{"id":304276,"date":"2016-04-25T19:00:00","date_gmt":"2016-04-25T19:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wdev.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent-dev\/2016\/04\/25\/minute-operas-by-frederic-forte-why-this-book-should-win\/"},"modified":"2018-05-04T14:46:41","modified_gmt":"2018-05-04T14:46:41","slug":"minute-operas-by-frederic-forte-why-this-book-should-win","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/2016\/04\/25\/minute-operas-by-frederic-forte-why-this-book-should-win\/","title":{"rendered":"“Minute-Operas” by Fr\u00e9d\u00e9ric Forte [Why This Book Should Win]"},"content":{"rendered":"

This entry in the Why This Book Should Win<\/a> series, is by Becka Mara McKay, BTBA<\/span> judge, author (<\/i>A Meteorologist in the Promised Land, Happiness Is the New Bedtime), translator (<\/i>Laundry, Blue Has No South, Lunar Savings Time), and director of the Creative Writing MFA<\/span> at Florida Atlantic University. We will be running two (or more!) of these posts every business day leading up to the announcement of the finalists.<\/i><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Minute-Operas<\/em><\/a> by Fr\u00e9d\u00e9ric Forte, translated from the French by Daniel Levin Becker, Ian Monk, Michelle Noteboom, and Jean-Jacques Poucel (France, Burning Deck)<\/b><\/p>\n

In 2005, shortly after the publication of his innovative, entrancing collection Op\u00e9ras-minute, the French writer Fr\u00e9d\u00e9ric Forte was elected a member of the OULIPO\u2014the innovative and entrancing Ouvroir de Litterature Potentielle (Workshop of Potential Literature). Reading Minute-Operas<\/em>, with its masterful translations (and transformations) by Daniel Levin Becker, Ian Monk, Michelle Noteboom, and Jean-Jacques Poucel, it\u2019s quite easy to see both the necessity and vitality of Forte\u2019s membership in the group, and the difficulty and pleasure that translating this book must have presented.<\/p>\n

As the title states, Forte\u2019s poems are miniature performances enacted on every page. With a vertical line running down each poem\u2019s face, Forte creates areas that he terms \u201cstage\u201d and \u201cwings,\u201d and uses an extraordinary variety of typographic techniques\u2014erasure, diagram, blank space, symbols, and much more\u2014to write the poems. Each opera, then, can be read in a number of ways, from a number of directions. For me, these are not so much poems that have moved from French to English\u2014they are boldly original creations in one poem-language that are recreated in a new poem-language. The results are infinitely engaging. Forte\u2019s poem-language takes the form of stage directions, lists of props and other materials, and process notes, among the more recognizable gestures. Yet these gestures and typographic techniques never overwhelm or overshadow the words that Forte (and his translators) choose. The writing remains meticulously original, tightly crafted, yet still ludic and lyrical. While some of my favorite of these poems are difficult to reproduce here, the following excerpt gives a sense of Forte\u2019s mischievous mixture of the playful and the grim:<\/p>\n

A wall
\nerected for tennis
\nand what if we changed
\nit to something else
\nto handball
\nheadball
\no sacrificial<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Ceaseless games\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Interchangeable massacres
\nDismal demigod<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

 <\/p>\n

Minute-Operas<\/em> is divided into Phase 1 and Phase 2 (each phase consists of five twelve-page sections). Phase 2 draws on dozens of existing poetic forms (listed in a brief appendix\u2014the book\u2019s only paratext) from the very traditional (triolet, villanelle) to much newer forms (including the minute-opera itself), some invented by earlier Oulipians. The work of the translators on this section of the book is most interesting to me, as form is so clearly integral to the text that it, too, must be translated. There is something quite sculptural in these efforts, as though Forte\u2019s text were three-dimensional and the translators needed to find its new language on a number of axes.<\/p>\n

I have spent hours combing through the layers of this book, reading the poems in order, reading them at random, reading them aloud, and I have yet to grow tired of what Forte and his translators have achieved. Minute-Operas<\/em> is meant to resound loudly in the readers\u2019 heads and then force us to grapple with the uncomfortable, uncomforted silence that follows.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This entry in the Why This Book Should Win series, is by Becka Mara McKay, BTBA judge, author (A Meteorologist in the Promised Land, Happiness Is the New Bedtime), translator (Laundry, Blue Has No South, Lunar Savings Time), and director of the Creative Writing MFA at Florida Atlantic University. We will be running two (or […]<\/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":[67476],"tags":[35996,61536,49386,38156,64466,63556,37876],"class_list":["post-304276","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-best-translated-book-awards","tag-btba","tag-btba-2016","tag-btba-poetry","tag-burning-deck","tag-frederick-forte","tag-minute-operas","tag-why-this-book-should-win"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/304276","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=304276"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/304276\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":396912,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/304276\/revisions\/396912"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=304276"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=304276"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=304276"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}