Something here for everyone…I’m proud to announce for 2010 three new publications! As different as any translations could ever be:  one is by a woman (the fat one) two by a man (one man, two skinny books). One is bright red and is a book you can lose yourself in, all four hundred plus pages; the other two are discreet little “lyric essays” to be read like poems, in moments of bright, floating contemplation…whatever! And one (the fat one) is only available in the UK, so you’ll have to go here to order it, and the other two are available only in the US, so go here.

Anna Gavalda:  Consolation

Consolation is as I said a book to get lost in, and I did for weeks and months, translating it with the echo of Leonard Cohen’s famous blue raincoat in my head…it’s a love story with a twist (aren’t they all?), where a lost love leads to a found love…and there are lots of children and donkeys and music and drunken Russians and bratty Parisian teenagers and a burnt-out architect… Anna Gavalda is one of France’s most beloved and popular authors, and she has yet to become known to the benighted Anglo-Saxon world, but she deserves to be read and beloved  for her humor and her warm take on life. I know I enjoyed reading it over and over, despite all the vicious puns I had to translate (she has told me she puts them there on purpose! Just joking) and I hope I’ve done justice to the rich “Gavaldian” world she creates.

Christian Bobin:  A Little Party Dress and I Never Dared Hope for You

Christian Bobin is one my favorite authors of all time. I am particularly proud of these two translations because I struggled for years to find a publisher, and at last they have been published by Autumn Hill Books, an independent small press in Iowa City, Iowa, specializing in translation. Christian Bobin is as different from Anna Gavalda as can be, but he is also a creator of worlds. Above all, he shows us how to see the intimate details of life that are there before our eyes and that we’ve never really seen or understood. His lyric essays read like a mixture of poetry and a short story; above all, the language fractures light, rearranges your emotional perception. For me these are little legible jewels, to be read again and again, just for the pleasure of the fusion between language and vision… I hope I’ve done them justice because they are indescribably beautiful texts in French, and it’s easy to curse English for being unpoetic and utilitarian, a language of shopkeepers…still, I hope something has come through of the light and the music.