July 28, 1927

We learn, according to a major poetry database, that John Ashbery (July 28, 1927 to September 3, 2017) a major American poet,

'...was born in Rochester, New York,.... He was the author of more than twenty books of poetry, ...
During his career, Ashbery received nearly every major American award for poetry. His collection A Wave (Viking, 1984) won the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize; Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (Viking, 1975) received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the National Book Award; and Some Trees (Yale University Press, 1956) was selected by W. H. Auden for the Yale Younger Poets Series.'

Among Ashbery's other volumes was.. Collected French Translations: Poetry (2014)....These were a topic in an interview Adam Fitzgerald, conducted and curated in Bomb. The interviewer, as an introduction, situates Ashery in the context of other poets translating French poetry.

'[John Ashbery's translations of French poetry]..... are not so programmatic as Pound’s, nor do they feel as singularly monumental an epiphany as when one realizes how much T. S. Eliot imported directly from Jules Laforgue. ...

'For this interview, I wanted to know more about the time leading up to his travels in France, and specifically about his years in Paris—a crucial time for him as poet, editor, and Francophile. As a poet, he was in the process of formulating his iconoclastic second book of poems, The Tennis Court Oath, whose strange syntax and subject matter belie just how fascinated he was by being severed from the vernacular he so loved. ....

'AF When did you first get to France?

'JA My first year, the 1955–56 academic year, I was in Montpellier. Fulbright applicants had to list two places where they’d want to study. Everybody, of course, put Paris as number one, so not that many people got their first choice. I listed Montpellier because a friend of mine had said, “Why don’t you pick Montpellier? It’s sunny, it’s in the south of France, near the sea.” It was, but it was terribly dreary, although it’s supposed to be very glam now. I snuck off to Paris as often as I could. There were very cheap hotels then that you could stay in for like a dollar or two a night, which I didn’t really have. My stipend was like 135 dollars a month, but my parents helped.
....
'I went back to America in the summer of ’57 when my Fulbright expired, and spent that school year in New York taking graduate French lit courses at NYU thinking I would get a PhD in French literature so as to be able to teach. I taught first and second year French at NYU’s Bronx campus. During that year I lived with Jimmy Schuyler in a sixth floor walk-up.

'...... At the end of the year I persuaded my parents to let me go back to France in the summer of ’58. I planned to do research on Raymond Roussel, which no one had yet done. So I went back, supposedly for the summer only, but kept extending my stay. When I look back at my letters to friends then, I realize I lived through years of uncertainty as to where my next meal and next month’s rent would be coming from. (I recently ran into a filmmaker of my age whom I’d known in the ‘50s, who said, “People don’t know how poor we were back then.”) I eventually got a job as art critic for the Paris edition of the New York Herald Tribune on the strength of the reviews I’d done for ARTnews, [ from about 1962–65]
.....
'AF When did you start translating?

'JA Maybe a year or so before I went to France, and probably for pragmatic reasons—friends needed things translated. I remember doing a few of the Max Jacob prose poems for a friend who was involved with a concert including musical settings of them; they were printed in the program.
....
'JA .... Once when I was really hard up for cash in Paris, I translated two detective novels—

'AF Under a pseudonym.

'JA Yes, they were pretty trashy, but I was instructed to make them trashier because they weren’t sufficiently lurid for the American public.
....
'[As  a child] I had a children’s encyclopedia, The Book of Knowledge, which had belonged to my mother, published around 1910, I think. Among the many entries in it were the history of astronomy and the medieval world. There were French lessons in each volume (there were twenty) featuring conversations in French, and they looked so elegant and pretty that I wanted to learn the language. I also had a volume of stories by Madame d’Aulnoy, whose marvelous story “The White Cat” is in my first volume of translations.

'AF So what grade were you when you took your first French class?

'JA Probably tenth.

'AF After your first year abroad you came back to New York, and—

'JA When I was enrolled at NYU, in the graduate French department, I got enough credits for a PhD—

'AF Really?

'JA Yeah, but of course I needed to write a dissertation. I picked Raymond Roussel because nobody knew very much about him, and I found his work fascinating. The French weren’t interested in him at all at that time, but since then he’s become very chic in France.

'AF So why didn’t you complete your PhD?

'JA I didn’t want a PhD, I just wanted to live in France! So once I got back there, I figured out ways to hang on until I finally had to return in 1965 to care for my mother after my father died.
....

'AF You were able to contact Michel Leiris?

'JA Oh, sure. His father had been Roussel’s business manager, so Michel had known him as a child. Roussel was extraordinarily rich, eccentric, and gay. He kept a woman friend, Madame Dufrêne, whom he had pose as his mistress. Through Leiris, I discovered that she had gone to live in Brussels after Roussel died in the ’30s—it was cheaper there and she didn’t have any money. Leiris gave me an address he had before the war, and I finally tracked her down. There was a shop on the ground floor and two floors of apartments above, and the shop owner said he didn’t know who the woman was. As he was talking, a tenant came through the shop and said, “Oh, I remember her; she went to live at the so-and-so nursing home.” So I went over to that place, and I eventually saw quite a bit of her.

'I told Leiris about the miserable place she was living in, and he had her placed in a very nice private rest home. I went to see her there once, and she wasn’t very happy because she missed her cronies at the other place. She said, “Michel Leiris thinks this is the earthly paradise!” Another funny event: I gave a poetry reading at the office of the American cultural attaché in Brussels. Do we still have cultural attachés? Anyway, I wasn’t known then as a poet, but I was in the Grove Press anthology Donald Allen edited. The attaché was a musicologist, Gilbert Chase; he saw the anthology and invited me to Brussels. I told Madame Dufrêne about it, and she said, “Oh, I must come to that.” She didn’t know any English, of course. I said, “I don’t think you’d enjoy it that much.” And she replied, “Oh yes, I’m sure I would.”

'AF So Roussel’s mistress showed up at your poetry reading?

'JA I picked her up in a taxi; she was wearing her last remnants of finery and had makeup smeared over her face. She was quite a sight! She came to the reading and pretended that she enjoyed it very much.

'AF Tell me about “In Havana,” the Roussel piece included in the Collected French Translations.

'JA Roussel had arranged for the publication of six unrelated tales under the title “Documents to Serve as an Outline,” which, as it turned out, occurred posthumously; the framework that was supposed to link them together wasn’t given. The French word for “outline” is canevas, which also means an embroidery canvas that has to be completed. When I would go to parties or cafés with intellectuals jabbering, I would interrupt them and ask if they knew anything about Roussel. One of the people I pestered was a Romanian surrealist painter named Jacques Hérold, who said, “I happen to own an unpublished text of his.” It turned out that Hérold had a proof copy of the unpublished preface to Roussel’s final, unfinished work of fiction.

'AF Incredible! Didn’t the Parisians give you a nickname for being so obsessed with Roussel?

'JA A woman named Paule Thévenin, who had been close to Artaud, referred to me as Ce fou d’Américain qui s’intéresse à Raymond Roussel, “that crazy American who’s interested in Raymond Roussel.” Anyway, Hérold lent me his document, the unpublished proof of the introduction, which explains how these tales are linked together, although it doesn’t really do so very clearly. The names of the characters are left blank with only initials, whereas with the published chapters they’re complete names. I’ve never found out much about that, but he obviously had some code or more than one going.

'AF Kenneth Koch turned you on to Roussel, coming back from his Fulbright in France. What was it about Roussel that excited you and still excites you now? For me, it’s hard to get into because it is just so dry.

'JA That’s what I find so exciting. It’s as though he’s trying to reduce the temperature of literature to absolute zero. Somehow, the closer he gets to that, the more passionate it seems to become, just because of his fanatic and fantastic desire to reduce everything to something clear and passionless and meaningful only in itself. It doesn’t have any allegorical quotient.

'AF In French, is it very literary? Once you said it was very technical sounding.

'JA I think it was Leiris who said that Roussel wrote the kind of French that students were instructed to write at the Lycée: grammatically correct and totally limpid and cold. I don’t know why it appealed to me so much. I don’t think I’m a cold person myself. Maybe that’s why.

'Another thing that was interesting about him was the look of his books. He had them all published at his own expense. He chose a publisher, Lemerre, who was famous for publishing the academic Parnassian poets in the nineteenth century. Even back then they were considered stuffy, but Roussel was impressed by the handsome way their books were produced and by the fact that they would take him on for money, which a lot of reputable publishers wouldn’t do. For one of his books, New Impressions of Africa, he commissioned anonymous illustrations from a hack illustrator. It’s very difficult to translate because it’s cut up into grammatical segments that nest inside each other. It’s also a challenge to read because you have to connect the matching fragments together. It’s a perfectly simple text, but if half of a sentence is on page twelve and the other half is on page eighteen, it becomes difficult. Roussel wanted to have it printed in different color inks, which at the time would’ve been fantastically expensive, even for someone with his resources. But now it’s feasible, and recently Princeton University Press has published it like that, in an English translation by the poet Mark Ford.
....
'AF You met Pierre [Martory,] the first year there but would only translate his work much later, once you were established in the States. Did he ever translate your work as well?

'JA He translated some of mine very early in our friendship, but no one was interested in my poetry then. I translated him much later, when I realized if I didn’t, no one would ever read his poetry, since he didn’t want to have to go through the agony of sending it to a French publisher. He had a horror of that, in fact.

'AF Didn’t he retreat from publishing after his first novel came out?

'JA His first novel was very well received and, for a short time, he was considered a young fiction writer to watch. He was always working on a novel, and he finished a few. He sent one to his editor, Robert Kanters, who had published his first one but who, though gay, turned down the second one because it had a homosexual plot. Things took much longer to get liberated there than here. Kanters was very well known in the French literary world. In his book of memoirs he wrote, “And then there was the young, talented novelist, Pierre Martory, I don’t know whatever happened to him…” Pierre was going to write a letter to him saying, “You certainly do know what happened to me, because you turned down my second book!”

'AF The title of the first novel is Phébus?

'JA Yes, Phébus ou le Beau Mariage (Phébus or the Good Marriage). He left several incomplete novels and lots of poems. I have to say that I wasn’t that impressed by Phébus myself when I read it. It seems dated now—sort of like the novels of Mauriac, who wrote about the bitterness of bourgeois French provincial life.

'AF You’ve described the difference between French and English as that of a violin and piano.
.....
'JA Yeah.

'AF .... Is your work as a translator difficult because you feel you’re facing the same incompatibility, that French and English can’t work together?

'JA No. I think an English translation of a French text is genetically different from the original. People say that some piano music is pianistic. French never seems to be English-tic, if you will, but that doesn’t mean you can’t have idiomatic versions in both cases.

'AF Just building off of that, you’ve often said to me that you thought one of the reasons you loved Rimbaud so much was because he was able to avoid the “tyrannical clarity” of the French language. There is something about the French language that leads toward clarity and sense, in a way, where English can kind of go off more.

'JA Yeah, there’s no room for dark, musty corners. It’s as though something written in French were completely illuminated just because of the nature of the language.'


These words of the interviewer can also serve as a conclusion on the significance of John Ashbery in reference to his French poetry:

'Through his translations from the French, John Ashbery joins a body of great twentieth-century American poets who have sought to trace their lineage from elsewhere, as much to undermine prevailing literary conventions as to inform us about those other traditions. In the twin prose and poetry volumes of Ashbery’s Collected French Translations, recently published... a compelling argument can be made—that the wild diversity and vitality of innovative American poetry operates today, in large part, because of what the translator-poet found in Raymond Roussel, Arthur Rimbaud, Giorgio de Chirico, and Max Jacob. By influencing Ashbery so decisively throughout a seven-decade career, these Frenchmen have shaped us all.'