Gustave Flaubert

Mark Polizzotti

Considered Gustave Flaubert's masterpiece, Bouvard and Pecuchet opens with two middle-aged copy-clerks who become fast friends after meeting on a city bench and discovering their shared habit of writing their names in their hats: "I should say so! Someone could walk off with mine at the office!" When a small inheritance allows Bouvard and Pecuchet to retire early and move to the country, they use their newfound leisure time to satisfy their curiosity about all the things they'd been too busy to study in the city. Flaubert shows his unlikely protagonists diving disastrously into everything from farming and politics to literature and love, and coming up empty-handed each time - until, finally, their obsessive pursuit of knowledge becomes an end in itself. Bouvard and Pecuchet unravels the novel's realist tradition, and sets the stage for the modernist innovations of Kafka, Joyce, and Beckett. Although Flaubert died before completing it, this new translation contains the fullest and most accurate version of the text, as well as his "Dictionary of Accepted Ideas" and the previously untranslated "Catalogue of Fashionable Ideas."

Bouvard and Pecuchet

Patrick Modiano

A Novel

Scene of the Crime

Jean Echenoz

A sophisticated Parisian art dealer abandons his family to join a treasure hunting expedition to the Arctic, only to find himself caught up in a bizarre theft linked to corruption in the international art market. Winner of the 1999 Prix Goncourt.

I'm Gone

Marguerite Duras

Celebrated writer Marguerite Duras on the artistic process

Writing

Why Surrealism Matters

"Highway 61 Revisited resonates because of its enduring emotional appeal. Few songwriters before Dylan or since have combined so effectively the intensely personal with the spectacularly universal. In Like a Rolling Stone, his gleeful excoriation of Miss Lonely (Edie Sedgwick? Joan Baez? a composite?) fuses with the evocation of a hip new zeitgeist to produce a veritable anthem. In Ballad of a Thin Man, the younger generation's confusion is thrown back in the Establishment's face, even as Dylan vents his disgust with the critics who labored to catalogue him. And in Desolation Row, he reaches the zenith of his own brand of surrealist paranoia, that here attains the atmospheric intensity of a full-fledged nightmare. Between its many flourishes of gallows humor, this is one of the most immaculately frightful songs ever recorded, with its relentless imagery of communal executions, its parade of fallen giants and triumphant local losers, its epic length and even the mournful sweetness of Bloomfield's flamenco-inspired fills. In this book, Mark Polizzotti examines just what makes the songs on Highway 61 Revisited so affecting, how they work together as a suite, and how lyrics, melody, and arrangements combine to create an unusually potent mix. He blends musical and literary analysis of the songs themselves, biography (where appropriate) and recording information (where helpful). And he focuses on Dylan's mythic presence in the mid-60s, when he emerged from his proletarian incarnation to become the American Rimbaud. The comparison has been made by others, including Dylan, and it illuminates much about his mid-sixties career, for in many respects Highway 61 is rock's answer to A Season in Hell."--Bloomsbury Publishing.

Highway 61 Revisited

Scholastique Mukasonga

Kibogo

An engaging and unabashedly opinionated examination of what translation is and isn't. For some, translation is the poor cousin of literature, a necessary evil if not an outright travesty—summed up by the old Italian play on words, traduttore, traditore (translator, traitor). For others, translation is the royal road to cross-cultural understanding and literary enrichment. In this nuanced and provocative study, Mark Polizzotti attempts to reframe the debate along more fruitful lines. Eschewing both these easy polarities and the increasingly abstract discourse of translation theory, he brings the main questions into clearer focus: What is the ultimate goal of a translation? What does it mean to label a rendering “faithful”? (Faithful to what?) Is something inevitably lost in translation, and can something also be gained? Does translation matter, and if so, why? Unashamedly opinionated, both a manual and a manifesto, his book invites usto sympathize with the translator not as a “traitor” but as the author's creative partner. Polizzotti, himself a translator of authors from Patrick Modiano to Gustave Flaubert, explores what translation is and what it isn't, and how it does or doesn't work. Translation, he writes, “skirts the boundaries between art and craft, originality and replication, altruism and commerce, genius and hack work.” In Sympathy for the Traitor, he shows us how to read not only translations but also the act of translation itself, treating it not as a problem to be solved but as an achievement to be celebrated—something, as Goethe put it, “impossible, necessary, and important.”

A Translation Manifesto

Sympathy for the Traitor

Philippe Djian

Marlene

Aptly described by playwright Eugene Ionesco as "one of the four or five great reformers of modern thought", Andre Breton (1896-1966) was the founder and prime mover of Surrealism, the most influential artistic and literary movement of the twentieth century. Poet and theorist, artistic impresario and political agitator, Breton was a man of paradoxical character: inspiring one moment, crushingly tyrannical the next; embracing friends like Bunuel, Dali, Duchamp, Miro, Man Ray, Aragon, and Eluard, only to exile them as enemies later. From its emergence from Dada after World War I through its culmination in the 1960s, here is the Surrealist world in fascinating detail.

The Life of André Breton

Revolution of the Mind

Jean-Claude Kastner is assigned to find Gloire Stella, a popular singer who disappeared four years earlier

Big Blondes

Highway 61 Revisited resonates because of its enduring emotional appeal. Few songwriters before Dylan or since have combined so effectively the intensely personal with the spectacularly universal. In "Like a Rolling Stone," his gleeful excoriation of Miss Lonely (Edie Sedgwick? Joan Baez? a composite "type"?) fuses with the evocation of a hip new zeitgeist to produce a veritable anthem. In "Ballad of a Thin Man," the younger generation's confusion is thrown back in the Establishment's face, even as Dylan vents his disgust with the critics who labored to catalogue him. And in "Desolation Row," he reaches the zenith of his own brand of surrealist paranoia, that here attains the atmospheric intensity of a full-fledged nightmare. Between its many flourishes of gallows humor, this is one of the most immaculately frightful songs ever recorded, with its relentless imagery of communal executions, its parade of fallen giants and triumphant local losers, its epic length and even the mournful sweetness of Bloomfield's flamenco-inspired fills. In this book, Mark Polizzotti examines just what makes the songs on Highway 61 Revisited so affecting, how they work together as a suite, and how lyrics, melody, and arrangements combine to create an unusually potent mix. He blends musical and literary analysis of the songs themselves, biography (where appropriate) and recording information (where helpful). And he focuses on Dylan's mythic presence in the mid-60s, when he emerged from his proletarian incarnation to become the American Rimbaud. The comparison has been made by others, including Dylan, and it illuminates much about his mid-sixties career, for in many respects Highway 61 is rock 'n' roll's answer to A Season in Hell.

Bob Dylan's Highway 61 Revisited

"This is at once a manual, handbook, and a manifesto on translation in all its literary, business, scientific, machine, and Biblical forms: what some regard as being the "poor cousin of literature" and a "necessary evil"; what others consider to be "the royal road to cross-cultural understanding and literary enrichment." Mark Polizzotti, himself a celebrated translator, avoids the historically entrenched standpoints of "traduttore, traditore" as well as the notion that there is something inherently noble in the practice. Discarding translation theory, Polizzotti instead approaches translation as a practice and looks to sensitize readers--both those informed and those with little knowiedge of the subject--to both the large but also to the more detailed matters at hand by way of concrete examples of translations. The book addresses the history of translation--the "bearing across" of a saint to heaven that it started as in the 12th century in Englsh; it looks at the ethics and culture of translation (and when adaptation can become imperialist appropriation); it draws from personal case studies from the author's own translation work to show the impact that different renderings of a text can have on what the text says; it also looks at the limits of translation, when sounds compete with meaning which in turn competes with cultural context and impossible choices are faced (as in the cases of Surrealist champion Raymond Roussel, or self-described "Schizo" Louis Wolfson, who wrote in French and transmosed any piece of English to hit his ear into phonetic amalgamations of other tongues)"--

a translation manifesto

Sympathy for the traitor

Los Olvidados (1950) established Luis Bunuel's reputation as a world-class director. Set in the slums of Mexico City, it follows the crime-filled and violent lives of group of juvenile delinquents. The film exhibits some of Bunuel's recognisable themes of love's yearnings, social injustice, and surrealism, but with a layer of compassion that sets it apart from many of his other films. In 2003, 'Los Olvidados' was inducted into UNESCO's Memory of the World programme, which preserves documentary heritage of world significance. Mark Polizzotti explores the historical context, aesthetic importance and biographical significance of the film, providing the first complete overview of 'Los Olvidados' in English. He also presents an introduction to the Mexican film industry and places Bunuel and his films within it. While many critics have taken 'Los Olvidados' as a film about urban poverty, Mark Polizzotti sees it as a much more personal and mysterious statement about yearning, loss, and the need for redemption. By taking the notion of hunger as its structural principle, he explores the themes of love, betrayal, desire, and death that make the film such a powerful statement more than fifty years after its release.

Los Olvidados

André Breton

Originally published in 1928, Surrealism and Painting is the most important statement ever written on surrealist art, and the only book on the subject composed by the movement's founder and prime theorist. It contains Breton's seminal treatise on the origins and foundations of artistic surrealism, with his trenchant assessments of its precursors and practitioners, and his call for the plastic arts to "refer to a purely internal model." Also included are essays - on Picasso, Duchamp, Dali, Ernst, Masson, Miro, and many others, as well as pieces on Gaulish art, outsider art, and the folk arts of Haiti and Oceania. But what makes this book most compelling is Breton's mix of rigorous erudition and visceral passion, his sense of adventure, and his discoveries of many of Modernism's most prominent figures early in their careers. Long unavailable in English, Surrealism and Painting remains one of the masterworks of twentieth-century art criticism.

Surrealism and Painting

Aptly described by playwright Eugene Ionesco as one of the four or five great reformers of modern thought, Andre Breton (1896-1966) was the founder and prime mover of Surrealism, the most influential artistic and literary movement of the 20th century. Poet and theorist, artistic impresario and political agitator, Breton was a man of paradoxical character: inspiring one moment, crushingly tyrannical the next; embracing friends like Brunuel, Dali, Duchamp, Miro, Man Ray, Aragon and Eluard, only to exile them as enemies later. From its emergence from Dada after World War I through its culmination in the 1960s, here is the Surrealist world in detail. --Black Widow Press.

Jo Hoestlandt

Johanna Kang

Nine-year-old Helen is confused by the disappearance of her Jewish friend during the German occupation of Paris.

Mark Polizzotti

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