Cahiers Series

by Jhumpa Lahiri

For three years the renowned author and translator Jhumpa Lahiri has been collaborating with her friend the classicist Yelena Baraz on a translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses into English. From among the elements of transformation that have spoken to her directly and intimately she has chosen to focus here on stones: stones that turn into human beings; and, later, human beings – silenced, stilled, petrified – who will turn into stone. The connotations of stone – of rock, of pebble – pose questions of origin and destiny, immobility and unsettledness, living and
dying. Lahiri’s text on translation-as-metamorphosis and the protean self resonates alongside the dynamic and colourful paintings of celebrated artist Jamie Nares. These extend the exploration of metamorphosis by questioning, beautifully, the relation of the permanent to the ephemeral, the necessary to the aleatory, the completed art work to the human gesture that created it.

by Michael Finke

Deskbound and myopic, ever since his childhood author Michael Finke has dreamt of flight. After decades as a university professor whose secret vice was to spend weekends soaring in light planes and gliders, he came across little-studied writings of leading Russian authors of the 1920s who, at the direction of Soviet authorities, engaged aviation as a signal promise of progress in Bolshevik Russia – another dream asking to be translated into reality. The resulting essay allows the literary scholar to meet the flier in an exploration of the sources and meanings of the several dreams inspired by flight. Placed alongside the text are paintings by the British artist Rachael Plummer, paintings which have their own oneiric quality,

as airplanes disintegrate into abstraction and as the offer of an aerial perspective renders landscape almost – but in the end not quite – legible.

by Marina Warner

What happened to time during the Coronavirus pandemic lockdowns? Acclaimed novelist and essayist Marina Warner recounts how strangely her days and weeks passed, in this highly personal account of a response to lockdown in which she delves into her experience of Catholic convent schools for some clues as to how each day might be marked as significant. She discusses missals, almanacs, Roman and Revolutionary calendars, developing her thoughts into what amounts almost to a manifesto – for a new way of rendering each day different, memorable, human. Her text is accompanied by a further response to lockdown, by the Greek photographer Dimitris Kleanthis, whose haunting images somehow make visible the suspension- and-acceleration of time experienced by so many, while also hinting at how, to the eye that is acute enough, there may always be an event taking place.

by Rachel Cusk and Siemon Scamell-Katz

Novelist Rachel Cusk explores themes of arrival, transition, and loss in this account of a time spent in Greece. Her experience of the potency and fragility of landscape leads to an examination of the moral ambiguity of human creativity. Questions about writing, reproduction, gender, the meaning of location, and the role of translation in the maintenance of coherence, arise amid the cross-currents of a sensory experience of place and of nature. The text is partnered – rather than illustrated – by the paintings of Siemon Scamell-Katz, whose responses to the same events and landscape create a visual essay of their own. This dialogue between language and image represents also a search for meaning, by two artists whose shared life nonetheless gives way to the autonomy and solitude of the creative act.

by Anna-Louise Milne

Everyone knows how it works in the big waiting room just off the street. There’s no reception desk in Dr Al Asadi’s surgery, so you just find a spot, and make sure you’ve noted who is there already. People come from all over, though the surgery has nothing obvious to recommend it. Anna-Louise Milne charts the silent cues and halting accounts that constitute the everyday choreography of care in a world where the rules are anyone’s guess and everyone’s business. The text is rhythmed by paintings by artist Andy Robert in which figures emerge vividly from his experimental and abstract use of colour and line, inscrutable and requiring. Inspired by his surroundings and community in Brooklyn, his travels, as well as his family’s involvement in healthcare and mass transit, Robert’s work shares Milne’s interest in our cities’ hidden places that harbour the labour that sustains the bodies of those who are often deemed expendable, even unspeakable.

by Peter Cole and Terry Winters

Is ekphrasis a kind of translation? Or translation a kind of ekphrasis? What kind of ekphrasis? Which sort of translation? On Being Drawn, by MacArthur-winning poet and translator Peter Cole, is a meditation on receptivity and composition, sensation and sympathy. Braiding drawings by artist Terry Winters, poems Cole wrote in response to them, and a prose commentary that explores the often synaesthetic meeting of mediums, this cahier asks what it might mean to ‘translate experience’. In the process, it reflects on the primary yet mysterious role mediation plays in all we see and do, hear and know.

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by Andrea Applebee

Having arrived from the United States to make a new life in Greece, Andrea Applebee gives a vivid account of the challenges and pleasures that await her as she learns a new language and makes her way around Athens – assisted in both cases by her guide dog. Diagnosed at a young age with a degenerative condition affecting her vision, she brings a phenomenologist’s sensitivity to immediacy of perception when telling of how she has lived with her condition, survived her unusual upbringing in South Carolina and a relationship with a violent man, and gone on to embrace a future in a foreign land. Her text is complemented by works on paper by Scottish artist Lorna McIntosh, who has drawn inspiration from the present text as well as thinkers of the 17th and 18th centuries in her exploration of the notion of life as navigation.

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by Neel Mukherjee

A highly intelligent girl becomes entranced by the sounds that birds make. In time, this develops into a fascination – an obsession even – with avian communication; as an accomplished neuroscientist, she devotes her life to attempting to unlock the mystery of bird song. What celebrated novelist Neel Mukherjee explores here is the extent to which communication systems can exert a pull on the human psyche – as well as the costs and dangers that may await the individual who cedes to that pull. Mukherjee’s gripping and poignant tale is accompanied by finely-detailed paintings by Chinese artist Lu Chao in which the relation between earth and air, weight and weightlessness, is constantly in question.

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by Olga Medvedkova

Five tales, each of which stages an encounter between an acute sensibility and a city. Russian-born Olga Medvedkova reveals something of what may motivate travel –curiosity, infatuation, uxorial affection, search for academic knowledge, acquisitiveness – and what may lie behind that word, in its forms both loved and loathed: tourism. Writing in French rendered into English by renowned translator Richard Pevear, Olga Medvedkova lends her art-historian’s eye to the particularity of place, intimating how every city offers its own specific lure and threat. Her texts are complemented by photographs of exquisite installations of small brass houses made by Japanese artist Hana Sakuma. 

by James Montgomery

The seventh-century Arabian poet Tumāḍir, known as al-Khansāʾ (a sobriquet that means ‘the Snub-nosed gazelle doe’), outlived her two brothers, both of whom died in battle. Her poetic output consists solely of laments for them. James Montgomery, Arabist and scholar, offers his translations of some of these dirges, interspersing them with observations on other explorations of death and loss, and thoughts on why, through his own experience, al-Khansāʾ’s poems came to speak to him. The text is complemented by details – details which take the reader further into darkness, as well as towards some possible consolation – from the painting and print-work of the celebrated artist Alison Watt.

44 pages, 12 illustrations | 240 x 150mm | Sewn paperback with dust jacket | ISBN 978-1-909631-27-4

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By Éric Chevillard

Taking his cue from the order of letters on a typewriter keyboard, renowned French writer Éric Chevillard – or some irate persona he has created – vents his displeasure on everything from feet to the ageing process to photographers to toilets to the start of the new school year in France in September. A word is enough to set him off, as his imagination hilariously attempts to exhaust the sources of an irritation that the world seems able endlessly to offer; while at the centre of his tirades lurks an awareness that his own fiercest enemy may lie within. Responding to Chevillard’s prose, French artist Philippe Favier offers both a commentary on and an extension of the text, in images that are as delightful as they are – occasionally – sinister.

44 pages, 12 illustrations | 240 x 150mm | Sewn paperback with dust jacket | ISBN 978-1-909631-26-7

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By Sylvia Brownrigg

A woman travels to seven ‘invisible’ countries, and from the moment of arrival is surprised, challenged, disturbed by what she discovers. In the brightly coloured and somewhat sinister world conjured by American novelist Sylvia Brownrigg, what is standard – passing through customs, checking in to a hotel, pronouncing words in a foreign language – becomes fraught; the traveller’s urge to escape and seek adventure vies with her sense of melancholy and anxiety at feeling unmoored. Brownrigg explores border-crossing, cultural misunderstanding, touristic voyeurism and naïveté, as her visitor attempts to navigate the environments she encounters. Accompanying the text are images by the celebrated British artist Tacita Dean which extend the traveller’s journeys into spheres that turn almost uncanny in their combination of abstraction and realistic detail.

44 pages, 11 illustrations | 240 x 150mm | Sewn paperback with dust jacket | ISBN 978-1-909631-24-3

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By Georgi Gospodinov

Some smuggle cigarettes or alcohol, others weapons, but for the renowned Bulgarian novelist Georgi Gospodinov, the most dangerous contraband is carried by writers as they surreptitiously move stories across borders. In twenty-five short chapters, Gospodinov explores how smugglers, writers and translators are all involved in transporting what is desired, valued, missing, repressed or forbidden. Gospodinov explores his child­hood, spent in Communist Bulgaria, and the fantasies of other lives and places engendered by this setting. Drawings made specially for the text by the Bulgarian animator and graphic artist Theodore Ushev adorn the cahier.

Translated from the Bulgarian by Dan Gunn and Kristina Kovacheva

40 pages, 8 illustrations | 240 x 150mm | Sewn paperback with dust jacket | ISBN 978-1-909631-20-5

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By Javier Marías

The celebrated Spanish novelist and translator Javier Marías writes of the origins of his impulse to write, of the origins of his own family, and of the connection between these two different sorts of beginning. Exploring the difference between what is true in the world and what is true in fiction, he explains why an appeal to ‘real events’ has never convinced him; why the history of his own family, with its Cuban and Spanish strands, has left him uncertain as to what is legend and what is historically factual; and why what has been imagined or dreamed can end up being truer than what ‘really happened’. The cahier includes a postface on translating Marías by his chief translator into English, Margaret Jull Costa, and images from the works of the renowned Cuban artist Wifredo Lam (1902 – 1982).

Translated from the Spanish by Margaret Jull Costa.

40 pages, 12 illustrations | 240 x 150mm | Sewn paperback with dust jacket | ISBN 978-1-909631-18-2

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By Kirsty Gunn

Kirsty Gunn meditates upon her childhood in New Zealand, revisiting in writing the landscapes she once explored through sight, sound and touch. Struggling with the stifling norms of colonial society, the young girl becomes fascinated by ‘the bush’ – that fringe of sodden, savage vegetation bordering the town’s tidy gardens and parks. Both threatening and irresistible, the bush becomes a powerful metaphor for the wild, with all its contradictions: marginalised but intrinsic, feared but desired. Interweaving essay, memoir and narrative, Gunn explores the influence of this disquieting presence on her early life and how it was able to provide her sustenance during the painful years of growing up.

Merran Gunn has created a mixed-media assemblage, reproduced in this cahier, that attempts to extend her sister’s exploration of the bush.

40 pages, 7 illustrations | 240 x 150mm | Sewn paperback with dust jacket | ISBN 978-1-909631-17-5

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by Franco Nasi

An Italian naïf from the town of Reggio Emilia travels America and his home province, reflecting as he does on the oddity of what he finds. Through his unguarded eyes, the world is revealed in all its fundamental strangeness, pathos and humour. If there are ‘blues’ to be heard, then this is partly because any description or explanation, however successful it may be, is bound to go awry when it is required to pass into another language. At once story and reflection, essay and narrative, this cahier by one of Italy’s most eminent translators and translation theorists is a celebration of the space between languages, which both unites and divides us.

40 pages, 12 illustrations | 240 x 150mm | Sewn paperback with dust jacket | ISBN 978-1-90963111-3

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by Marlene van Niekerk 

This playful, genre-bending cahier tells the story of pale, anxious creative writing student Kasper Olwagen and his strange encounter, through the person of a Swan Whisperer, with the phenomenon of translation. Through brilliantly imagined letters and recordings, van Niekerk recounts Olwagen's discovery of a vagrant who, without uttering any even remotely intelligible words, summons swans from Amsterdam's canals. Through the story of Olwagen's experience, van Niekerk probes south and north, language and living, stories and truth. A story of doubles, cadence, and, yes, swan whispering, The Swan Whisperer delves into the playfulness of sound in the Afrikaans language and the necessity for listening in all translation

William Kentridge’s black-and-white prints form a fantastical accompaniment to van Niekerk’s peculiar fable. Birds, mammals and human figures are thrust into loose spatial arrangements, struggling, like Olwagen, to orient themselves in a newly rearranged world.

40 pages, 10 illustrations | 240 x 150mm |Sewn paperback with dust jacket | ISBN 9781909631106 |

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by Maureen Freely

Angry in Piraeus is the story of the creation of a translator. In this cahier, Maureen Freely explores what it was in her childhood that led her to become a traveler across the spaces that exist between countries, languages, and forms. She offers rich descriptions of her itinerant upbringing in America, Turkey, and Greece, vividly evoking what it means to be constantly commuting between worlds –geographical, conceptual, linguistic, and literary – in search of a home, or a self, that is proving elusive. She tells of her transition from novelist to translator – specifically, the English translator of Nobel Prize-winner Orhan Pamuk – and of how eventually she found it necessary to give up translating Pamuk in order to return to her own fictional worlds.

Freely's meditations are accompanied by the playful collages of Rie Iwatake, a Japanese artist with her own experiences meandering between cultures. The resulting book is an unforgettable meditation on translation, writing, and life itself.

40 pages, 12 colour illustrations | 240 x 150mm | Sewn paperback with dust jacket | ISBN 978-909631-13-7

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by Idra Novey

In this cahier, American poet Idra Novey explores multiple notions of translation through two sequences of poems. In the first sequence, ‘Letters to C’, she directly addresses the figure and the words of a writer she recently translated, Brazilian visionary Clarice Lispector. In the second, ‘Regarding Marmalade, Cognates, and Visitors’, Novey looks at the connections between language, translation, and the hosting of visitors, including her newborn son. Idra Novey’s texts are in conversation with images by the artist Erica Baum – images of books that seem both to invite and resist attempts to read them.

40 pages, 9 colour illustrations | 240 x 150mm | Sewn paperback with dust jacket | ISBN 978-1-909631-07-6 | 

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by Paul Griffiths

In this cahier Paul Griffiths effects a multi-layered translation, taking a series of eleven Japanese noh plays and turning them into stories in English. The reader will encounter spirit-beings set free, lovers lost and found, dreams and desires fulfilled, lessons learned from nature, and always a longing for the infinite, as the long, slow drama of each noh play is transformed into a short and moving tale. Interspersed and contrasting with the stories are ten photographs of contemporary Japan by John L. Tran which further explore the relation between theatricality and narrative, while offering hints of a very different vision of infinitude.

44 pages, 10 colour illustrations | 240 x 150mm | Sewn paperback with dust jacket | ISBN 978-1-90963102-1 | Publication date: December 2013

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by Anne Carson

This cahier unites two texts by celebrated Canadian poet Anne Carson, encouraging readers to experience them alongside and illuminating each other. ‘Variations on the Right to Remain Silent’ is an essay on the stakes involved when translation happens, ranging from Homer through Joan of Arc to Paul Celan; it includes the author’s seven translations of a poetic fragment from the Greek poet Ibykos. ‘By Chance the Cycladic People’ is a poem about Cycladic culture where the order of the lines has been determined by a random number generator. The cahier is illustrated by Lanfranco Quadrio drawings and gouaches, inspired by his reading of Anne Carson’s texts.

44 pages, 16 colour illustrations | 240 x 150mm | Sewn paperback with dust jacket | ISBN 978-1-90963103-8 | Publication date: December 2013

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by Jeffrey Greene and Ralph Petty

Shades of the Other Shore has come about through a collaboration between writer Jeffrey Greene and artist Ralph Petty. The two, writer and artist, share rural American beginnings, but have since discovered a new life in France, in sparsely populated French areas of Burgundy and the Ardèche, respectively. Their cahier offers a deep mapping of their adopted regions: Greene’s sequence of sketches and poems explores imagined correspondences between personal and historical ghosts tied to the seasons; Petty’s watercolours records a journey to the source of a local river. The result is a rich artistic translation, through their American sensibilities, of the landscapes of their chosen homes.

36 pages, 15 colour illustrations | 240 x 150mm | Sewn paperback with dust jacket | ISBN 978-0-9569920-6-2 | Publication date: April 2013

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by Bernard Turle

In recent years theories about translation have proliferated. Yet surprisingly little has been written about what it actually feels like to be a translator: to spend one’s days devoted to the words of another. Bernard Turle’s Diplomat, Actor, Translator, Spy seeks to address certain prevailing translation theories, but above all to give a sense of the true task of the translator – a daily grind that is anything but abstract. Through twenty-six alphabetically organised recollections, anecdotes, fantasies, and dreams, he vividly conveys what it is that drew him to becoming a translator, evoking the delights as well as the frustrations of his chosen profession.

44 pages, 25 colour illustrations | 240 x 150mm | Sewn paperback with dust jacket | ISBN 978-0-9569920-5-5 | Publication date: March 2013

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by Elfriede Jelinek

Her Not All Her is a play about, from, and to the great Swiss writer Robert Walser, by the great Austrian writer and Nobel Prize winner Elfriede Jelinek. It highlights what Jelinek calls ‘the fundamental fragmentation’ of Walser’s voice, revealing Walser as ‘one of those people who, when they said “I”, did not mean themselves’. Presented here in a prize-winning translation by Damion Searls, it shows Jelinek to be an impassioned virtuoso reader of classic European writers. The cahier contains an essay by the Director of the Robert Walser Centre, Reto Sorg, and thirteen paintings by the British artist Thomas Newbolt.

44 pages, 15 colour illustrations | 240 x 150mm | Sewn paperback with dust jacket | ISBN 978-0-9569920-4-8 | Publication date: October 2012

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by Ivan Vladislavić

‘I found myself in the thick of things. I shut my eyes experimentally, opened them again. If I was dreaming, the scene should change – but no, everything was exactly as it had been before.’ So begins A Labour of Moles, by one of South Africa’s most important writers, Ivan Vladislavic: a story which takes the reader into a realm utterly alien and at the same time as familiar as the letters forming the words on the page and the very building-blocks of fiction.

44 pages, 19 colour illustrations | 240 x 150mm | Sewn paperback with dust jacket | ISBN 978-0-9565092-8-4 | Publication date: December 2011

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by George Craig

For fifteen years George Craig has been translating into English the thousands of letters that Samuel Beckett wrote in French. To readers of this cahier he opens that experience, describing the challenges as well as the rewards, which can go from the difficulty of deciphering Beckett’s notoriously difficult handwriting to finding an English equivalent for one of Beckett’s numerous verbal jokes. Highly personal and at the same time informed by a lifetime of experience of movement between languages, this cahier offers an insight into the ‘task of the translator’ – when the writer being translated was himself a master translator.

40 pages, 12 colour images | 240 x 150mm | Sewn paperback with dust jacket | ISBN 978-0-9565092-7-7 | Publication date: May 2011

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by Daniel Albright

In this cahier Harvard Professor Daniel Albright gathers parables, poems, dreams, translations, written during a three-year period following the death of his father. Together, these form a moving record of a time of trouble, a tribute to people and objects lost, as well as offering a way of deflecting or evading even greater and less knowable harm. Accompanied by artwork by the poet and artist Peter Sacks, the cahier builds towards an attempt, as the author puts it in his Preface, ‘to translate my private experience into something with public meaning’. Albright adds: ‘But I feel as if I were less the translator than the thing being translated’.

44 pages, 7 colour images | 240 x 150mm | Sewn paperback with dust jacket | ISBN 978-0-9565092-6-0 | Publication date: February 2011

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by László Krasznahorkai and Max Neumann

This cahier is the result of a collaboration undertaken specially for The Cahiers Series, between a writer and a painter. Hungarian novelist László Krasznahorkai, author of The Melancholy of Resistance and War & War, responds with fourteen texts to fourteen depictions of a strange and ill-formed creature made by his friend the renowned German painter Max Neumann. The texts speak from within the head of Neumann's creature that seems to be menacing existence itself; serving, as they do so, to confirm Susan Sontag's estimate of Krasznahorkai as ‘The Hungarian Master of Apocalypse’. All fourteen of Neumann's paintings are reproduced alongside the texts (translated by Ottilie Mulzet). The cahier is introduced with a preface by Irish novelist Colm Tóibín.

40 pages, 14 colour images | 240 x 150mm | Sewn paperback with dust jacket | ISBN 978-0-9565092-1-5 | Publication date: September 2010

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by Gao Xingjian

In this cahier Nobel laureate Gao Xingjian publishes for the first time his latest theatrical text, Ballade Nocturne. Originally written in French, it is a ‘woman’s manifesto’ that pursues Gao’s experimentation with artistic forms through a combination of poetry, dance, music, and drama. The play is translated by Claire Conceison, who adds a preface about Gao’s work and her experience of translating it. The text is complemented by five paintings by the author and by a booklet containing the original French version.

40 pages, 5 colour images | 240 x 150mm | Sewn paperback with dust jacket | ISBN 978-0-9558896-9-1 | Publication date: March 2010

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by Alison Leslie Gold

Alison Leslie Gold, known best for her work on Anne Frank and the Holocaust, here for the first time relates a personal memoir, centred on recent losses of loved ones and on various findings that to some extent offset the losses. Starting with her childhood experience of running her primary school ‘lost and found’ depot, she develops, through a series of letters, a meditation on ageing, friendship, and the sort of ‘translation’ required when writing to the dead. Her text is accompanied by 13 paintings from Charlotte Salomon’s masterpiece Leben? oder Teater?

40 pages, 13 colour images | 240 x 150mm | Sewn paperback with dust jacket | ISBN 978-0-9558896-8-4 | Publication date: February 2010

Purchase Lost and Found online

by Vincen Cornu

In this cahier, Vincen Cornu, a Paris-based architect, attempts to ‘translate’ architectural sensation into words and images, in order to convey the inspirations behind his work and the ways in which buildings, and the spaces they create, can offer journeys of imaginative discovery. Writing for the enthusiast rather than for the specialist, he takes the reader back to early theories of architecture, through topics as diverse as skyscrapers, railway tracks, grain barns in Northern Spain designed to deter rodents, and the work of masters in the field such as Álvaro Siza, Hans Scharoun, and Louis Kahn. The text works alongside numerous full-colour drawings and architectural plans to give a glimpse into what architecture might mean to us today.

44 pages, 24 colour images | 240 x 150mm | Sewn paperback with dust jacket | ISBN 978-0-9558896-7-7 | Publication date: December 2009

Purchase In the Thick of Things online

by Keith Botsford

In this cahier the novelist, critic, translator, and editor of News from The Republic of Letters Keith Botsford presents the visual and literary work of the Polish painter and intellectual Józef Czapski. Botsford’s imagined brief autobiography of Czapski takes us inside the artist’s turbulent life, signalling the chief events which marked him, as well as the affinities which led to his creative flourishing. This cahier offers a chance either to get to know a neglected thinker or artist, or – for those already familiar with Czapski – a chance to come to know him better. The text is accompanied by 12 full colour reproductions of Czapski’s work.

44 pages, 12 colour images | 240 x 150mm | Sewn paperback with dust jacket | ISBN 978-0-9558896-4-6 | Publication date: April 2009

Purchase Józef Czapski: A Life in Translation online

by Simon Leys

Simon Leys, novelist, unflinching cultural and political commentator, Sinologist, and occasional illustrator, presents here timely meditations on the experience and hazards of literary translation. Preceding his essay are observations on everything from demented tyrants to musical geniuses who gain insights from vacuum cleaners. Written with wit and concision, this cahier offers English-language readers a chance to get to know a writer who is renowned for his wisdom and insight as much as he is for his linguistic and literary expertise.

44 pages, 6 images | 240 x 150mm | Sewn paperback with dust jacket | ISBN 978-0-9558896-3-9 | Publication date: November 2008

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by Paul Muldoon

This cahier presents new work by the celebrated Irish poet Paul Muldoon. After a preface in which the poet explains what for him is the importance of translating, there follow four original works, “The Windshield”, “Balls” (a five-sonnet sequence), “Quail”, and the title series of poems, “When the Pie Was Opened”. Interspersed with these are the poet’s translations: from the Latin of Ovid, from the Anglo-Saxon, from the Medieval Welsh of Dafydd ap Gwilym, from the Greek of Kostis Palamas, and from the Irish. The cahier is completed by drawings and an etching by the Sicilian artist Lanfranco Quadrio.

44 pages, 6 images | 240 x 150mm | Sewn paperback with dust jacket | ISBN 978-0-9552963-8-3 | Publication date: May 2008

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by Rachel Shihor

Four excerpts from Rachel Shihor’s novella Yankinton have been selected, and translated from the Hebrew for this cahier. These poignant and humorous tales are as much about the act of recollection as they are about the remembered Tel Aviv of the 1940s and 195os. In a playful and yet muted style, Shihor tells of the everyday life of a child beginning to grasp her surroundings. Six works by the painter David Hendler further explore the city.

44 pages, 6 images | 240 x 150mm | Sewn paperback with dust jacket | ISBN 978-0-9552963-7-6 | Publication date: February 2008

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by Isabella Ducrot

Isabella Ducrot is a Roman textile artist and painter, who in this cahier presents reflections on the nature of textile and weaving which arise both from her major textile collection and from her close reading of mythology and art history. Her meditations are illustrated by her own art and are introduced by a specially-written poem by the celebrated Italian poet Patrizia Cavalli.

36 pages, 8 colour images | 240 x 150mm | Sewn paperback with dust jacket | ISBN 978-0-9552963-6-9 | Publication date: February 2008

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by Lydia Davis

The cahier comprises three linked pieces by the translator and short story writer, Lydia Davis. First is ‘A Proust Alphabet’, which gives an account of several words and issues of particular interest, encountered during the author's recent translating of Marcel Proust's Swann's Way. There follows a short article on the French thinker and novelist Maurice Blanchot, entitled ‘The Problem in Summarising Blanchot’. Finally comes a series of dreams and dreamlike moments, recounted in ‘Swimming in Egypt: Dreams while Awake and Asleep'. The text is accompanied by ten tritone photographs by Ornan Rotem.

48 pages, 10 tritone illustrations | 240 x 150mm | Sewn paperback with dust jacket | ISBN 978-0-9552963-5-2 | Publication date: November 2007

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by Alan Jenkins

The cahier comprises an introductory preface by Alan Jenkins, and his new translation of "Le Bateau Ivre" by Arthur Rimbaud (reproduced in French original with translation facing), along with two poems of his own which take their bearings from Rimbaud's as well as from images by the painter William Pownall. Two of Pownall's works are reproduced, as well as one drawing by Rimbaud and two by Paul Verlaine.

32 pages, 8 colour illustrations | 240 x 150mm | Sewn paperback with dust jacket | ISBN 978-0-9552963-4-5 | Publication date: November 2007

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by Jonathan Harvey & Jean Claude Carrière

This cahier, third in the series produced by the Center for Writers & Translators at the Arts Arena of The American University of Paris, is published to coincide with the Dutch premiere of the newly written opera Wagner Dream, directed by Pierre Audi and produced by De Nederlandse Opera.

The cahier includes an interview with Jonathan Harvey, the composer of Wagner Dream, and Jean-Claude Carrière, the librettist. It contains an essay by Jonathan Harvey on contemporary music and its relation to Buddhist thought and practice. Six photographs are reproduced from the world premiere of Wagner Dream, as well as a detail from Jonathan Harvey’s musical score, and a rare image of an ancient Indian ritual plaque.

40 pages, 8 colour illustrations | 240 x 150mm | Sewn paperback with dust jacket | ISBN 978-0-9552963-3-8 | Publication date: June 2007

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by Muriel Spark

This cahier, the second in the series produced by the Center for Writers & Translators at The American University of Paris, commemorates Muriel Spark by publishing nine short pieces, as well as one photograph, by her. To this it adds a preface by the editor, Dan Gunn, as well as several photographs deriving from his stay with Muriel Spark’s friend Penelope Jardine, during which the selection of texts was made.

Included in Muriel Spark’s texts are: one handwritten note on dream interpretation; one dream, recounted; two poems; an essay on Piero della Francesca and another on hotels; one note on translation; one short story; and several diary entries.

40 pages, 7 colour images | 240 x 150mm | Sewn paperback with dust jacket | ISBN 978-0-9552963-2-1 | Publication date: April 2007

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by Richard Pevear

This cahier, the first in a series, marks the opening of the Center for Writers & Translators at the Arts Arena of The American University of Paris. It also marks the completion by its author Richard Pevear of his translation (done in collaboration with Larissa Volokhonsky) of Tolstoy’s War and Peace, which will be published later in 2007.

Readers will learn here of the intuitions and convictions that have steered the course of one of the most famous translators of our day, as well as of the particular difficulties and rewards of translating Tolstoy’s masterpiece. Also published here for the first time is Richard Pevear’s translation of a long poem by Pushkin (with Russian text facing) as well as drawings by Pushkin himself.

36 pages, 5 monochrome illustrations | 240 x 150mm | Sewn paperback with dust jacket | ISBN 978-0-9552963-1-4 | Publication date: April 2007

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