“Yet, I also began to have the sense, fostered in part by the cross-contamination of research, that around the world enclaves that never knew one another—writers who could not have read each other—still had communicated across decades and across vast distances, had stared up at the same shared unfamiliar constellations in the night sky, heard the same unearthly music: a gorgeous choir of unique yet interlocking imaginations and visions and phantoms. At such times, you wonder as both a writer and an editor if you are creating narrative or merely serving as a conduit for what was already there.”

So writes Jeff VanderMeer in a searching, enlightening recent article at The Atlantic. Happily, he and his wife the amazing editor Ann, co-founded this site, Weird Fiction Review, for this very purpose: to explore enclaves of Weirdness around the world, Weirdness that may have developed outside of other influences, or braided garbled versions of such influences into its own traditions, or responded to reigning forms of Weirdness but not been heard in return—putting all these in conversation with each other. WFR is a showcase for the Weird in all its international glory, adding far flung members to the “gorgeous choir.” Here the Weird—its ancient and evolving records of encounters with radical alterities—dovetails with the very contemporary project of exploring the earthly alterities of other cultures, at once refuting and embracing universality, or else fractally complicating its older, easier models with new particulars.

A brief index, then, of my selected contributions to WFR since its inception in 2011: authors translated or profiled in the rich field of the French and Belgian Weird, to point your way to some of the rich reading to be found on this site. After all, there’s something of a love affair between French and English literatures, especially where the fantastic is concerned. French Decadents were reflected in the dark mirror of their British brethren and in the American “weird tale,” somber hybrid of fantasy and horror. Even contemporary genrebending movements of literary fantasy like the New Weird (China Miéville, Jeff VanderMeer) and New Wave Fabulism (Kelly Link, Jonathan Lethem) cite the contes cruels and fantastique as forerunners. But why should the last communiqués from French shores date more than a century back, or to the Surrealists at best? Consider this effort an overdue letter between two long-divided lovers once close, but fallen largely out of touch, a billet doux to rekindle the relationship between the French and English fantastic.

These traditions, twinned at birth, have as much to learn from their independent evolutions as from their history of mutual influence. Seeing where they vary and diverge can only fertilize, diversify the conversation, and seed the ground for future exchange. The postwar fantastique, steeped in decades of surrealism, drew new life from continental fabulism (Calvino, Kafka, Schulz), which married folklore with experimental form; the South American magic realism of cosmopolitan expatriates (Paz, Borges, Cortázar); and the frenetic inventiveness of a new field, genre fantasy. Contemporary French fantastical movements like La Nouvelle Fiction seek to rouse French writing from “the slumber of psychological realism,” and have much to offer recently renewed interest in the metafictions of Coover, Barth, and Barthelme. The Belgian School of the Strange is another domestically vibrant but internationally overlooked tradition on display here.

Francophonia features writers and styles, from classical to experimental, clever to vengeful, understated to outrageous, wistful to wicked. Here are Académie mandarins and contemporary hopefuls, one-hit wonders and the unjustly forgotten, bestsellers and writer’s writers, scholars and dabblers, outsiders and literati. Some are sui generis, some descended from long tradition; all are united in their use of the unreal. Together, they have won every major literary prize in France and Belgium, and many minor ones, several times over: the Goncourt (in the novel and short story categories), the Femina, the Renaudot, the Rossel, the Grand Prix de l’Académie française (for a single work and for lifetime achievement),  the Grand Prix National des Lettres. Six are Chevaliers of the Order of Arts and Letters (and four of the Legion of Honor). Most of these authors have never been translated into English, while translations of the others are outdated, out-of-print, or obscure to begin with (tiny print runs from tinier presses).

Given the breadth of historical span, the variety of theme and subject, the diversity of form, you’ll find: refashioned fairy tales, insinuating fables, absurdist prose poems, macabre parables, mocking twists, haunting ambiguities, austere mysteries, gory histories, cunning disappearances, unforgiving metamorphoses, unbidden malice, crippling rue, singular creatures, terrible decisions, vertiginous terrors, glorious paradox (cerebrally Borgesian and playfully Lewis-Carrolingian alike), lonely reverie, outlandish ribaldry, radical subjectivities, subtle slippage, sudden madness.

“We like to think that we understand our universe,” writes VanderMeer, “but I came away from these readings with a sense of weird fiction as a potentially powerful way in which to find the distance and the universality to grapple with the negation of that idea.” There are more things in heaven and earth, dear reader, than are dreamt of in our anthologies.

Some Belgians:

• Thomas Owen (1910 – 2002): with Jean Ray, regularly cited as a pillar of Belgian fantastical fiction, and the nom de plume of Gérald Bertot: criminal lawyer, art critic, mystery writer, and career manager of a flour plant. In more than 300 stories over the course of his lifetime, Owen refined the tale of supernatural horror to an almost anachronistic degree of economy and purity. His unsettling work has been compared to that of Poe and Buzzati. A consistency of worldview emanates from Owen’s oeuvre: an existential dread, one that Thomas Ligotti correctly identified (in a blurb where he name-checked Owen) as “the nightmare of being alive.” His story “Kavar the Rat”  and a nonfiction appreciation of Lovecraft are available here at Weird Fiction Review; his story “The Women Who Watch” is available at The Dr. T.J. Eckleburg Review. Audio versions of both stories are at Pseudopod.
• The only child of writer parents, Jean Muno was born in a Brussels suburb in 1924 — the year André Breton published the first Surrealist Manifesto, as Muno is fond of pointing out. A schoolteacher for much of his early life, in 1955 he settled with his family in Malaise (Flemish: Maleizen), a hamlet of Walloon Brabant near Belgium’s linguistic border. For the rest of his life, Muno could not resist making jokes about where he lived, especially given the unsettling fantastical nature of his fiction. Consistent in these tales is a scorn for suburbia, its stagnant mores. Muno is adept at dissecting that morally bankrupt land of the averted gaze, and ventriloquizing the puffed-up bluster of its hypocritically indignant inhabitants. These days, the corruption of the suburbs has been done to death, but Muno was writing at the height of suburban social critique and expression of ennui. The plots kick off with some Cheeveresque trifle over stubbed pride, and yet beneath these one senses an abyss always yawning, of which sudden swerves of phrase or story make us abruptly aware. The good citizens — nosy neighbors in prudish provincial towns ruled by fear and vestigial Christianity — waver between ignorance and precarious comprehension. How paltry are things on which they stake their identity: front steps that “had the clean distinctness of a set of false teeth.” His tale “The Ghoul” is available at Weird Fiction Review.
• Anne Richter (1939 — ): anthologist, scholar, and formidable writer of fantastical short fiction, editor of the groundbreaking anthology Le fantastique féminin, named for her 1984 monograph on female contributions to the fantastical corpus, in which she asserted: “Women move at the heart of magic realism in a more spontaneous and concrete way than men; they do not reflect on it, they reflect it as though it were their natural and daily element… With neither argument nor pride, women enter easily into the supernatural, whose existence seems, a priori, indisputably obvious to them.” Her work has appeared online at The Collagist and is forthcoming in Ann and Jeff VanderMeer’s anthology of feminist speculative fiction, Sisters of the Revolution.
• Eugène Savitzkaya (1955 — ) is a creature of limens, spaces of detente, unlikely juxtapositions. Belgian by birth of Ukranian descent, long admired but little known, Savitzkaya is generally classed as a poet despite having penned plays, essays, and more than twelve novels. And these novels — plotless, impressionistic, glories of language and consciousness, brief unchaptered bursts all from France’s leading avant-garde publisher, Minuit — surely they partake more of poetry than prose? Savitzkaya stands at the consciousness-expanding intersection of Weird and experiment. His work is available online at Drunken Boat and Anomalous, and forthcoming in Gigantic.
• Bernard Quiriny (1978 — ): heir to the Belgian School of the Strange, contemporary critical darling Quiriny synthesizes disparate fantastical influences from Borges to Calvino, Robert Louis Stevenson to Enrique Vila-Matas in his playful, prizewinning, postmodern takes on classically fantastic themes. He has also written two novels: Les assoiffés (Seuil, 2010), a satirical dystopian alternate history of Belgium as a feminist totalitarian state, and most recently Le village évanoui (Flammarion, 2014). A profile of the author can be found at the NEA Writer’s Corner. His work has appeared in English at Subtropics (with author interviews in English and the French), The Coffin Factory, World Literature Today, here at Weird Fiction Review, and Dalkey Archive’s Best European Fiction 2012. New work is forthcoming in Bengal Lights and Subtropics.

Some French:

• The early work of Pierrette Fleutiaux (1941 — ) was exclusively fantastical, and drew the admiration of Julio Cortazar. Her 1984 collection Les Métamorphoses de la reine, contemporary subversions of Perrault, won the Prix Goncourt for short stories. The first story from this collection, “The Ogre’s Wife,” was published in Grand Street (trans. Leigh Hafrey), selected for inclusion in Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror 1992 by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling, and also adapted into an opera.
• There’s something oddly joyous in the stories of Jehanne Jean-Charles, even at their most malicious. She’s been compared to Saki, Bradbury, and Matheson, but the wink of her trick endings is one not of smugness but of merry complicity — a wink from your stylish, daffy aunt, the absent-minded one who wears galoshes, knows magic, and has unmanageable hair. “Isn’t life grand?” she’s apt to exclaim, giddy in the face of blackest misfortune, as if the universe had in causing suffering merely proved its infinite variety and capacity for surprise. Which is not to say that tragedy in her tales lacks suitable solemnity, that moving moments don’t get their due gravity. But bad things do befall the bulk of her characters, without apology or redress, sometimes even without explanation. The famously taboo-breaking Jean-Jacques Pauvert, her editor, said of her, “If she were English, she’d be read the world over.”
• If Serge Brussolo (1951- ) is often called France’s answer to Stephen King, it is largely because of how consistently his countless titles (almost 200, sometimes at a pace of five or six a year) have become bestsellers. One of France’s most prolific authors, he has has worked with almost every major publisher in almost every genre: science fiction, fantasy, historical (WWII, Egypt, Middle Ages), suspense/thriller, horror, crime, and YA. Brussolo is most noted for his violent originality, the seemingly bottomless fecundity of his imagination, and the breathless sense of dread, a visceral fatalism, that pervades the worlds he creates. Brussolo’s protagonists, sometimes even entire communities, are often cut off from the larger world. Among his recurrent themes are the decay of social order, the illusory consolation of religion, imprisonment, and madness. His prose is marked by a density of playful neologisms, and an energy from feverish riffing on images and ideas that concretizes dreamscapes. His novel The Deep Sea Diver’s Syndrome, forthcoming in 2016, will mark his English-language debut.
• André Pieyre de Mandiargues (1909–1991) was a French writer of the fantastic whose prolific output included poems, plays, essays, novels, and short stories. He also translated works by Yeats, Mishima, and Paz. Initially affiliated with Surrealism, he went on to be known for his flamboyant style and fascination with the erotic and macabre. His 1967 Goncourt-winning novel La marge was translated as The Margin (Calder & Boyars, 1969) by Richard Howard, and his novel La motocyclette (Gallimard, 1963) made into the film The Girl on a Motorcyle (1968) by Jack Cardiff. His story “The Red Loaf” is available at Words Without Borders.
• Noël Devaulx (1905–1995) is the secret master of the 20th century French fantastique. His prose has the shimmer of Mérimée and the seemliness of Flaubert; clearly, he keeps Nerval by his bedside, the better to read it by the light of a Baudelairean lunacy. In his hands, the Kunstmärchen—nine collections’ worth, over nine decades—is reinvented as the vessel of a personal metaphysics; evident in every one is his mandarin mastery of narration. Jean Paulhan, an early champion, famously called his hermetic, exquisite tales, oft-featured in the Nouvelle Revue Française, “parables without keys”: spellbinding, even when perfectly obscure, for the secret to his prose is promise.
• Writer, poet, and painter Pierre Bettencourt (1917–2006) was, despite coming from a prominent family, a retiring figure and lifelong outsider artist. He self-published his first works on a family-owned press during the Nazi occupation. He later published Antonin Artaud, Francis Ponge, Henri Michaux, and Jean Dubuffet. In the 1950s and 60s he was a frequent contributor to the Nouvelle revue française, and Gallimard later put out a volume of his selected works. He can be read online at Weird Fiction Review, The Collagist, and Anomalous.
• Marcel Béalu (1908–1993) was best known for the delicacy with which he explored dreams and the unreal in poetry, prose, and painting. A retiring figure, he ran a Paris bookstore by the Jardin du Luxembourg named Le Pont Traversé after a novel by his friend, critic and editor Jean Paulhan. There he held readings for a small circle of surrealist and fantastical writers; it is said Lacan, among his first customers, purchased Shakespeare’s complete works and forgot to pay for them. His 1945 novel L’Expérience de la nuit was translated by Christine Donougher as The Experience of Night (Dedalus, 1997). My translations of his work have appeared in Joyland, Anomalous, Unstuck, and The Café Irreal.
• Jean Ferry (1906–1974) was primarily a screenwriter, best known for his collaborations with Clouzot, Buñuel, Louis Malle, and Georges Franju. A satrap of the College of ‘Pataphysics, he was known in his time as the greatest specialist in the works of Proust’s neighbor, Raymond Roussel. His only book of fantastical tales, The Conductor, was first published in 1953 and reprinted three times by various publishers, most recently in 2011 by Éditions Finitude.  Andre Breton called Ferry’s story “The Society Tiger” “the most sensationally new poetical text I have read in a long time.” I received a PEN America grant to translate his work, which has appeared in Subtropics, Weird Fiction Review, PEN America, Sentence, Anomalous, The Coffin Factory, Birkensnake, Gigantic, and The Café Irreal. In November 2013, Wakefield Press published my translation of The Conductor.

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Last week began and ended with work from the French–not my own, but translations by Kit Schluter and Katie Assef, doing wunderkind Weird precursor Marcel Schwob and twisted Belgian fabulist Nadine Monfils, respectively. Last week also saw the highlight of a classic favorite by Kelly Link, courtesy of Adam Mills (all hail Adam Mills!) who until recently was WFR’s very capable managing editor (he will be sorely missed–is already, in fact). Then on Thursday we took a turn for horror humor with a gory vampire redneck tale from proud South Carolina native Grady Hendrix, and on Friday finished up with some delectably perverse doings in Venice.

This week at WFR, I am proud to present J.W. McCormack’s visionary short novella Backwater, serialized in three installments. McCormack grafts his heady, pyrotechnic prose to the Biblical backbone of a rip-roaring Armageddon adventure in a Weird update of deep Southern Gothic featuring snake preachers, Cajun gamblers, cult compounds, and teenage runaways–all narrated by Hell’s own anglerfish, who gleans life stories from souls as he digests them. This will be accompanied by images from J.K. Potter, well-known for his covers and art for Subterranean Press.

Backwater will appear Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, while Tuesday and Thursday will showcase an original sequence of weird prose poems by G.C. Waldrep inspired by the work of outsider artist George Widener.

Bringing the Weirdness,

e.g.

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I confess I know little, and almost all of it circumstantial, about this atmospheric sketch of a gutter-dwelling worm. It was written by André Bay (1916–2013), for more than four decades a senior editor at Éditions Stock. Among the diverse writers he championed there were Jorge Amado, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Joyce Carol Oates, Thomas Wolfe, Anaïs Nin, and Virginia Woolf. His was the first French translation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night; he also translated Mark Twain, Robert Louis Stevenson, Lewis Carroll, and Jonathan Swift. In 1948, along with Raymond Queneau, founded the Prix du Meilleur livre étranger, a literary prize for the best foreign novel. He was also an artist and art critic.

Born André Pierre Robert Dupont, Bay was given his pen name by his close friend, painter Mario Prassinos. Prassinos frequented Surrealist circles—his sister, poet and painter Gisèle, numbered among them—and it is likely that he introduced them to Bay. Among them was a writer named Lise Deharme (née Anne-Marie Hirtz, 1898–1980).

Deharme’s first encounter with the Surrealists is immortalized in Nadja by André Breton, who was so enchanted with her glove that he pinned it to the wall and dubbed her the Lady of the Glove. Deharme is remembered, in Marie-Claire Barnet’s words, as the “first impossible mad love dreamed of by André Breton,” but her reputation as an author in her own right has recently been recovered from oblivion by the vein of feminist scholarship that also restored the likes of Leonora Carrington and Gisèle Prassinos. According to Barnet, Deharme was a prolific organizer of Surrealist salons, and the founder of a subversive publication, Le Phare de Neuilly [The Neuilly Beacon],  which featured James Joyce, D.H. Lawrence, and Jacques Lacan.

In 1937, José Corti published Le Cœur de Pic [Heart of Spades], a book of Deharme’s children’s poems paired with black-and-white photo-assemblages by Claude Cahun (brought back into print, after long years during which it was a collector’s item, by Éditions de MeMo).

The transgendered Cahun—artist photographer, poet, and writer—was the niece of fantastical symbolist Marcel Schwob, soon to appear in these pages. Cahun’s twenty illustrations, made from unusual juxtapositions of ordinary things, are compositions of miniature worlds that elevate ordinary objects—dolls, dollhouse furniture, flowers, leaves, seeds, forks, spoons, scissors—into the mysterious and extra-ordinary. Cahun herself was interested in objects domestic and Surrealist.

Man Ray once described Deharme’s house, where she held her salons, as “a rambling affair, filled with strange objects and rococo furniture.” After her book with Cahun, Deharme then became to be known in the Surrealist circle as “la Dame de Pique,” or the Queen of Spades, as in this photograph by Ray:

Deharme exhibited a wicked sense of humor in her supernatural writings, and Barnet claims the charm of her writing is that it is “more venomous than it first appears.”

But then Deharme in any of her Surrealist incarnations would bear as little resemblance as an incarnated card from Lewis Carroll (a favorite author of the Surrealists) to the terrifying creature André Bay describes in his mysterious and moody little fragment. If any readers out there have any more clues to the circumstances surrounding its composition, please do leave a comment!

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Night travelers step from the train. I’m freezing. Footsteps hammer the street, shaking white droplets loose. The gutters are streaming. Mice are nibbling on cobwebs. Cows moo in the mist. Everywhere, without speaking a word, they fear the Queen of Spades.

She is a woman, a monster, some claim; others maintain she is a gigantic insect; the truth is that all those who’ve ever come near her are dead.

I slip into a sewer, my shoulders smack the walls, I am a hunchback. I walk toward a light that is forever retreating. I seek the Queen of Spades; unlike the others, I have no wish to kill her, just to see her. The sewer widens and deepens, a hernia of rubber; soon I will no longer be able to exit the intestines of the Queen of Spades. Perhaps I am already dead, among those who vanish without a trace. The hernia swells, hardens, takes on a geometric shape, becomes an underground boulevard where I’m driving, borne toward a pale egress that keeps shrinking. Just before the fall, I brace myself and pull up short, barely making it. My limbs are icy. Everything is naked, strange, and lonely.

I sit down, feet dangling in the emptiness over a great misty plain, a vast yellow moonless sky. Not a sound. An empty space where distant forests trace the outlines of dark mountains. But from here I will see the Queen of Spades. I’m alone, I’m wearing shorts and clogs, I am ageless.

I see her—the Queen of Spades! She’s walking. Her black body lies somewhere in the valley, crushing the grass, but her shadow is slender as a tall mannequin’s—you can make out her spine, she has long stiff arms that toss mad hands about, hands that are hairs. For a head she has but a clump of bristling hair growing from a single root. This shadow grows, leans forward, stretches out, can suddenly turn out to be right overhead, and the terror of these substanceless limbs is paralyzing. Like all monsters, the Queen of Spades is alone. I feel almost friendly toward her, but at the same time, I’m afraid she’ll find me, follow me into the sewer. What would she do with me? I am with her, since I see her. But no—all I see is her living shadow, a shadow that no longer looks like her at all.

Peasants have told me that they thought they’d killed the creature by killing its great flaccid body, but their efforts were wasted. Now the villages are empty all around; those who remain have gone to ground in their houses. They hardly dare to go out in the daytime to gather food in the fields no one now owns. It is not certain that the Queen of Spades means its victims harm. They fear her like death, without knowing…

And yet I leaned forward to try and surprise her. But she seemed too far away, and I clung uselessly to the edge of the cliff. In the sewer behind me, I heard movement. When suddenly I turned around, my clog rang against the cast iron, and the vibrating sewer amplified the sound. The valleys made echo. I trembled, unable either to advance or retreat. Something hirsute, sticky, warm, took me by the shoulders, lifted me up before I had the strength to put up a fight. I fainted in the arms of the Queen of Spades.

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He stops.

Turns around.

A man of middle age, graying, in a hunting vest and fishing boots. Watchful, no doubt worried. He’s alone, and sees no one. No one behind him.

And yet there’d been a cry. A wail, a call, something human.

I have been following this man for a long time. Step by step, keeping my distance, as a hunter does its prey. Because I am wary. Whatever happens, I don’t want to be involved, just a witness, as a dreamer of his dream.

Sometimes the man stops, turns around, but because of the fog, ever denser as the tide rises, he sees less and less. Neither the dunes nor the sea, neither his destination nor his starting point. Perhaps he has crossed the border, perhaps not—how to tell? He is alone on a meager stretch of beach without landmarks. The cry could have come from anywhere at all.

Leapt from the ground, fallen from the sky, surged from the waves.

A cry from anywhere at all.

To his right, the ocean, to his left, the line of dunes. Between these barriers, however invisible, you can’t  completely lose your way. The beach tilts imperceptibly toward the great moist murmur. It is littered with debris, black tresses of seaweed, broken by fat violet jellyfish. Dead, undone, shipwrecked splatters, they smell of kelp. Pale and swollen, a lamb’s cadaver stiffens its long legs in desperation.

Where does it go, this invisible line that frees and confines? Never has the man crossed the border, not even a brief foray, without a feeling of something irreparable. The euphoria of borders, he thinks. Behind him, his patchwork life, worm-riddled, left to the scavengers’ feverish devouring. Behind him. As if, in an instant, everything had become possible once more, his dreams of a clean break, starting over! But today is enough to drive him to despair. The same gray everywhere. Gray the fog, gray the sand in which the lamb’s remains have softly burrowed, as if the beginning of a grave.

Gray the cry.

This time he’s sure of it—the cry is coming from the sea. Before him. The sea is slow, heavy. Reeling under the weight of the fog, it spreads out in short waves, leaving a thin, sinuous fringe of froth. A stupor, the edges of exhaustion, and suddenly that cry, that tearing—the brutal, awaited return of pain.

Help!

Save me!

He recognized the voice; it hadn’t changed in what would soon be twenty years. An ageless cry. The first time it was in Provence, in the depths of a narrow, almost impassable canyon. Help! Save me! Help! In the rocky wall opened a shadowy maw. The cold hardness of metal, the hand that greedily seized his own, for the first itme.

Wherever he had gone since then, that cry, the feel of metal barely colder than that hand. One day in Flanders, in a village empty as a necropolis; another time, at the edge of a pine wood, before a massive lightning-streaked sky. And that rainy night when, unable to find his way, he’d paced the strangely uneven pavement of a foreign city… It wasn’t tied to a single place, but a state of mind. A feeling of failure, loneliness, as if the call came from inner breach. He had answered each time, unable to resist. The idea of what had to follow held him terrified and spellbound, like an abyss.

He has stopped, facing the direction from which the wail came. It seems to be drawing nearer, making its way through the fog, eating it away like an acid, carving vague contours into it. And suddenly the image is there, ever clearer. He recognizes the shape of the back of the chair, the glint of its metallic frame, the underside of a half-submerged wheel. And the hand that reaches out, opens, calls.

How to tear his gaze from that lovely skeleton’s hand, elegantly gloved in flesh, that calls him, compels him?

He steps into the water. The tide rises, the crippled woman is a prisoner of the steel chair, he must rescue her from danger. Once more, she has been abandoned. But he feels strong, heroic, and pure, invincible in his dream as if in armor. His dream! To see her again, lift her up in his arms, carry her over the waves, experience once more the incomparable exhilaration of having saved her.

The water is up to his belly now. Like the lamb’s corpse, the wheelchair has burrowed into the sand. He seizes the woman’s hand, and she turns her unchanging face toward him—the face of a doll, with its great made-up eyes and strange gaze, intense and cold. Her pitiful legs have drowned. She puts an arm around his neck, and for a moment they stay that way, unmoving, as if embracing in a dream. Then he lifts her up and, tottering a bit, carries her toward shore. Jettisoned, the wheelchair lists, topples, slowly disappears.

Strange: she’s exactly same as she was in that village crouched at the foot of a cliff that rose, a gigantic mausoleum, in the middle of an unremittingly flat landscape. Seated before the doorstep of that stone house, just as well-dressed, hair as perfect, hands with their red nails resting on the sheepskin that hid her atrophied legs. With night nigh and the air full of crows’ panicked cawing, a small circle of youths, girls and boys, formed around her. Backed by the cliff, the voices took on a singular resonance, and the silence of the heights, where a few raptors wheeled, became unfamthomable. Then suddenly a tall sad woman appeared, her older sister. She pushed the wheelchair through the town square to the old church with the lowered parvis, and then, lifting the crippled woman to her chest, carries her inside, like an idol.

She pressed herself against her sister’s chest—so frail, so light. A bird, a loving child. What a joy to bring her back alive, maimed but alive, to cross that invisible threshold, to place her at the foot of the altar in a cradle of soft sand. He leans over her; he could stay here all his life, just looking at her. The curve of her shoulders, her breasts, the fine lawn cloth swelling like a sail…. Skin of incorporeal delicacy…. A face whose harmony no expression troubled, in contrast with the thick, living, wild tangle of her jet-black tresses…. Why did he never stop meeting the mysterious creature? Beautiful as a mummy’s golden mask, ambiguous as the perfect mortal coil of the departed. Perfect—unfinished.

You saved me, she utters. You saved me once more.

They are lying side by side somewhere, under the fog. She whispers right into his ear, repeating like an incantation You saved me… you saved me… and then, just as before in the shadow of the cliff in that sleepy town, in the gorges of Provence, the obscure story, the spectral story, in insistent snatches. She called her witch… melancholy witch…. She who pushed the wheelchair not out of love but interest, with the ignoble hope that one day…. For years, her suffering was hitched to hatred, hatred that would push her to the very edge of sheer cliffs and stop, ecstatic at her terror, standing silently behind her…. Hatred that would drag her with great strides, almost naked, through icy autumn rains…. Hatred that that for no other reason than to make its own omnipotence known, would abandon her in the middle of nowhere, laughing at her pleas and cries…

A madwoman, a demon. Her own death had taken her in hand, was now in charge. Every outing could be her last.

And now, right beside his ear: I am just like you. Each of us moves forward with our own death for a shadow. Each of us, sooner or later, abandoned…

How to tell her she was his child, saved once more, that he loved her more than anything in the world—how to tell her?

He carried her along the path she had traveled earlier, before being abandoned. The sea had not yet erased her tracks from before, the wheels’ parallel lines and, between them, the firm steps of the other woman, the Melancholy one, wide mannish soles marked by a kind of Maltese cross. At the end, the two tracks went their separate ways, toward the cliff and the fisherman’s hut, where the murderer had taken refuge, praying for the tragedy to come to an end at last.

The world is filled with incomplete crimes, begun over and over time and again, ghosts that know no rest and err in the recesses of loneliness, in the embittered memories of the aged, among ruins, the ghastly cawing of crows, deep in gorges where raptors wheel silently overhead. Stories clawed and fanged, stories that feed on blood. Some vague apprehension signals your presence, and I am careful to draw no closer. Woe be unto him who takes no heed, for he who seeks such tales shall find them.

You saved me. I owe you my life…. You saved me. I love you…. My beloved, I love you…

With each step she grows heavier, harder, crueler. Already he can feel the bite of her nails in his neck.

Once more, the terrible metamorphosis is underway. Ineluctable. The moment is nearing when she will be stronger, with all her claws, all her fangs, and she will never let go again. He will fall to his knees, torn to pieces, crawl his way through the sand, bleeding out. It will be the end. His death, begun time and again in the nightmare that feeds on him.

She is lying on the sand, eyes closed, and he is beside her, out of breath. Ever less human and ever more beautiful. That is the horrific part: seeing her draw away, grow ever stranger, and having to suffer this mystery.

Keep me warm, she utters, hold me… hold me tight.

He gets back on his feet. The border has been crossed, everything is possible now. She opens her eyes just a slit. A blue, icy stare. Different. Like a chrysalis accomplishing its fearsome birth. The child is no more, neither child nor woman—all that was a trap. When this strange icy blue unfurls its wings, it…. He steps back, retreating step by step. But no—it’s no trap, because he knew in advance. He never saved her, he will never be able to leave her: he is victim.

He hadn’t gone far, he never even took his eyes off her. Leaning on his arm, she thrusts out her chest and, for the first time, smiles. Hieratic and smiling in the serpentine waves of her hair. He kneels before her. Do ghouls, empuses, have such blue eyes?

He will never reach the fisherman’s hut now; his strength will leave him long before. He will collapse in sight of his goal, at the foot of the cliff, before the invincible fortress. The crime will remain unfinished, the sea will efface all evidence. Neither victim nor perpetrator. The tragedy without end will return to the limbo haunted by spectral stories.

Hours now he has been walking. Hours, days, following the tracks of wheels toward the nightmare’s source. He stoops, back bent, his feet sink ankle deep in the damp sand, each step demands effort from his entire being. Ever since, unable to stand it anymore, he took her astride his back, he has felt lost, demeaned, guilty. Hours, days… perhaps all his life. Who knows? What he carries has no face, is a mute embrace, lethal, from the depths of time—is the Creature, the Creature without a name that sits astride man.

Suddenly the fog is torn to pieces, and the cliff appears, chalk-white, dizzying. As if in a dream, bedazzled, enthralled, he recognizes its unchanging profile. It seems a gigantic altar cracked down the middle by a titan’s fist. There, in the depths of the fissure, lies the path that leads to inner lands, toward which the tracks now lead. But the two parallel lines deepen, grow farther apart, become ruts of sand and gravel, as if a wagon launched at a mad speed had riven the beach.

Here and there, perched at varying heights, still as statues, their great black wings folded, the Furies are waiting.

He will go no farther, for this is where it all ends. He has known it ever since the cry, the first cry, long ago, in a canyon in Provence. Now it is too late. Once more, he is in the middle of a fatal arena, in the blinding light.

Light like a blade. The Furies are waiting, draped in their jet-black tresses.

Slowly, with neither haste nor cruelty, with a kind of melancholy ardor, despairing, the talons shred his cheeks, the spurs pierce his sides, a beak tears open the nape of his neck, delves down to the very vertebrae…. His back buckles, his knees give…. He surrenders to the inexorable embrace, the sweet and monstrous devouring. To torture, to violation.

His face against the earth. He falls, falls again, several times, rushing, held back, as if something immense above him, with him, sought to take flight.

A sudden wind rises, a strange breath, panting, a dying breath. Everything darkens. The sky is no longer anything but a slow, profound beating of black wings.

Then once more the blinding, triumphant light, this time bursting into the very sky.

The eagle flew over the sea, straight toward the setting sun. Its wingspan was not of this world. Between claws stiff as crutches, it held an unmoving body that sowed the sand with a few drops of blood.

translated by Edward Gauvin

The post The Ghoul appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

I was in 10th grade French and on a daylong field trip to see The Phantom of the Opera when they shuffled us, winter-bundled, into that narrow storefront of the Librairie de France at Rockefeller Plaza, with its vestibule full of Madeleine and Babar for the children of the Upper East Side. Clown eyes peered from a gutter on an unusually lurid paperback where maculate red letters spelled out Stephen King’s Ça. I snickered with all my schoolboy heart: the one amused by F YOU on the library spines of novels by Young or Yourcenar. It seemed a certain menace had been lost in translation. The flowery French pronoun with its dainty cedilla, component of our interrogatives and idioms, could not hope to equal It in innominate loathing. All through middle school, the constant antecedents of the third person singular neuter pronoun were understood to be dirty. At no loss to salacious implication—driving it, in fact, deeper into perversion—King took that tiny, ordinary word and, by making it shirk the indescribable, restored its capacity to terrify. The anonymity of It left everything to the imagination, the way an empty circle of spotlight increases the density of the darkness all around. “Ça” was at most a designator of safe, frilly things, bordered as a flowerbed, or for that matter, a classroom.

This was the early 90s. In grade school, King’s novel had leered at me from supermarket spinner racks, among the flowery greeting cards. Now the miniseries was a recent memory, Tim Curry’s fanged face on TV Guide, and the punk band named after his evil clown was just starting to show up on skater tees.

Mimicking the American cover.

Students of foreign languages often blame their shyness about speaking on a fear of embarrassment—but embarrassment at what? Mistakes, of course, but also, I would argue, imposture: to speak a language not your own is to play a part. Those unfamiliar words, when approximately mouthed, credit us with emotions to which we can only pretend. Romance languages are mocked for their relative demonstrativeness next to phlegmatic English (nevermind the things Asian speech has been likened to: birdsong, ground glass, expectoration, alley cats). A French speaker who says Oh là là! is expressing dismay or surprise; an English speaker who does so is putting on airs, or else at a nudie revue. (I myself opted, in public school, for an Anglicized pronunciation of my last name.) Those practiced phrases, drilled, droned, repeated… why would we, self-conscious teens keenly sensitive to the slightest flutter of pretension, ever say Ça alors! (unless ironically) when what we meant was Whoa or Jeez? French at every turn seemed breathier, more twittery, exhortatory, animated, full of sentiments we knew from being taught. We knew what they meant, but to feel what they meant would have been… foreign.

I went back to the Librairie de France only once: much later, when I lived in New York. I had recently returned from a college in Picardie, where for two years I had taught English to economics majors. Which meant I had drilled them in words I only dimly understood in my own tongue: debenture, arbitrage, zero-coupon. As with many stores in Manhattan, the cozy lobby did little to prepare you for the vast and chilly basement, where on low shelves huddled massive dictionaries, paperback classics, scholarly omnibuses limned in dust, collected works in ripped shrinkwrap. Under high ceilings where heat hovered, sundered cobwebs trailed between the hanging lamps. I was reading a great deal of French then, more even than I had while living in France: to keep the language alive, if only as a voice in my head. And I was just beginning to translate. In the years since, the Librairie has closed (though another French bookstore, through an initiative of the French Embassy, is about to open).

A language grows through use, like a katamari; it gloms, gobbles, ramifies, and sprawls, spreading tendrils and acquiring associations. The late Michael Henry Heim (whose translations, from eight languages, included Chekhov, Karel Čapek, Milan Kundera, Bohumil Hrabal, Danilo Kiš, Gunter Grass, and Thomas Mann) was fond of saying that you know when you’re ready to begin translating when you can tell what the language is doing from what the author is doing with it. We must move beyond our delight at our own comprehension, however flattering; in fact, that is the very first step.

Strangely enough, with the years of reading French—of entering, ever deeper, the language like a wood—I had become aware of a change in my position, an alteration in the ground beneath my feet. Ça seemed to me now less narrow in its designations, less risible as a title. I thought at first this was because I knew more French. I knew, for instance, that ça was also the Freudian id—taking a cue from its Latin roots, where id quite directly meant “it.” Also, I was reading fantastical fiction in French. Although Belgian writer of the Weird Jean Ray makes no special use of the demonstrative pronoun, he had a rhetorical approach to horror like Lovecraft’s, favoring superlatives and balking at the unspeakable: the very strategy of King’s title.

But now I think, rather, that what really happened is ça came to mean only and simply itself. To mean “it” or “that,” and not “it” or “that” plus some unquantifiable Frenchness—or should I say, je ne sais quoi? Its cartoonishness had ceded to the contours of daily use, much as I had become comfortable in the language: as comfortable plodding about errands, buying a vacuum or a toaster or my daily bread, as I was declaiming Baudelaire. We make words to name things, to specify and clarify. And yet a great deal of the power in their use derives from a vagueness around the edges, from slipperiness and what linguist Arika Okrent calls “wiggle room… for the muddle within our minds.” Familiar with the ambiguity of it,  I had settled into the ambiguity of ça.

Horror in the Weird is that ultimate, irreducible other: the other to which our attempts at comprehension are not only paltry, but irrelevant. But a sense of horror may be contingent on the sense of the everyday that it brutally violates, surging from cracks where it lurks. In the words of Michael Dirda (writing about Robert Aickman), a certain placidness, even banality, “highlights the horror by reminding us of the bland, ordinary life going on just outside the bloody chamber.” Even as ça has become more ordinary, it has come to mean more, or at least imply it. Which is to say, it has faded from view, but become surrounded by shadows.

All those years, for the most innocent of pronouns to acquire its full force. One wonders about other words.

(Covers for the three-volume J’ai Lu paperbacks of Stephen King’s Ça, courtesy Will Errickson at Too Much Horror Fiction.)

The post Stephen King’s Ça appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

If the gods of Golden Age of the Belgian School of the Strange are Jean Ray, Thomas Owen, and Franz Hellens, its Silver Age hero is surely Jean Muno. The only child of writer parents, Muno was born Robert Burniaux in a Brussels suburb in 1924—the year André Breton published the first Surrealist Manifesto, as Muno is fond of pointing out. He took his pen name from a town in the Gaume region, where his family often vacationed. A schoolteacher for much of his early life, in 1955 he settled with his family in Malaise (Flemish: Maleizen), a hamlet of Walloon Brabant near Belgium’s linguistic border. For the rest of his life, Muno could not resist making jokes about where he lived, especially given the unsettling fantastical nature of his fiction.

Muno began publishing in the mid-50s, but it was with his fourth novel, L’hipparion (Julliard, 1962) that he really hit his stride, coming into his own as the unique fantasist he was to be. Set on Belgium’s North Sea shore—the nation’s beloved Riviera—it concerns an aging archeologist who discovers a fossil skeleton of the titular equine ancestor, and his ensuing battle to keep his discovery secret. The features of Muno’s later work are all here: lonely little boys lost in dreams, iconoclast codgers, the supernatural suddenly arising from the most ordinary circumstances,  the primacy of the imagined over the real, the satire of small-minded society written in vitriol. In 1963, he followed this with L’homme qui s’efface (The Man Who Erased Himself), a surreal novella about a teacher who, clinging to his umbrella in a storm, is transported to a magical land not unreminiscent of his classroom lessons. Over the next decade, Muno would pen a memoir, a science fiction radio play, a study of Francophone Belgian literature, and more novels. In 1974, he quit teaching to devote himself to writing, and in 1979, took Belgium’s top literary prize, the Prix Rossel, for his second of three story collections, Histoires singulières (Jacques Antoine, 1979). To give some sense of publishing in Belgium, a land of small presses, Histoires singulières owed its extravagant first print run of 3000 copies to Muno’s already established reputation. The Prix Rossel resulted in another run of 3000.

But what strange, unusual, singular tales they are! They are ten, and partake of almost every kind of the fantastic. “Cartoon” is an alien encounter story, wistful and deceptive as a sprinkler-misted flowerbed in, say, Blue Velvet. “The Lady with the Dog” and “Nobody” are old-fashioned ghost yarns, the first about a familiar cemetery walker, and the second about an old, importunate friend. With surreal violence, “The Chair” details the clash of a vacationer and mysteriously sentient beach furniture. Equally short and powerful—almost flash fiction—“Homesickness” takes as its inspiration the famous Magritte painting to develop a melancholy tale of the petty fragility of routine in the face of an indifferent cosmos. “The Ghoul” is a weird tale not unlike Haruki Murakami’s “The Ice Man,” spanning years in the relationship between a man and the eponymous apparition. There are more than passing allusions to existing bodies of fantastical literature: vampires; Greek mythology (plus The Odyssey and Ray’s Malpertuis); Planète, the Francophone revue of “fantastical realism”; the Fortean Times… Muno’s broad embrace of the speculative spectrum lends the collection a showcase exuberance, as if it were a dry run for later explorations, deeper but narrower.

Also consistent in these tales is a scorn for suburbia, its stagnant mores. Muno is adept at dissecting that morally bankrupt land of the averted gaze, and ventriloquizing the puffed-up bluster of its hypocritically indignant inhabitants. These days, the corruption of the suburbs has been done to death, but Muno was writing at the height of suburban social critique and expression of ennui. The squabbles are petty and the stakes low: propriety, dignity, seemliness. The plots kick off with some Cheeveresque trifle over stubbed pride, and yet beneath these one senses an abyss always yawning, of which sudden swerves of phrase or story make us abruptly aware. The good citizens—nosy neighbors in prudish provincial towns ruled by fear and vestigial Christianity—waver between ignorance and precarious comprehension. How paltry are things on which they stake their identity: front steps that “had the clean distinctness of a set of false teeth.”

A closer look, then, at the collection’s longer stories: “The Voice of Blood” presents a vampire, Monsieur Báthory, of the shabby-genteel aristocracy (a mark of how far his family has fallen is how often he brings it up) attracted to the boarder he and his wife have been forced to take in: a young, flighty woman unhappy in love. Of course vampirism, like much of this collection’s supernatural content, is alluded to (hinted at in glimpses and flashes) but never named. This seems less a classical strategy to draw out suspense than a natural, perhaps national reticence in whatever narratorial voice the author assumes, as if bald statement were in bad taste. There is sibling rivalry, ancestral skullduggery, weird humor and poetry—the young boarder’s blood, a bit high in cholesterol, proves too rich a meal for the unaccustomed Báthory, who promptly vomits—but the story turns on a poignant moment of marital disillusion: a husband shocked to learn, after thirty comfortable years, how little his wife really knows him, when he had considered them “a true couple,” with an “identical way of understanding things.”

In “Glove of Passion,” a trick of synecdoche, the black leather item in question lures the recently unemployed Peter Manderly into something like an affair. It lives in the crack of a café banquette with a coaster, a bottle top, a key ring, and more transient tenants, like loose change. The first time Peter’s hand seeks her out (for it is a she), she nips at him, leaving a whiff of perfume; the second time, she caresses his fingers. Only later does he realize his wedding ring is missing.

As with “Cartoon” and its gently dotty heroine, these stories feature baffled, hapless, or befuddled men often grappling with temptation, and concerned no matter their age with some kind of propriety, to which some insoluble problem is presented, usually in female form. Propriety (“What will they think?”) is intimately bound up with identity (“What do/should I do?”), as perhaps befits the shame society of an overcrowded bourgeois country unsure of its national character. Gossip polices.

Muno can be a very cruel writer, especially in his last lines:

“the triumphant light of summer, inexorable as pain”

“that ever more terrible fragrance of violets… the depraved odor of death.”

“the black hand rising like a bird of prey holding between its claws a pale glove streaming red.”

Much of Muno’s menace, and also his understated comedy, arise from his characters’ studious refusal to confront the uncanny with anything but the resolutely mundane.

“His conjectures were most assuredly far too logical for a story that, as readers will no doubt have noticed, had advanced a bit beyond the margins of the usual chain of events, right from the start.”

Muno’s sense of the fantastic is itself scrupulously anchored in the real. Writing on Georges-Olivier Châteaureynaud, critic and translator John Taylor, noted that the author’s persuasiveness and ability to unsettle derive from the “parsimony” with which are measured out “the telltale frissons of supernatural fiction.” The same is true of Muno, who has said:

“Although my stories are often strange… they sink their roots into the commonplace, as if the fantastic were the natural extension of the banal, which is the way we prudently live life in my little, too comfortable country, where great spaces and great ambitions don’t exist, where nothing ever happens, but where everything seems possible because we live in our imaginations, in our folly, which erases boundaries, even the boundary that separates us from the ever-present invisible. Is this a natural extension or a permanent menace to established order? Fear or a temptation toward the unknown?”

What makes Muno an exemplary Silver Age author is that he wrote with a conscious sense of tradition, of continuing a lineage. He was a great believer in Franz Hellens’ concept of “le fantastique reel,” the “real fantastic,” which for him translated a specifically Belgian “malaise… not a purely gratuitous literary exercise.” The typically Belgian insistence on prudence and the commonplace seem unlikely soil for a thriving fantastical tradition, but to Muno, “fantasies are the expression of the paradoxical ambiguity of my situation in particular and of life in general.” In 1981, he was one of several noted fantastical writers—Thomas Owen, Anne Richter, and critic Jean-Baptiste Baronian—who collaboated in creating an International Center for the Fantastic in Abbaye de Forest-lez-Bruxelles, which helped unite writers of similar bent and formalize the Belgian School of the Strange as a literary movement. That same year, he was elected to the Belgian Royal Academy of Francophone Language and Literature.

Muno’s fantasy was to prove, above all, a complex working-out of his publicly proclaimed love-hate relationship with his native land. His characters’ dilemmas have that hint of loving condescension native to neurosis and the divided self. “It’s in Belgium that I breathe and choke,” Muno says about his ambivalence toward his homeland, a country 1/12 the size of Montana with 15 times the population. This ambivalence suits the “national ambiguity”: “Belgian writers… express themselves in spite of their dual cultural heritage.” The Belgian fascination with doubles may be credited in part to this national schizophrenia: Belgium is not a naturally occurring country, and should never have existed. It is artificial, a condition imposed by neighboring powers to end the Napoleonic wars. The history of its identity is the history of trying to cope with being a buffer state. Perhaps the story that most directly tackles this question of uncertain identity is “The Medium.” Told in the present tense, it is a progressively chilling tale. Its hero Gerard is a hapless, willing, well-intentioned young man whose identity is eventually subsumed into that of a dead husband whose elderly widow he serves as a caretaker.

It is interesting, then, that in the final story of Histoires singulières, Muno chooses to give his protagonist a measure of freedom and escape, however ambiguous, however uncertain what lies ahead remains. By far the collection’s longest tale, “The Iguana” episodically recounts the dissolution of a marriage engagement, and the narrator’s general awakening… but to what?

“That was when it all began, I think. Everything that happened to me happened in the fringes. As if, from that moment on, bit by bit, I drew away from my regular route to follow one less obvious, but just as real—detour or shortcut?—indicated by mysterious signs… Rest assured: I’m no visionary, I write these lines in full possession of my reason. I am incapable of leaving my lived experience behind.”

A travel agent, he soon finds his nocturnal adventures offer him “the fantastic… as the strange other side of the everyday,” a succinct summation of Muno’s approach. The story ends on a train, in mood and setting like the ending of Let the Right One In.

Muno has been previously translated by Kim Connell: “Glove of Passion” and “Voice of Blood” not only bookend a slim volume of nine Muno stories drawn from throughout his career, but together, lend their titles to that volume: Glove of Passion, Voice of Blood (1986) from the defunct Owl Creek Press. I cannot wholeheartedly recommend seeking out this out-of-print book—Connell’s translations are clumsy and, when not outright wrong, inadequately convey the sprightliness of Muno’s tone—but for interested readers, it is better than nothing. I do, however, owe a debt to Connell for his pioneering work on the Belgian fantastic, and his introductions to his two books are perceptive. Connell personally worked with Muno, interviewed him, and solicited from him an introduction to the Glove of Passion, Voice of Blood, from which I have quoted.

Whimsy, dire irony, sudden surreality, and dashes of the absurd—Muno’s work wears all these hallmarks on its sleeve. His wit and light touch only serve to make the occasional flash of savagery—the claw unsheathed, the fang bared—all the more unsettling. He died in 1988 from a tumor of the optic nerve.

The post Jean Muno’s Unusual Tales appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

It is customary to establish reality before disrupting it, but some works are uncertain from the get-go. We all know that voice, of contemplation or reserve, into which madness gradually leaches, or in which it is revealed to have been lurking all along—the idea of a weird tale being to leave us without a place to stand, or a leg to do it on, before the vast, malign indifference. Still, there are stories where our first step falls not on firm ground, but on sand at the water’s edge. And already the tides, rushing out, are robbing us of foothold.

The water’s edge, that porous border, is a good place to start with Eugène Savitzkaya: a creature of limens, spaces of detente, unlikely juxtapositions. Belgian by birth of Ukranian descent, long admired but little known, Savitzkaya is generally classed as a poet despite having penned plays, essays, and more than twelve novels. And these novels—plotless, impressionistic, glories of language and consciousness, brief unchaptered bursts all from France’s leading avant-garde publisher, Minuit—surely they partake more of poetry than prose?

The intersections of the Weird and what is often called “experimental” writing have been covered before: Burroughs, Ballard, Donald Barthelme, Blake Butler, Brians Marcus and Evenson, Mark Danielewski’s House of Leaves… Like “world” literature, “experiment” is a baggy category, a catch-all for whatever balks the casual reader: strange line breaks, eccentric page layouts, lack of characters or plot, lack of setting or signposts… Another feature might be emphasis on language: meticulous, painstaking emphasis, the sense that at every moment the entire work hinges on, lives or dies by the next word choice, the syllable-by-syllable propagation of some established rhythm. It’s not that the prose is abstract—in fact, it is often exceedingly concrete, blunt, simple, stripped of metaphor and complex syntax—but that (as in Evenson, Butler, or even Beckett) something has been subtracted from it, making us work harder for a fuller picture of what is being described. The result is a certain destabilization, dislocation, an alienation that does not distance you so much from the text as lock you alone inside it. Hence the usual adjectives: hallucinatory, intense, incantatory… the feel and unease of Weird. You’re not sure where you are, because if you are where you think you are, it can’t really be that way, can it? The author can’t mean it.

Consider the opening paragraph of Savitzkaya’s short eulogy “In Memory of Tabacchino,” in the latest issue of Anomalous:

Tabacchino was a child. Tabacchino was a dormouse. Tabacchino was a dog, a bird, a squirrel, an almond tree, a living being. Child, dog, dormouse, bird, squirrel, or almond tree, he breathed, drank water, had a clean smell, a unique charm, and grew old. He bore inside him sap that flowed groundward through openings planned and improvised. The wind would muss his hair, rumple him, refresh and sometimes torment him. The first Tabacchino to get the coup de grâce was the almond tree: drought, then woodcutters. They wept then, lovers of almonds, the child first among them. No one could put the tree back as it had been. The dormouse, terrified by an owl, succumbed to a heart attack, rotted, and was scattered to the winds. Not the slightest sign of that bird in the skies now. Seek the dog’s grave in vain. Then came the child’s turn: crushed, ground, and scattered.

What, exactly, is Tabacchino? All of these things? None of them? Is he really a man; are these merely metaphorical comparisons? And if so, are his transformations meant as fable? If this is allegory, where is the key? (One might also dismiss this as “poetry.”)

Degrees of reification have sometimes been used to draw lines: between spec fic and lit fic, between allegory and story, between poetry and fiction. If the monster’s a metaphor, it’s lily-livered literary, but if the monster’s a monster—well, now we’re talking. Speculative fiction is the imagined made real, so that it must be contended with, at a physical, visceral level: blood and guts, meat and sweat. Literature, ever polite, merely entertains the imagined, as in a parlor of conjecture.

But I would argue Savitzkaya’s very power derives from his refusal to reify, his insistence on simply stating. Reification, Savitzkaya shows us, can in its own way be a kind of reassurance, a signposting, letting us know where we stand. When we tightrope between is-it? or isn’t‑it?, a fuller reification tips us off, tips us to one side. As an elaboration of the simply stated, reifying is also a bringing-into-the-world that entails history and rules and a certain kind of sense-making: all the basics of that spec staple, coherent worldbuilding.

Savitzkaya’s Russian mother is said to have fed him on fairy tales, and “In the Rediscovered Book” (also in Anomalous) certainly owes more to that tradition, but as usual, slips from classifying grasp. Its sinuous first sentence takes us straight into the world inside a book inside the drawer of a small platen press in the cellar of a house in the mountains. We spend the rest of this short piece there, punctuated by something like a refrain. Three times throughout, it is stated that there is no point peering nearer, or bending closer to sniff: the world of the book, being described, is immediate and blindingly obvious, assaults the senses. Of course this organizing chorus, a tactic borrowed from lyric or joke, clarifies nothing, may not even organize, may indeed only provide the appearance of organization. The minutely detailed world of Savitzkaya, who once devoted a monograph to Hieronymous Bosch, is never far from violence, nor the blithe ignorance that is the other side of its coin:

All the book’s children were in love; they polished their nails, smoothed their hair, and painted their lips. At night in the book, trucks passing by on the road crushed the sheep, then the dogs who’d come to devour the dead or wounded sheep, then other wilder dogs drawn by the fresh flesh of the dead or wounded dogs and the reek of the sheep’s remains. Night in the book smelled bad… At the heart of the book, the balloon exploded, and the charred navigator landed on the pines. The young woman watching the scene let herself be bitten and eaten by ants. Only the children kept playing.

Or consider this vow of vengeance from “Tabacchino”, which smacks of Arcimboldo whimsy and childish caprice:

Whosoever scattered Tabacchino’s body: I would have shattered his bones, those of the torso and those of the head, I would have scored into his skin as into calf leather, annulled the order of his fingers and replaced his tongue with a pepper of the brightest red. And his nose with a sprouting potato.

We cling to every word as if to handholds in a rock face, because at every moment we have no idea what to expect. In the absence of conventionally established expectations, anything is possible. Every word defers the promise of sense; in fact this creeping progress is Savitzkaya’s narrative drive. Story lies in smithereens. This is narrative atomized, moving forward by crumbs; we can see no further than the next word, focus yoked to this infinitesimal progress, like a tile in a vast mosaic, a scrutiny of minutiae, while all around us is a spreading sensation of alarm that the bigger picture, could we but see it, is quite terrifying.

Through language, Savitzkaya lends, extrudes consciousness into things alien to him: animal, vegetable, and mineral alike. This, the imaginative process by which writers bring the strange closer to us, often  finds itself inverted in Savitzkaya’s work: we are brought closer to the strange, the alien. As Rokus Hofstede (trans. Donald Gardner) notes at Poetry International, Savitzkaya’s voice,

“sometimes sombre, sometimes intimate, but always sensual… sings of metamorphosis, of unity and dissolution. The world appears to him as a garden in which everything and everyone – plants, insects and people – are doomed to change, to melt away and disappear.”

Among his more famous novels are pseudo-biographies of his son, then his daughter in their infancy, and of young Elvis. From the succinct sections of these novels something emergent arises, a portrait of development and transition through accretion of fantastical detail. His record of infancy—that of son Marin, daughter Louise, and even himself, in stories like “The Rubber Animal”—is something like a mushroom coming to life: the dawning of some powerfully alien intelligence.

In “Family Portrait,” (forthcoming in the next issue of Unstuck), this intelligence is applied to death, whose harbinger is a wasp:

A wasp visits my mother, who is lying in her room. The wasp is truly golden and soot-streaked. Its abdomen is separated from its thorax by only a filament thin as a hair, which seems very close to snapping. The wasp says to my mother:

I know this room, I’ve been here three times before and I drank a good amount of sugar from your glass of blackcurrant cordial, the walls of this room are much too close and the window cold and hard like the tall sky.

And the wasp says:

I am a woman you met in the train taking you to Germany; it was I who, having put you at ease—you, sad and shattered—stole the envelope containing all your photos, my heart and my nerves are in my thorax and my abdomen contains the rest, and this clear division makes me invincible.

And the wasp says:

I have always been a wasp, golden and soot-streaked, social, relentless and quivering; the world doesn’t frighten me, already I have begun to eat you, I devoured your children and soon I will tell you how I went about it, I work the best when ignored, I am most effective when believed absent, I am also all the women who have harmed you.

If writing is a record of thought, then the thought process here is lyrical, fractured, unpredictably foreign.

While Gian Lombardo has translated some of Savitzkaya’s prose poems in Rules of Solitude (Quale Press, 2004) and the anthology When the Time Comes: A Selection of Contemporary Prose Poetry (Quale Press 2002), the work of Savitzkaya’s that most clearly maps onto the Weird—while far from the majority of his oeuvre—has yet to be explored in English. Savitzkaya is minimal without being skeletal; in fact, in few words he is almost lush, an impression derived from the swerve of his language, coloration through unlikely word choice. Lusher, I think, than his avant-weird American counterparts, though both draw power from rhythmic devices. Above all he is authoritative. By refusing to say more, he makes us make do with what is said. Whatever is said simply is, though it can’t be.

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Google Franz Hellens and you’ll probably get the mournful portrait above by Modigliani, more famous now for its artist than subject. Born in Brussels in 1881, Hellens was unfit for service and sat out World War I in Nice, where he met Modigliani, as well as his future wife Maria Marcovna. In a late book of essays and reminiscences entitled Documents secrets [Secret Documents], Hellens tells how Modigliani tossed off the portrait a few hours while downing three liters of wine leavened by the occasional stroll for a bit of fresh air. Hellens and Maria were disappointed with the portrait. He describes his reaction in one of his more famous stories, “A Clairvoyant”:

“… it was alive, animated; it ‘spoke,’ as connoisseurs were fond of saying. But there was really no resemblance.

It must be said that not for a single moment had the painter thought to flatter the face before our eyes. It was strangely elongated; stretching the oval emphasized a thinness no doubt full of character, but one unlike my own. Moreover, he had completely done away with the shoulders, such that what little of the body he granted the portrait further contributed to that lack of volume which could not have come from his sitter. Lastly, the few wrinkles already lining my face back then had been exaggerated. That face gave off an air of mental and physical exhaustion justified by the difficult life I’d led till then. Despite all this, what struck me the most was a youthful, even childish character, as disproportionate and paradoxical as the rest, stemming from the deliberate fragility of the construction, and something else still that I could not explain.”

Hellens was a tall, raw-boned man with large, voluble eyes, reminiscent of Jeremy Irons; the planes of his face aged into gauntness. Years later, Hellens was to find Modigliani’s portrait the spitting image of his youngest son, Serge, and this formed the basis for the story, from his 1941 collection Nouvelles réalités fantastiques [New Fantastical Realities].

Franz Hellens is one of three names bandied about, along with Jean Ray and Thomas Owen, in the (un)holy trinity of Belgian fantastical fiction. Rounding out the pantheon at five are two writers who made their name in other literary fields, but each contributed a single memorable collection to the genre: symbolist playwright Michel de Ghelderode with Sortilèges [Maledictions], and poet Marcel Thiry with Les nouvelles du grand possible [Stories of the Great Possible].

Unlike Ray and Owen, Hellens evolved the fantastic away from horror and toward magic realism. His early works were hailed as shining examples of the “real fantastic,” and this was to decide his aesthetic direction: first in fiction, and much later in life, essays where he tried with middling success to codify a theory of the fantastic. The “real fantastic” is a slippery concept at least partly lost to its historical moment. It can sound a lot like the traditional fantastical tale, which takes the shape of reality unsettled by the inexplicable, but for Hellens, it was a much more specific concept, an “unusual refraction of daily reality” that left reality displaced and disoriented. Rather than begin with a far-fetched presence, his general approach was to push reality to the edges of the known and believable, the “extension of reality into the imaginary.”

At the time, dreams and the imagination were the cutting edge of the inner frontier. Hellens’ pursuit of an “inner fantastic” that was “the product of a lyrical soul… essentially poetic” prefigured the Surrealists’ cult of beauty, their explorations of the occult, and their veneration of imagination’s liberating powers. He tended toward emotions gentler than terror, the haunting rather than the haunted, and in this way paved the path for later writers who used the fantastic to mourn lost realms, like Georges-Olivier Châteaureynaud and André Hardellet. If death stalks Hellens’ fictional landscape, it is less fearful and macabre than “a far better place to go to,” or at least a far stranger and often ironic one. For like many fantastical writers, Hellens is concerned with the weird in its embryonic, etymological sense: the turns and vagaries of fate.

To read Hellens now is to revisit an earlier stage in the evolution of the genre. His themes are fairly classical: doppelgangers, reincarnation, possession, the cursed object, mind-reading, séances. If stories of the fantastic begin with any invocation to the muses, it is to the gods of belief, and like tales from a certain time, Hellens’ stories do not stint on such prefatory exhortations:

“There are times in the lives of men and nations when the miraculous—or the extraordinary, if you will—becomes the rule for a while and winds up astonishing even the most empirically minded.”

“For any man given to observation, the most pragmatic life offers up, at one moment or another, truly extraordinary circumstances wherein one’s senses are overturned, wherein one’s consciousness takes a strange turn and loses its way amidst inextricable fantasies.”

“What happened—truth to tell, quite extraordinary—at a crucial hour of his life is due neither to his character, since he had none, nor his will, nor the influence of someone close to him.”

De rigueur throat-clearing aside, Hellens’ style is fluent, gentlemanly, and enjoyable, ushering the reader briskly through webs of hearsay and coincidence to mystery’s doorsill. Events are impartially juxtaposed as if the fruit of mere chance, while over the story as a whole the hangs the unreal, an inescapable and faintly menacing atmosphere. A down-to-earth banker finds eternity in the contemplation of a gourd. A Russian businessman is cured of gambling by a brush with a woman in black. In an early story reminiscent of Kipling’s “The Gate of a Hundred Sorrows,” the Armenian Nadajan, obsessed by statue of Shiva, sinks into opium addiction. Succumbing to inexplicable impulses, a notary rights an old wrong and is rewarded with the best meal of his life. A woman must exorcise herself of an ex, but the ensuing altercation ends with her death. A man with an eye for the worm in the apple doubts his friend’s marriage. Only when that marriage ends in murder is he able to see, in photos, what has always been obvious to everyone else: how happy they were as a couple.

Doubles, representations, the demonic metonymy of objects that stand in for absent people: Hellens was one of the most dedicated explorers of the doppelganger and all its permutations, which figure in some form throughout his short fiction. A father whose son is missing on the front is drawn by voices to that son’s childhood room, and dies in his son’s bed. A son wears the suit his father left him to his father’s funeral and, feeling increasingly constricted in it, dies, only to be buried in it. A bust slowly usurps the lifeforce of the businessman it’s modeled on. In a psychic twist on traditional vampirism–no less agonizing, and oddly timely in our age of intellectual property–a famous writer at a career lull finds his every idea fleshed out to perfection by a lesser upstart with whom he once shared a brief mental connection at a séance. And in a very short tour-de-force somehow reminiscent of Conrad’s The Secret Sharer, heir to a Dutch East Indian tobacco plantation externalizes his own meekness as twin sister, marries her, and has a child.

This story, for its swiftness and the way it keeps upping its own ante, is one of Hellens’ best and lends its name, “The Double,” to a recent volume of selected stories from Espace Nord, Belgium’s equivalent to the Library of America: a partly government-funded imprint to keep its literary treasures alive. Hellens published six collections of short stories over his career, with some overlap between them, and The Double includes fifteen stories from five of these. Although it focuses on his contribution to the “real fantastic,” sidelining his early experiments in Symbolism and allegory, it is a fine introduction to Hellens’ fantastical work, though this is only one facet of a writer whose prodigious output included essays, memoirs, and many novels only one of which, alas, has been translated into English: the faintly magical realist Bildungsroman Memoirs of Elsinore, by the excellent Howard Curtis. Of interest to fantasy lovers as well is his early novel Mélusine, a Surrealist conflagration if ever there was one, which features the wizard Merlin, a cathedral of translucent stone, and the mythic fairy of the title. First published in 1920, its definitive edition from Gallimard in 1954 won the Grand Prix de la Société des Gens de Lettres (1956). Ten years later, he won the Grand Prix for French Literature reserved for non-French citizens. In a 1971 interview, no less than Vladimir Nabokov, known for his pronounced opinions (and who thought Robbe-Grillet the finest French writer of his time), said, “It is a shame that Franz Hellens is read less than that awful Monsieur Camus and even more awful Monsieur Sartre.”

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A print from Valérie Mehong’s linocut for “Le Bocal” valeriemehong.blogspot.com

“There was a story, probably apocryphal, that James T. Kirk had once said that captaining the Enterprise was like making love in a fish bowl. You couldn’t make a move without someone voicing an opinion about your technique.” ~ David Gerrold, Star Trek: The Next Generation – Encounter At Farpoint

So, let’s talk about technique. This week we present, side by side for comparison, two short-shorts of similar setting, action, mechanics, and thematics, by two authors of entirely different temperaments.  The ingredients: fish, porous aquarium walls, lonely men, and erotic currents both beneath and on the surface.

The first is by Marcel Béalu, whom I’ve discussed before in the context of a longer story, “The Water Spider,” though he’s best known for his short-shorts. This one, “Le Bocal,” was first published in the “Théâtre Souterrain” section of Mémoires de l’ombre (1944), a volume that went through numerous reprints from a variety of publishers, starting with Gallimard, then going on to Éric Losfeld’s* Éditions Le Terrain Vague, the mass-market Marabout Fantastique (1972) imprint that did much to popularize the fantastique, and most recently, the classy literary indie Phébus (1987), which specialized in obscure reprints. “Le Bocal” was also included in another selection of Béalu’s shorts, L’aventure impersonnelle et autres contes fantastiques (Le Terrain Vague, 1954; later reprinted by Marabout, 1966, and again by Phébus, 1991). It was also among a selection of 10 Béalu shorts featured in issue #67 of Fiction (June 1959), the French sister publication of F&SF, alongside stories by Alfred Bester, Fritz Leiber, Marion Zimmer Bradley, Poul Anderson, and editor Alain Dorémieux.

Without further ado:

“The Goldfish Bowl” by Marcel Béalu (translated by Simon Watson Taylor**)

Impossible to concentrate on my book with this fish swimming round and round in its bowl! My gaze kept on wandering back to this luminous, moving creature, the one particle of life inhabiting my solitude. After staring fixedly at the glass for a long time, it seemed to me that its guest had passed through the transparent wall and was swimming around in the room, mocking me with its golden undulations. One day I got so annoyed that I smashed the bowl. The floor glittered as though with a flash of sparks. To make my revenge sure, I picked up the tiny creature which gave one last wriggle in my hand. Then, as it finally lay still, I found to my utter amazement that the icy object I was grasping between my fingers was a golden key. The key! … I understood in a flash. Racing from my room like one possessed, I hurried across town and, with the aid of this marvelous key, let myself into the house which even the previous evening had been forbidden territory to me, the house of the woman I loved. She was waiting for me, completely transformed, a thousand times more beautiful than when I had last seen her in my dreams. I clasped her in my arms, and for one brief moment her writhing movements reminded me of the goldfish’s final convulsions. But already she was encircling me with the caresses of flowing rivers. And as I reached a paroxysm of voluptuous pleasure the walls around me began sparkling like crystal, while an icy coldness began to invade my limbs and I could feel, in helpless horror, my skin gradually become hard and scaly.

What can be said about this? The action is swift, and the navigation deft between registers of reality and dream. In fact, the reality is hard to locate and quickly left behind. Expert compression makes the successive transformations even more alarming. There is a whiff of fairy tale (the golden key, the beautiful woman, the crystal palace) and, at the end, a pinch of parable. Love and death are linked in their endless dance, and just as at the end of “The Water Spider,” voluptuous surrender leads to horror. Reviewing it for Fiction #224 (August 1972, reprinted at Noosphere, the online French speculative fiction database), leading SF writer Jean-Pierre Andrévon describes it thus: “You think you hold the key to the greatest love of your life and you wind up a goldfish in a bowl.” Meanwhile, reader JNP, at his blog De Spookrijder, rightly compares it to Cortazar’s “Axolotl” and the drawings of M.C. Escher. Sensual details keep the story from melting away into metaphor, and yet metaphor is clearly a source of its power.

The second story is “Le Brochet,” by Belgian Jacques Sternberg, black humorist and speculative nihilist. Sternberg, who also started with Losfeld, also excelled at flash fiction, and beside him, Béalu’s work more resembles the prose poem. Sternberg had a mad energy, and may have overproduced; if Béalu was an explorer of dreams and interiority, a retiring poet and bookseller, Sternberg was a fierce satirist of his time, a friend of Roland Topor, a precursor of the Panic Movement. “Le Brochet” was one of two Sternberg stories anthologized in Marcel Schneider’s memorable milestone Histoires fantastiques d’aujourd’hui (1964).

“The Pike” by Jacques Sternberg (my translation)

I’d had it for a week.

I’d put it in a great glass cube on the mantel.

Its size was slightly shocking when unfurled in its entirety, as if tacked to the room’s broad wall.

At night—every night—I’d pull up a chair and sit right in front of the aquarium, watching.

The pike almost always positioned itself across from me. Slowly, by millimeters, it drew closer to the wall of glass. Then it would stop, and watch me back.

All I could see of the pike then were great lips drawn downward at the corners, stretched in a strange pout of contempt or disgust. Those empty, colorless eyes; its knack for staying completely still, or fluttering its fins so faintly as to graze the inconceivable.

I could watch it for hours at a time, wondering what on earth it was plotting. For bit by bit, I had grown convinced it was waiting for something, I couldn’t say what, no doubt an opportunity, a promising opportunity to suddenly— Nor did I know what, exactly, it might suddenly spring into… That much was almost certain when I watched its glum face, the face of a sly object; it was all jaw and its jaw was all rictus, but hiding something… I knew what it hid. One evening, the pike had given me a glimpse behind the scenes: teeth like blades, planted in implacability.

All this worried me, but that worry was seductive; it was the very reason I was fond of that fish. I wouldn’t have loved it with such panicky passion if I hadn’t known it to be dangerous and deceitful; on the other hand, I would certainly have done away with it had I really believed I was in any danger.

What had I to fear? What was there to fear?

One night, at last, I found out.

I’d just gone to sleep. No suspect rustling, no sudden light, nothing abnormal around me and yet something happened; some intuition of the unusual in me, definitive, ever more harrowing.

I woke abruptly, sat up, switched the light on.

At once, I turned toward the aquarium.

It was empty.

Seaweed bobbed in the water. It seemed unsteady, a bit drunk.

Thoughts, all absurd, went through my head in a second’s glance. I leapt out of bed, grabbed an empty bottle, and stationed myself by the door, while the most ludicrous questions were demolished by answers no less preposterous.

But they were all wrong, questions and answers alike; reality left the absurd far behind. Suddenly I saw the pike, I should have seen it right from the start, so unbelievable a sight my eyes had passed right over it. The pike was in a corner of the room, rigid, perfectly alive, six feet up between floor and ceiling. It floated there, fluttering its fins, drawing slowly closer as if through water, implacable, headed straight for me, lips already parted beneath eyes of dead wood.

I may have done Sternberg’s twist a disservice by juxtaposing it with the Béalu story: readers are predisposed to suspect the fish’s escape. But Béalu is also breathless, headlong; Sternberg may himself have made his turn toward the fantastic more predictable by making us wait for it. Does the story work as anything more than a Gotcha! surprise?

I think so. Both pieces are after bigger fish, so to speak, than what’s on the page. While Béalu’s logic and leaps of imagery are dreamlike, his prose is rather concrete. Sternberg’s sentences, paradoxically, tail off into metaphysical contemplation, sly objects grazing “the inconceivable,” yet “planted in implacability.” Béalu’s abstractions occur at a macro-level, Sternberg’s at a micro- one.

Nor is Sternberg’s prose less honed for its frank expressions and analyses of feeling. What are the virtues of obviousness? Rather than disparaging Sternberg for relative bluntness, we might ponder the uses to which bluntness might be put, and the instances in which it is effective. Sternberg’s piece unfurls much more like a traditional story, but does that make it more pedestrian? He delivers establishing shot, geography, psychology, and build, while Béalu presents us with something more hermetic and rarefied. To each his own approach. Gaze into the waters, and they gaze also into you. “The Goldfish Bowl” is a circle, “The Pike” is a straight line. Where Béalu contemplates fate, Sternberg writes a dark valentine to the menace of romance. Both insist that the absolute reality of the moment is no dream. Both know that the best way to end a short-short is to leave things hanging.

Valérie Mehong’s original linocut

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*The publisher of more than 1,000 books—including works by Ionesco, Duchamp, and Boris Vian—Losfeld (1922–1979) occupies an important place in the histories of censorship and the avant-garde. His erotica list included Sacher-Masoch and Emmanuelle, while his interests in comics (Barbarella) trace the midcentury intersection of experimental and popular literatures.

**A note on the translation: Simon Watson Taylor (1923–2005) was an English actor, a secretary for the British Surrealist Group, and a proponent of ’Pataphysics, that French avant-garde pseudo-philosophy known as the “science of imaginary solutions.” Taylor edited the English language surrealist review Free Union and translated Breton’s nonfiction and plays by Boris Vian, as well as works by Antonin Artaud, Louis Aragon, and ’Pataphysics founder Alfred Jarry. His collection of Jarry’s The Ubu Plays (Methuen, 1968) included translations by himself and Cyril Connolly. He also co-edited, with Roger Shattuck, the  famous May-June 1960 special issue of Barney Rosset’s Evergreen Review devoted to ’Pataphysics:

If these names ring a bell, it may be because Jean Ferry had similar attachments. And so naturally, it was while translating Ferry that I made the acquaintance of Taylor’s translations, and came to their close study. He edited an absolutely astounding volume called French Writing Today (Penguin, 1968) that ranged all across the French literary scene at the time, including many fabulists never before or since translated. The list of authors I love in it goes on: Pierre Bettencourt, André Hardellet, Mandiargues, Béalu—all in Taylor’s own translations. Grove released it in the US the following year, cementing their status in the 60s and 70s as the great publisher of the European avant-garde.

I rarely rag on other translators; in a profession filled with nitpicking, I find it unbecoming. And I am never less than impressed the first time I read a Taylor translation, at the limpid fluency, the crystalline meaning, he’s managed to coax from any French text. So since this column is all about alternative approaches, let’s just say Taylor’s verve and fluidity are matched only by the liberties he takes with the original. Sometimes these are arguably improvements. Sometimes they are clarifications—always a tricky call in fantastical tales, which depend on transitions and mystery. Every translator breaks up sentences, re-orders clauses. In his translation of Ferry’s “La Maison Bourgenew,” Taylor goes so far as to re-order sentences and actions. He also adds and subtracts words, embroidering at will. He does the same with Béalu.

The simple fishbowl of the title becomes “The Goldfish Bowl,” rivers are “flowing rivers”; toward the end, the “icy coldness” should perhaps be a “deathly” one, and does the “horror” really need to be intensified as “helpless” or the narrator’s skin as both “hard” and scaly? In fact, to stickle and stick to the French, the coldness should be spreading throughout the narrator’s body, not simply beginning to invade his limbs, and that body is being covered in scales—nothing is said about “gradually.” In fact, the problems really start with Taylor’s interpretation of the first line. The French expostulation is simple “Impossible de lire avec ce poisson dans son bocal !” I might render it as “How could I read with that fish in its bowl?” A translation is a reading, the record of the translator’s comprehension. Here, Taylor’s additions of “concentrate on my book” and “swimming round and round in its bowl” to the first sentence read to me, at least, like the translator explaining the action to himself, and gratuitously leaving it there for fear readers won’t follow. I call these breadcrumbs, best swept away in revision.

Yet for all that, can Taylor actually be said to be betraying the spirit of the original? I have yet to encounter that in his work; he has such sympathy for the kind of work that interests him, and a sure grasp of tone, which he sometimes amplifies with a certain theatricality. Still, small changes can add up to big shifts. The residual literalist in me bridles. For me, at least, Taylor provides an instructive model for the outer limits of acceptable alteration. This is an incredibly useful service, especially for beginning translators hewing to each word and fearing every tiny step away. I like to think that, perhaps with more brainstorming and revision, something of Taylor’s admirable verve can still be captured within closer constraints. After all, constraints are said to force invention.

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