{"id":275486,"date":"2009-12-10T15:00:00","date_gmt":"2009-12-10T15:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wdev.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent-dev\/2009\/12\/10\/latest-review-europes-by-jacques-reda\/"},"modified":"2018-04-16T14:10:04","modified_gmt":"2018-04-16T14:10:04","slug":"latest-review-europes-by-jacques-reda","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/2009\/12\/10\/latest-review-europes-by-jacques-reda\/","title":{"rendered":"Latest Review: "Europes" by Jacques Reda"},"content":{"rendered":"

The latest addition<\/a> to our Review Section<\/a> is a piece by Daniela Hurezanu on Jacques Reda’s Europes,<\/em> which was translated from the French by Aaron Prevots and published by Host Publications. <\/p>\n

Daniela Hurezanu—a translator and author who wrote a great review<\/a> for us of Memory Glyphs<\/i>—makes this book sound incredibly interesting. There’s a bigger sample below, but I love this line from her review: “Reda’s style is an homage to the long sentence made of complex clauses with subordinates that intricately follow each other—a perfect mastery of grammar as logic-machine.”<\/p>\n

Anyway, the one gripe I have is about Host Publication’s website (surprise!). I really like what Host has done over the past few years, and they have quietly become one of the most consistently interesting presses publishing today. Especially in terms of poetry in translation. But for whatever reason, it looks like their website hasn’t been updated in months. At least. In fact, unless I suddenly became incapable of reading and\/or using the Internets, Europes<\/em> isn’t even listed on Host’s site. Not that I can actually “search” the site, seeing as that there is no seach function . . . (Sorry, everyone at Host. This kind of thing is a pet peeve of mine. And trust me, you are light years ahead of clusterfuck sites like Houghton Mifflin Harcourt’s,<\/a> which I’ve decided is either a joke or some devious experiment.)<\/p>\n

Back to the subject at hand—Reda’s Europes<\/em> and Daniela’s review:<\/p>\n

\n

After having published Return to Calm<\/em>, Host Publications now offers us another book by Jacques R\u00e9da, also bilingual and also in Aaron Prevots\u2019s translation\u2014Europes.<\/i> If in an \u201cofficial\u201d way Europes could be called a \u201ctravel essay,\u201d the book\u2019s fluid character undermines this characterization. Recording the fleeting instants of the narrator\u2019s peregrinations, Europes includes essays on Portugal, Spain, Italy, Switzerland, Germany, Scandinavia and France\u2014one or two essays followed by one or more poems for each country. The poems are “po\u00e8mes de circonstance,”<\/em> that is, topical poems, in this case, poems on the countries described in the preceding essays, written in the tradition of Raymond Queneau: playful, silly, ironically rhymed.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\n

R\u00e9da is what the French call a fl\u00e2neur,<\/em> a roamer who enjoys his anonymous status in a city\u2019s labyrinth. When a fl\u00e2neur<\/em> crosses a border into a new territory he becomes a tourist. The difference between a fl\u00e2neur<\/em> and a tourist is that a tourist usually has a destination and certain goals\u2014“Today is Paris Disneyland, tomorrow Auschwitz.” R\u00e9da is that rare species of tourist-fl\u00e2neur;<\/i> more a traveler than a tourist, he doesn\u2019t entirely belong to the first category either, since as early as the eighteenth century it was common for travelers to have a project: that of letting themselves be formed<\/em> by the experience of travel. R\u00e9da wants to be neither formed nor informed by his travels, he simply has \u201cla bougeotte,\u201d as the French would say, i.e., he can\u2019t stay put.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\n

Although R\u00e9da\u2019s style is very literary, he is no snob, and he probably wouldn\u2019t mind being called a tourist. With complete lack of snobbery, he declares that he loves supermarkets \u201cfor themselves,\u201d a love only natural for someone who has grown up in poverty (after all, to despise richness is a luxury only the rich can afford). But this confession is immediately followed by an unexpected critical reflection: supermarkets are \u201ccounter-museums\u201d or \u201cmuseums of the instant,\u201d R\u00e9da says, \u201cwhose instants are accessible, consumable, nearly straightaway consumed but indefinitely renewable . . .\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Click here<\/a> for the full review.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The latest addition to our Review Section is a piece by Daniela Hurezanu on Jacques Reda’s Europes, which was translated from the French by Aaron Prevots and published by Host Publications. Daniela Hurezanu—a translator and author who wrote a great review for us of Memory Glyphs—makes this book sound incredibly interesting. There’s a bigger sample […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":292,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[67456],"tags":[29106,13786,29126,3426,29116,29096,29136,1646],"class_list":["post-275486","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-review","tag-aaron-prevots","tag-daniela-hurezanu","tag-europes","tag-french-literature","tag-host-publications","tag-jacques-reda","tag-return-to-calm","tag-review"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275486","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/292"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=275486"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275486\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":313046,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275486\/revisions\/313046"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=275486"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=275486"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=275486"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}