey's head is an Adonis. Or, in other words, and using the
common bromide, a writer/painter
must 'murder their darlings'.
There are some great gems in this book but, for this reader, there are also
too many asses heads.
© Andy Brown 2014
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