Les remplaçants

The Substitutes

Les nouveaux dieux marchaient derrière l’armée romaine, mais pas trop près pour que le mouvement des hanches de Vénus et les éclats de rire irrépressibles de Bacchus ne semblent pas indécents.

 

Les cendres étaient encore chaudes, les fourmis et les scarabés enterraient solennellement les héros barbares.

 

Cachés derrière des arbres, les vieux dieux regardaient l’entrée des nouveaux avec admiration mais très peu de sympathie.

 

Leurs corps blancs dépourvus de poils semblaient faibles mais attractifs.

 

Malgré les difficultés de langues, une réunion au sommet fut organisée.  Après quelques débats, les sphères d’influence furent partagées.

 

Les dieux anciens étaient satisfaits avec des positions de second ordre dans les provinces, mais pour les cérémonies importantes leurs figures furent taillées dans de la pierre -- en grès effrité -- avec les dieux des conquérants.

 

Mais déjà de nouveaux dieux se préparaient à faire leur entrée ...

 

 

           [fragment d’un texte qui pourrait être plus long]

The new gods marched behind the Roman army, but not too close behind, so that the sway of Venus' hips and Bacchus' irrepressible bursts of laughter should not appear unseemly.

 

The ashes were still hot, the ants and beetles solemnly interred the barbarian heros.

 

From behind tree trunks, the elder gods watched the new gods' entrance with admiration but very little sympathy.

 

Their white and hairless bodies appeared feeble, but attractive.

 

Despite linguistic difficulties, a meeting at the summit was arranged. After several debates, the spheres of influence were allotted.

 

The elder gods were satisfied with second-rate positions in the provinces, but for important ceremonies their faces were carven into stone -- of crumbling sandstone -- along with the gods of the conquerors.

 

But new gods were already preparing to make their entrance... 

 

           [fragment of a text that could be made longer]

The France Issue

Summer 2010

Poems

Raymond Federman

Raymond Federman (1928-2009) was a French-American poet and novelist. He was born in Montrouge, France, and emigrated to the United States in 1947. He earned a doctorate in comparative literature at UCLA, and continued throughout his life to dialogue with Samuel Beckett in his scholarly writing and literary works. As an experimental novelist and translator who published works in French and English, Federman remains a singular figure in the American literary tradition; esteem for his work grew most quickly in Germany, while the United States and France continue to discover and rediscover his many creations. A mediator of the French tradition in the US, he explored oralized styles autofictional narratives and genre-bending forms crucial to the French novel since writers like Louis-Ferdinand Céline and Blaise Cendrars. But his digressive narratives (such as Double or Nothing in 1971 or Amer Eldorado 2/001 in 2001) owe as much to Beckett’s novels as they do to a long line of English-language novelists like Laurence Sterne or Herman Melville. And his jubilant, transgressive imagination, full of huge bonhomie and bizarre conceits, belongs to him alone, as illustrated, for instance, in the last work published during his lifetime, Les Carcasses (Paris: Editions Léo Scheer/Laureli, 2009), a wryly delivered fable on the afterlife, amplified by Federman’s authorized "translator" Stéphane Rouzé (originally published in partial form in 2007 by the Librairie Olympique). Other important works include Chut (Paris: Léo Scheer, 2008), Mon corps en neuf parties (Romainville/Paris: Al Dante/Léo Scheer, 2004), Future concentration (poems, Marseille, France: Le Mot et le Reste, 2003) and many others. Raymond Federman’s disappearance on the 6th of October, 2009 was deeply felt by his friends and admirers.

English translation by Alexander Dickow

Alexander Dickow grew up in Moscow, Idaho. He currently lives in Châtillon, France, where he is pursuing doctoral research on the works of Blaise Cendrars, Guillaume Apollinaire and Max Jacob. He has translated the work of Max Jacob, Henri Droguet, Jean-Claude Pinson and others into English, and of poems by Amy King, Ana Bozicevic-Bowling and others into French. He is currently translating the work of the Swiss poet Gustave Roud into English, part of which has appeared in the online translation journal Calque. His poetry has appeared in French and in English in journals including Sitaudis, Il particolare, can we have our ball back?, Little Red Leaves and others, and he has work forthcoming in Daniel Zimmerman and Caryll Balzano’s Arsenal. He is the author of the bilingual collection Caramboles (Paris: Argol Editions, 2008). A complete bibliography is available on his sporadically evolving weblog, Voix Off.