Women in Translation Month Celebration

August is Women in Translation Month! Malvern Books hosted a celebration on August 17th featuring two AATIA members: Russian > English translator Marian Schwartz (below right) read selections from The Man Who Couldn’t Die: The Tale of an Authentic Human Being by Olga Slavnikova, and English > Spanish translator Liliana Valenzuela (below left) read from her translation of Puro Amor by Sandra Cisneros. Check out footage from the event below!

NYRB Classics Spotlight: Picture

Malvern staff member Fernando is a New York Review Books Classics enthusiast, and he has an excellent recommendation for y’all…

Picture by Lillian Ross

Originally published in 1952, this journalistic account follows legendary director John Huston’s journey to adapt Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage into a film. Written in the compelling style Ross’s reportage came to be known for, it chronicles Huston’s determination to create a cinematic masterpiece, and the shifty studio heads worried about their investment. It’s a brutal account of an auteur’s vision at odds with commercialism, and the Hollywood powers that be.

Also recommended: Fat City by Leonard Gardner. Another novel adapted by Huston to the screen, and hailed as a masterpiece. A knockout double feature.

Staff Picks: The Milk Bowl of Feathers

Claire recommends: The Milk Bowl of Feathers: Essential Surrealist Writings, edited, with an introduction, by Mary Ann Caws

The Milk Bowl of Feathers is Mary Ann Caws’ most recent addition to the surrealist catalogue, and though it is (delightfully) slim for an anthology, this volume manages to feature an unexpected cast of surrealist writers, and a good percentage of them are women.

Distinguished Professor of English, French, and Comparative Literature and Emerita and Resident Professor at the Graduate School of the City University of New York, Mary Ann Caws has translated and written on many Surrealists, so it is with a comprehensive knowledge of the canon that she has curated this treasury of often-overlooked female Surrealist artists, whose captivating work really takes the spotlight, even as it is presented alongside the usual suspects of André Breton, Tristan Tzara, and the like. The stellar female Surrealists included here are: Dora Maar, Joyce Mansour, Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, Claude Cahun, Leonora Carrington, Mina Loy, Alice Rahon, Gisèle Prassinos, Kay Sage, Meret Oppenheim, Alice Rahon, and Léona Delcourt.

As Caws expresses in her brief yet compelling introduction, Dada emerged as a globalizing artistic force post WWI. It was the Dada movement, not André Breton, that was the true forbear of Surrealism. Though many claimed sovereignty in the movement (“I am Surrealism” says Salvador Dalí on repeat), this collection is proof that Surrealism belongs to no one, despite how it is traditionally anthologized. More importantly, this collection is a reminder that Surrealism belongs to everyone.

In her introduction, Mary Ann Caws says: “Essential to Surrealist behavior is a constant state of openness, of readiness for whatever occurs, whatever marvelous object we might come across, manifesting itself against the already thought, the already lived.” Concisely, Caws conveys the importance of spontaneity to this formative movement, the unlimited potential that it holds for the creation of art. And in the work of these featured female artists, we can read a more complete spectrum of this openness to the subconscious, often expressed in enthralling pangs of obsession, wild emptiness, and desire.

Love, Caws reminds us, is the emotion that triumphs through Surrealist writings, experiencing the transcendent emotion “always for the first time” (Breton). Love in Surrealism is a kind of enchantment with consciousness, even its darker tributaries:

I love sliding I love upsetting everything

… writes Jaques-Bernard Brunius in his poem “I Love”. A stunning and complex specter of love steps through in Dora Maar’s poem, “I Rested In The Arms Of My Arms”:

An eternal shivering of thoughts
Fear love Fear love
Close the window open the window
You’ll see you’ll see
The hummingbird motionless as a star

Among the diverse cast of writers is Claude Cahun, a non-gender-conforming writer who lived and wrote well before the term non-binary came into the nomenclature. Born Lucie Renee Mathilde Schwob, Claude Cahoun was a chosen name. A French photographer, sculptor and writer, Claude’s self-portraits often depict doubles of the artist which result in a kind of visual twinning, and reveal their deep investigation of identity and social constructs. Within Claude’s short piece in The Milk Bowl of Feathers, I found one of my favorite passages of the collection:

Only with the very tip would I wish to sew, sting, kill. The rest of the body, what comes after, what a waste of time! Only ever travel in the prow of myself.

Cahoun is not widely translated into English, and their titles in translation are currently out of print, so it is a rare treat to come across this piece in Caws’ collection. (any translators out there looking for a new project?).

Léona Delacourt, a name many people may not have come across, also finds its way into this collection. Léona was the dedicatee of Andre Breton’s infamous novel, Nadja, in which she is obsessed over and exoticized beyond recognition. Though her pieces here are very short, and are themselves drafts of letters to Breton, they lend humanity and a frantic voice back to the person who had been all but lost to history within the heroine, Nadja:

—my soul is troubled—and turns in all directions to find the fire—

Joyce Mansour was a prolific Jewish-Egyptian Surrealist poet whose work hasn’t seen much translation into English, but who authored 16 books of poetry during her lifetime. Her apartment was fabled to be a favored meeting place for Surrealist rendezvous. Her poetry is wrenched by deep bodily sensations, known for her brazen use of erotic imagery, but also for diving deep into the sensations of the mind’s surf:

Shining with a thousand quivers
Consumed by ecstatic mad inertia

Discovered by André Breton at age 14, Gisèle Prassinos is yet another female Surealist whose image has traditionally been cast in the light of a femme enfant, a young muse, objectified by male artists. But it is apparent that Gisèle was something of a prodigy; her words absolutely slice through the page in her intellectual and freaky prose:

I know that by taking on generally the superiority of prophetic organization, your heart will never dare to claim mine.

So, by fixing upon you curtsies and spinnings, I moan these words at you, as a hoax: ‘let’s fear the senses.’

If you like what you read of Gisèle Prassinos in The Milk Bowl of Feathers, check out her full collection of stories, The Arthritic Grasshopper (Wakefield Press, 2017) on the shelves at Malvern Books.

The Milk Bowl of Feathers also includes a range of writings done by visual artists, including a story by everybody’s favorite British expat painter, Leonora Carrington. Carrington’s stories (check out this great collection put out by Dorothy Project, also on the shelves at Malvern Books) feel like stepping into one of her paintings—they’re populated by bizarre humanoid creatures whose incoherent foibles mimic free association. For example, in her story “The Sand Camel,” two young boys fashion a camel out of butter and sand, and this weird pet animates, and goes on to hold their grandmother upside-down as a kind of makeshift umbrella.

The Milk Bowl of Feathers is a fresh salute to the Surrealist spirit, which is as relevant now as ever in its openness to possibility; in reaching beyond the rational, we push against capitalism, nationalism, and against a hierarchy of meaning that can create toxic frameworks, such as the phallocracy that dominates our understanding of Surrealism. I think we could all benefit from an injection of receptivity, and a more inclusive exploration of art and life that exists in a sheer state of exuberance.

Staff Picks: A King Alone

Celia recommends A King Alone by Jean Giono:

I slid into this novel first through its language. So: “Everything piles up on us; nothing moves. Green at first, the light turns the color of hare innards, then an extraordinary black that, black as it is, has shadows of deep purple.” Or else: “How can such perfection not have a consciousness, when all it takes is a puff of wind, an unfortunate shift of evening light, an odd tilt to its leaves for its beauty, defeated, to lose all its power to awe?”

Like much of Jean Giono’s other work, A King Alone takes place in an isolated community, both embraced and menaced by the natural world. There’s a beech tree in the mountains, a remote village, an unnamed Monsieur V. whose descendant once read Nerval while sitting under the hollyhocks of his mother’s farm, long after the events with which the novel deals were over, a “big illustrated book about Cartouche and Mandrin and werewolves with their different snouts all portrayed in it”—a jumble of innocent-sounding commonplace details, in other words, that, over the course of the novel, become less innocent and more and more sinister. There’s a formal severity to Giono’s chatty narrator, with his encyclopedic knowledge of the villages around him. He sees everything—or, if he doesn’t see it, he’s heard of it. But the reasons for things, the interior lives of those he watches, are often beyond him. The mystery, in this novel, is never what has happened, but rather why.

So, here is the what: it is 1843, and the people of a small mountain village have begun to disappear. One young woman vanishes into the fog and is never seen again. A second man is gripped from behind and nearly carried off, a scarf wrapped over his head. He gets free but never sees his assailant. A seasoned hunter disappears, leaving his breakfast cold on the table. All that’s found is blood on the snow—and, at one point, a pig is attacked with a razor, leaving it covered in cuts that “looked like the alphabet of some unknown, barbaric language.” Some villagers catch sight of the murderer, but he’s elusive. They see him from behind or in the dark or disappearing into fog, and for a while it seems that he’s the devil himself, or a spirit of bloody nature, a werewolf (remember those snouts in the novel’s opening!), a creature that rejects human sensibility.

Summoned to deal with this scourge is Inspector Langlois, but only after a year has passed. The beast takes people in winter, when the mountain roads are hardest and most dangerous to travel. In spring, the villagers enjoy an illusion of safety. Langlois arrives in the winter of 1844. He will not solve the mystery until the next year, long after the moment when he feels that he has most completely failed. And what is this solution, exactly? A name. A house. A human. Not an explanation for why what happened has happened, but a moment of convulsive violence, without apparent cause.

The true story happens on the fringes of the narrative, in the moments of calm that occur in the interval before death and blood. When a man named Frederic walks out in the morning mist, and witnesses yet another murder, the conflict that ensues is not one of strength or wits, but simply with his own endurance and memory. Will he be brave enough to follow the man to his destination? Will he trust his own memory of what he saw?

Then there is the innkeeper the villagers call Sausage, a former prostitute who strikes up a friendship with Langlois and who remains the best, although reluctant, historian of his time in the village. She’s a liminal character who, by the novel’s end, I thought had become its heart. In the beginning, the villagers know her only as the fat woman with whiskers and a checkered past who runs the inn, and slowly we see her revealed, in a way that few characters in this novel are. She attends a wolf hunt, in which the villagers, under Langlois’s supervision, band together to drive out a creature that might almost be the desperate reincarnation of their phantasmal killer. She helps Langlois find a wife. And she blames herself because, despite her friendship, she ultimately can’t save him.

What people need saving from, in this mystery, is not the murderer under the bed or the wolf at the window, but rather the unknown interior of things—the question, that is, of how to go on in a world that defies explanation.