Le monde s’étire s’allonge et se retire comme un accordéon qu’une main sadique tourmente The earth stretches elongated and snaps back like an accordion tortured by a sadic hand Dans les déchirures du ciel, les locomotives en furie In the rips in the sky insane locomotives S’enfuient Take flight Et dans les trous, In the […]

  As my colleagues at Zeteo, William and Steve, have already pointed out, the sorrow we feel for those who lost their lives or loved ones during the attacks in Paris and Beirut this week is unfortunately accompanied by fear that the violence will only escalate from here. That is, after all, the point of terrorism, to take the middle […]

  If now largely ignored, Alain Tanner and John Berger’s 1976 film Jonas qui aura 25 ans en l’an 2000 (For Jonas Who Will Be 25 In The Year 2000), remains warm, charming, lovable.[1] And the movie is particularly hard not to like now when the hopes and “Marxist humanist” analysis underlying it have come […]

Review of Tomb(e) by Hélène Cixous, translated by Laurent Milesi (Seagull Books, 2014). Distributed by The University of Chicago Press. By Walter Cummins   What are we to make of prose like this? Never did I love so powerfully but for dreaming still and dreaming the Dream of Dreams, as if Love killed me in order […]

  Last week’s Dirty Cookies concerned savoring the unpalatable. Since then, in a recent issue of The Brooklyn Rail, I have come across some of Colette’s many encouragements to savor the rather more palatable. From Mary Ann Caws’s translation, “I Love Being a Gourmande”: The real gourmet is the one who takes as much delight […]

  One hundred and twenty years ago, in December 1894, Captain Alfred Dreyfus was found guilty of selling French military secrets to the Germans. He was sentenced to life in exile on Devil’s Island, off the coast of French Guiana. Politicians and journalists used the fact that Dreyfus was a Jew to whip up a massive […]

Evelyn was a good deal out of sorts, said Hugh, intimating by a kind of pout or swell of his very well-covered, manly, extremely handsome, perfectly upholstered body (he was almost too well dressed always, but presumably had to be, with his little job at Court) that his wife had some internal ailment, nothing serious, […]

A very loose translation of a once better known Boris Vian lyric   One nice morning in July, the alarm At dawn it breaks the calm “My doll,” I said, “better shake a leg” Today’s the today, not to be missed Get to the boulevard without delay To see parading the Zanzibar King But suddenly […]

By William Eaton   A discussion of four Emily Dickinson poems in the context of Françoise Delphy’s French translations appearing in Poésies complètes : Edition bilingue français-anglais by Emily Dickinson and Françoise Delphy (Flammarion, 2009).   I.  The Articulate Inarticulate An early reader of Emily Dickinson’s poems used this phrase—“the articulate inarticulate”—to describe her, and […]

Scholars have a name for the twentieth-first century adults that get caught up in the care of their elderly parents and younger kids. They call it the “Sandwich Generation.” Claude Berri’s film The Two of Us (1967) offers a tender portrait of the sides of this group. Claude, an 8-year-old Jewish boy, and Pepe, an […]

Poetry as Conversation By William Eaton   Discussion, orchestrated by William Eaton, of Haikus du temps présent by Mayuzumi Madoka, translated into French by Corinne Atlan (Philippe Picquier, 2012).[1]   In a museum gift shop I came across a book of translations, Haiku Love, credited to Alan Cummings of the School of Oriental and African […]