Japanese Archery, a poem by Aleksander Wat

1.
The hand tells the bowstring:
    Obey me.
The bowstring answers the hand:
    Draw Valiantly.
The bowstring tells the arrow:
    O arrow, fly.
The arrow answers the bowstring:
    Speed my flight.
The arrow tells the target:
    Be my light.
The target answers the arrow:
    Love me. 

2.
The target tells arrow, bowstring, hand and eye:
    Ta twam asi.
Which means in a sacred tongue:
    I am Thou.

3.
(Footnote of a Christian:
O Mother of God,
watch over the target, the bow, the arrow
and the archer).

—Translated by Richard Lourie

This poem serves as the epigraph to Aleksander Wat’s My Century, a memoir based on the Polish futurist’s taped discussions with Czeslaw Milosz. Mavis Gallant admirers might be interested to know that the Wats counted Gallant as one of their dearest friends and that she has translated some his work.

Getting Gallant

I laughed, but I was the only one to do so. No one else seemed to know that this was a bit of Canadian gallows humor.

Over at Hazlitt, Michelle Dean goes to a tribute to (the still living) Mavis Gallant at KGB bar, helpfully explicating some references in Gallant’s stories that may be obscure to Americans and correcting Wallace Shawn’s pronunciation of “Raymond.”

Dear Dustin,

We make books, not t-shirts. Oh wait, sometimes we make pins, they’re more popular than our books. You think we’d make millions? Perhaps we should change industries. 

Love,
Nick 

mcnallyjackson:

Dear NYRB Classics,

Please make this tshirt. Then send me one of the many millions of dollars you earn. 

Love, Dustin

Mavis Gallant’s journals to be published →

…though, sadly, not by us.

picadorbookroom:

Last night at Greenlight Bookstore in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, Rosecrans Baldwin discussed his memoir, Paris, I Love You But You’re Bringing Me Down, the story of his time spent living in the French city. He spoke of the comparisons between the two peoples and what a place is like once you’ve settled in and gotten to know a few locals.

While in Paris, Rosecrans, a self-described Francophile, couldn’t get enough and proceeded to read a bunch of books about his new home. Here are four books Rosecrans recommends:

The Dud Avocado by Elaine Dundy
“It’s a wonderful, screwy take on 1950s Paris. The narrator’s voice just rampages.” 

You can listen to Rosecrans talk about this novel on NPR.

The Bathroom by Jean-Philippe Toussaint
“A novel in which nothing happens, and what does happen takes place in a Parisian bathroom for the most part. And yet: gripping, revealing, entertaining, and all in very few pages.”

The Friend of Madame Maigret by Georges Simenon
“It’s hard to pick one Simenon—I love so many. This one’s set in the Marais, where I used to live, so it’s a sentimental selection.”

Paris Stories by Mavis Gallant
“These are set around Europe in addition to Paris, so it’s a continental treat. Gallant has won all sorts of awards and she’s still underrated, I think. Effortlessly moving.”

You can listen to Rosecrans discuss Paris, I Love You But You’re Bringing Me Down with WNYC’s Leonard Lopate as well as with Brad Listi on the Other People podcast. You might also want to read an excerpt at Salon. Rosecrans is also on Twitter at @rosecrans.

In keeping with this wanderlusting, here are our suggestions for books with a great sense of place:

The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Hidden Inheritance by Edmund de Waal
Edmund de Waal is a world-famous ceramicist. Having spent thirty years making beautiful pots—which are then sold, collected, and handed on—he has a particular sense of the secret lives of objects. When he inherited a collection of 264 tiny Japanese wood and ivory carvings, called netsuke, he wanted to know who had touched and held them, and how the collection had managed to survive.

And so begins this extraordinarily moving memoir and detective story as de Waal discovers both the story of the netsuke and of his family, the Ephrussis, over five generations. A nineteenth-century banking dynasty in Paris and Vienna, the Ephrussis were as rich and respected as the Rothchilds. Yet by the end of the World War II, when the netsuke were hidden from the Nazis in Vienna, this collection of very small carvings was all that remained of their vast empire.

Blue Latitudes: Boldly Going Where Captain Cook Has Gone Before by Tony Horwitz
Two centuries after James Cook’s epic voyages of discovery, Tony Horwitz takes readers on a wild ride across hemispheres and centuries to explore the Captain’s embattled legacy in today’s Pacific. 

Recounting Cook’s voyages and exotic scenes — tropical orgies, taboo rituals, cannibal feasts, human sacrifice — Horwitz relives Cook’s adventures by following in the captain’s wake to places such as Tahiti, Savage Island, and the Great Barrier Reef to discover Cook’s embattled legacy in the present day. 

Peter Robb’s A Death in Brazil: A Book of Omissions
Deliciously sensuous and fascinating, Robb renders in vivid detail the intoxicating pleasures of Brazil’s food, music, literature, and landscape as he travels not only cross country but also back in time—from the days of slavery to modern day political intrigue and murder. 

Now in paperback for the first time at the end of this month, Land’s End: A Walk in Provincetown by Michael Cunningham
“Cunningham rambles through Provincetown, gracefully exploring the unusual geography, contrasting seasons, long history, and rich stew of gay and straight, Yankee and Portuguese, old-timer and ‘washashore’ that flavors Cape Cod’s outermost town… . Chock-full of luminous descriptions … . He’s hip to its studied theatricality, ever-encroaching gentrification and physical fragility, and he can joke about its foibles and mourn its losses with equal aplomb.” —Chicago Tribune

"I finally get it; I finally feel like I’ve grown up enough to appreciate Mavis Gallant." →

Another convert to the church of Mme Gallant.

“I wrote newspaper stories in the daytime and fiction early in the morning or at night. I had a sense of space and of freedom. And now I have to stop and ask myself if that sense of freedom was factitious, invented by me – then and in retrospect. Have I remembered a way I wanted to live when I was in my twenties, and did the desire just occasionally coincide with some aspects of a reporter’s life? In short, has a fiction about living spilled across that ambiguous entity we call ‘real life’? I may be building an ideal city, a lyrical downtown area – vanished, regretted, mourned by a handful of survivors. A friend from Montreal said, the other day, ‘Let’s face it. Those were terrible apartments, almost slums.’”

— 

Mavis Gallant’s contribution to A Writer’s Life: The Margaret Laurence Lectures, excerpted in The National Post

Mavis Gallant at the Standard, Montréal, May 1946