literary passport

interview with translator Aaron Prevots

Translator Aaron Prevots is Assistant Professor of French at Southwestern University in Georgetown, Texas. He specializes in 19th-21st century French poetry and has published articles on important writers such as Rimbaud, Réda and Yves Bonnefoy. Related poems and translations have appeared in The Dirty Goat and Archipel: Cahier international de littérature. His most recent translation is Return to Calm, a collection of poetry from France’s Jacques Réda (b. 1929). A cultural icon and eminent literary figure in mainland Europe, Réda is the author of over thirty books, including works of poetry, autobiographical prose, short novels, and essays on topics ranging from jazz to city life to literature. He is the recipient of numerous honors, including the Grand Prix de l'Académie Française (1993).

Aaron, what piqued your interest in Réda?

Jacques Réda is relatively unusual on the French scene today in that he enjoys writing rhymed poetry that, like his prose, has a smooth, percolating, wistful flow. I enjoy, for instance, abstract poetry too, but reading Réda is like listening to your favorite old jazz tracks on records, where you have a rich warm sound coming out of the speakers and the feel of an album you can see actually turning like time. It draws you in with its mix of energy and images and mellowness. There aren't so many writers like him nowadays that are sort of humble and old-fashioned and self-effacing but still deep in unexpected ways. If that sounds a bit much, just think Robert Frost — whom he's translated — transplanted to late-twentieth-century France.

Are there certain ways in which Réda can be seen as a particularly French writer?

The attention to words and, again, their flow on the page, is really distinct. This is partly a technical point, in the sense of poetic patterns and technique: whereas in English — or even for example Neruda's Odes in Spanish — there are numerous alternating accents in a line and density is important at the word level, in French density and impact occur more at the word group level. The emphasis on how the poem breathes is crucial. With Réda, the texts take on a drawn out and somewhat elegant quality, in that he's highly conscious of how phrases work as breath units, in addition to as groups of related images and sets of key words on the page. The rhythms are more measured and perhaps generous relative to much poetry in English today — although it's of course dangerous to overgeneralize, and Réda is perfectly well aware of the styles that set many countries' best writers apart.

a little wrong

From Under The Glacier, by Halldór Laxness:

It's strange that all birds don't fly in the same way. After all, the air's just the same at the same place and the same time. I've heard that the wings of aeroplanes all conform to the same formula, whereas birds each conform to a formula of their own. It has undeniably required more than a little ingenuity to equip so many birds each with their own formula, and no expense spared, either. Nevertheless, there has perhaps never been a bird that flies as correctly as an aeroplane; yet all birds fly better than aeroplanes if they can fly at all. All birds are perhaps a little wrong, because an absolute once-and-for-all formula for a bird has never been found, just as all novels are bad because the correct formula for a novel has never been found.