Edward Gauvin
Photo courtesy of Edward Gauvin
Bio
A full-time freelance translator since 2006, Edward Gauvin has received prizes, fellowships, and residencies from PEN America, the Fulbright program, Ledig House, the Lannan Foundation, and the French Embassy. His work has won the John Dryden Translation prize and the Science Fiction & Fantasy Translation Award, and been nominated for the Albertine, French-American Foundation, and Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prizes. A devotee of short fiction, he has contributed more than 100 translations to such journals as Conjunctions, the Harvard Review, and the Southern Review, as well as anthologies from Penguin, Dalkey Archive, and Macmillan, including various year’s best collections. Other publications have appeared in the New York Times and Harper's. The translator of eight works of prose fiction and over 300 graphic novels, he is a contributing editor for comics at Words Without Borders. He has published Pierre Bettencourt’s work in the Subtropics and World Literature Today, and online in The Collagist, Anomalous, and Tin House.
To say these grants are a matter of life and death (or at least art and starvation) is no exaggeration. The last time I got one, it and my Fulbright bought me a lean, rapt year of bookworming in Brussels. Careers hinge on such occasions. Worlds are opened, outlooks altered, hidden lineages unearthed. What is literature if not such resurrections and connections? The transmission of experience in that ancient, imperfect yet urgent medium, the word. My Brussels discoveries sit here, still irradiating my reading yet to come.
I’m in a different place now. A family means ramen or stoicism isn’t an acceptable dinner binary. I’d like a ramshackle barn out back where I could stand typesetting prose poems in a tattered scarf and a cloud of my own breath, as I imagine my author Pierre Bettencourt did on wintry Occupation mornings. (Lord knows the jackboots are getting louder outside.) But as Pierre Menard said of becoming Cervantes, “of all the impossible ways of carrying out” a translation, this might be “the least interesting.” Authors speak to us across improbable gulfs of space and time, mystically singling out the sympathetic ear. To translate Pierre Bettencourt today is to find my own (arduous and rewarding) path to bringing him back—an undertaking not without grave-robbing, skullduggery, and betrayals for posterity like Brod’s broken promise to Kafka.
Peter Taylor once said, “I might not be able to teach you to write, but I can save you time.” The National Endowment for the Arts doesn’t just save you time, it gives you time. The possibilities arising from its fungible gift are, like any masterpiece, a bounded infinity: Research. Travel. Objective weight to the besieged conviction that what we do is worth doing not only for ourselves, from some quixotic need, but for others, in the awaiting world.
Selections by Pierre Bettencourt
[Translated from the French]
No One
Always live your life as if No One were watching. For No One rules the world. The need to please, to work yourself to the bone, are at the root of all intellectual failings on this earth.
But you are alone on an island, with No One for God. All around this bandstand, the sea is your only audience, your sole witness. So speak or stay silent, live life out loud or in whispers, it’s all the same: No One resides deep inside, and whether he slumbers or shows himself, you feel his discreet omnipotent presence within, his cyclopean eye beams from the middle of your brow like the light on a miner in the muck, you make your way forward into the ever so lightly wooded night of existence with the purposeful step of a free man.
My Hole
I don’t know if the earth is round, if we can ever avoid winding up right back where we started from, but I do know it’s full of holes we spend our time avoiding, and in the end these holes determine our direction. You run into crazies dashing headlong who fall into the first hole they find, from the depths of which their voices come begging. Will you stop? Will you help them get out, or let yourself be dragged in too? A thorny debate the finest have spent their lives on. I myself turn a deaf ear; they’re clumsy souls whose cries allow me to keep moving through the night. For my duty it is to go farther than they, to stake out a hole of my very own where, alone, I shall await my death in silence.
About Pierre Bettencourt
Pierre Bettencourt (1917-2006) was a critically acclaimed painter, poet, printer, prankster, and true eccentric of French art and letters who shunned with mischievous modesty any limelight and the larger literary world. During the Nazi occupation, he printed his early chapbooks on a manual press in a family barn, later publishing works by Antonin Artaud, Francis Ponge, Henri Michaux, and Jean Dubuffet. His prodigious oeuvre—from typographically experimental prose poems to mixed-media collages—stands outside trends and tradition. A writer of caustic humor, abrupt absurdities, and extreme whimsy, he is best remembered for the prose poems he wrote throughout his life.