Paris, Tuesday 18 February, 2025

I’ve been in London for a few days, to see family and for a reading at the Broadway Bookshop, a lovely place on Broadway Market in Hackney. Also an appearance on Poetry Breakfast, on the erotic, for Valentine’s Day. Back the day before yesterday, now slipping back into my usual writing: mornings writing and reading, afternoons: maybe more writing, maybe biking (in the Vaucluse, or walking (Paris) plus a Tai Chi class two evenings a week. I’m reading Heaney’s translations, Will Eaves’ new collection, working on Leopardi. Also reading Eli Weisel And the latest PNReview. Dorothy Wordsworth’s journal. My edition, which I bought second hand, much foxed, a little brittle. It includes the shorter poems that William was working on in the period she was writing her journal.

Weather cold and sunny. There’s a church (St Sulpice) across the street, and yesterday a team of rock climbers with helmets and ropes began placing climbing ropes on the church. I imagine they are going to do some work on the facade, without scaffolding. It’s quite wonderful to watch as they clank around the various terraces on our side of the church, or let themselves carefully down a zinc roof. Last year a staircase on the outside of our building, made of metal was cleaned and painted using a team of climbers, rather than scaffolding. That team said on the weekends they went climbing.

Working on a poem about a dental hygienist who taught me to hold my toothbrush like a Chinese calligraphy brush. I think it’s going to be fun. A poem I wrote about visits to the hammam here in Paris is in The London Magazine for February/March.

Paris, Monday 3 February 2025

February already. Did I really say I’d write here more regularly? As I think I said in January, I’ve been reading Dorothy Wordsworth’s journal before sleep, and it completely removes any shyness about starting out with a weather report. So — the temps have dropped again to around freezing overnight, which means that if I put yesterday’s pot au feu out on the kitchen balcony, in the morning the removal of the fat is made easier by its being frozen. Still a delicate operation, given that the surface of the pot is lumpy as a sea with wreckage, meaning lumps of ingredients: onion, leeks, carrots, meat, marrow bones, bouquet garni. But it lifts off fairly easily in your fingers. Today, because of the cold, the air is cold and dry and the sky is blue.

I’ve been working on some new poems, one that is only new in the sense that, after years of work, it is unfinished to my satisfaction. It’s about the hole in my tummy when I go to the university library or even just survey my own bookshelves and fact the fact that I will never be able to read (or reread) all the books. And about how my husband seems to read so much slower than I do, and yet (perhaps?) more deeply. That reminds me how much I love the French expression for ‘skimming a book’: to read diagonally (‘lire en diagonal’).

It’s going to be dark in an hour and a half, so I really should go outside for a bit—maybe check out the leaves (still invisible) on the neighbourhood trees, or go window-shopping (‘lecher les vitrines’ or lick the windows) now that the January Sales are over and our spring wardrobes are beginning to be displayed.

Off to London next week for a few days for a reading on Thursday Feb 13 at the Broadway Bookshop, in Hackney, East London, and to see my daughter and Co.

Monday 20 January, Paris

I made a resolution to write here more regularly, even if it starts to sound repetitive. I’ve been reading Dorothy Wordsworth’s Journal, following reading (rereading?) one of Virginia Woolf’s essays about it in her Second Common Reader. DW has replaced Woolf for the time it takes on my bedside table, and its main effect is to make me want to spend some time in the Lake District reliving the cold winter mornings of 1801. Cold and frugal: they seem to be living off the land: apples and giblet pies (but where do the giblets come from?) When they walk (their feet are their only means of transport, aside from the very occasional cart) to the nearest town it is, it seems, mainly to collect their letters. It’s hard for me to gauge how long a journey that is, but they do spend a lot of time walking, in rain and snow and foraging for moss (?) Last night, when William returned from a few days away, Dorothy gave him a steak, presumably from a local cow via the farmer. I would like to know a little more about such household details. I do know a good deal about the weather, their health, often poor, it seems, though there’s no talk of doctors and going to bed and waking up feeling better, the same or worse, usually depending on the news from Coleridge and William’s struggles with his poems and the lovely Molly, the woman who helps with food and laundry.

Wednesday 15 January, Paris

Oh, goodness, it really has been a while since I wrote here, and only about new-book-related things. So I’ll begin by saying that we have been in Paris (and the Vaucluse over the holidays) for over a month; right now I’m looking out the study window at rain pouring steadily down. An occasion to remind myself of Ponge’s wonderful prose poem about rain, the poem that is at the very beginning of Le Parti Pris des Choses, where he describes — pretty much without subtext— the sights and sounds of rain falling outside his (Paris?) window. Here it’s the sort of a day when you keep the lights on, but I’m quite content to sit at my desk, which was once the childhood bedroom desk of one of my daughters, the set designer who now raises alpacas on a rainy island in the Pacific Ocean.

Time for the pitch: I gave a reading at the Red Wheelbarrow bookshop in Paris last night, and today one of the audience members wrote about it on her substack: https://open.substack.com/pub/vamoul/p/i-leave-this-at-your-ear-for-when?r=18fxj0&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email. You might also enjoy Victoria’s other posts — she’s a gifted writer.

Second \ pitch: I’ll be reading at the Broadway Bookshop in London (Hackney) on Thursday Feb 13.

I guess that’s all for today. I shall try to be more regular. I’ve been reading Dorothy Wordsworth’s diary and I see that a few lines every day is worthwhile. Virginia Woolf admires DW in her Second Common Reader: Four Figures: ‘She scarcely seemed to shut her eyes…as if some secret of the utmost importance lay hidden beneath the surface.’ If that rings a bell, reread Elizabeth Bishop’s poem ‘Over 2000 Illustrations and a Complete Concordance,’ easily available online.

Thursday 12 November 2024

The appearance of a long and very thorough review of Apple Thieves in the LA Review of Books prompted me to reread a sort-of-essay I published in 2018 in PNReview. I still like it, coming upon it out of the blue, after six years. There’s a paywall, so I thought I would repost it here.

Meanwhile, update: colder but still sunny here. If we leave to go cycling right after lunch there is still sun at the top of Alpine Road an hour and a half of riding or so later But the pavement was wet and a little slippery what with the fallen leaves and overnight fog. We head for Paris soon.

Darning (PN Review 241) by Beverley Bie Brahic

Roaming the library stacks makes me uneasy. Too many books I haven’t read. The flesh is sad? Alas. But I’ve read all the books? Not even close. Getting my bearings in the third (literature) floor’s musty pulp-and-paper-smelling undergrowth, I file down a narrow path between stacks to tip a few more books from the shelf.

My husband’s sabbatical at a California university has stretched into years. I miss the street corner stink of piss, the damp zinc and glitter of life in Paris. I miss the newsstands. I miss the bookshops. The campus bookstore has been taken over by sportswear with the university logo; books relegated to the caves and eaves. In Paris, the flâneur is forever being lured into small shops still in business because French law restricts discounting and free shipping (no help, unfortunately, for Paris’s English bookshops, like the much­-regretted Village Voice, which must still compete with the online trade).

But the campus dweller life allows me to indulge an old fantasy: plugging the holes in my education. Sure, this feels like one of those math problems in which the student is asked to calculate how long it will take to fill a bathtub that is simultaneously draining at a different rate. Still I persist. A card swipe gets me into the university’s Babelian library, its hushed reading rooms with rows of shiny new books (English spines one way, French the other) and the ferny canyon-like stacks. I can audit classes – heaven in my theology will be reading Dante’s Inferno / Calvino’s Cosmicomics in the dauntingly articulate company of students toting laptops on skateboards. I’ve screwed my courage to the sticking point for ‘Philosophy and Literature’, with readings from Aristotle to Lydia Davis’s radically short story (‘It has been so long since she used a metaphor!’): a course so rife with the stuff of thought that when I scrolled through the online catalogue recently and saw it was being offered again with what looked like a fresh slate of readings I messaged the teaching team – a Proust scholar and a historian of late modern philosophy – to beg permission to repeat. ‘The good news,’ my friend the philosopher shot back with characteristic Californian generosity, ‘is that you are most welcome… the bad news is that the syllabus will be exactly the same. Even the jokes.’

I’ve never fathomed why the ‘autodidact’ in Sartre’s Nausea was conceived as a comic figure. Was it a European thing: there are those born to education and the rest should lose their illusions and do something useful?

My useful task at the moment is translating a collection of poems by the French poet Yves Bonnefoy. In one poem a student sits late at night ‘in an isolated house in the middle of a big garden’ reading Augustine. Nodding off, he dreams he is back in his childhood room, where trains would rumble past the bottom of the garden in the middle of the night. Suddenly – is he dreaming? is he awake? – he is startled by the sound of a pebble tossed against the window; stepping outside he finds a ragged old woman he’s seen before, but can’t place. ‘He knows he has already taken those thin hands / in his, on a table.’

The poem’s late night fireside setting brings Coleridge to mind; searching for the words to make Bonnefoy’s poem shimmer to life in English I raid ‘Frost at Midnight’. I like dipping into Coleridge, Wordsworth and Yeats for words and images to help translate Bonnefoy who has himself translated into French English poets from Shakespeare to Yeats – bringing writers together across time and languages is one of translation’s particular delights. But the importance of the old woman in the poem and her connection to Augustine, if connection there is, remain mysterious to me. The words in their dictionary dress are familiar, but my translation feels thin, lacking in the visceral understanding that comes when one’s experience and the poet’s find a common ground. Perhaps the philosophical concepts underpinning the poem elude me? My knowledge of philosophy is spotty.

Perusing the university course catalogue I discover, what luck, that the Classics Department is offering a seminar on Augustine, and I am welcome to sit in. I request the reading list. Whether it will help me translate Bonnefoy’s poem is unclear, what I do know is that I relish spending an afternoon a week reading Augustine under the tutelage of a specialist.

The class also shows me how thin my knowledge of history is. One evening, reading a biography of Augustine, distracted by the squirrels racing effortlessly up and down redwood trees, I light on the words ‘Sack of Rome’ – an event of which I have only the vaguest notions. Reluctantly – so many books wait to be read! – I set the Confessions aside and take time to gather some moss on the internet. Rome, it turns out, was sacked not just once (Berlusconi rates a mention on Wikipedia’s ‘disambiguation’ page); in Augustine’s day it sent boatloads of Romans fleeing to North Africa. Mass slaughter, refugees… ‘The lamb?’ asks Bonnefoy in a poem, ‘Only ever / the knife and the blood’. Here, at least, is some familiar ground.

An hour slips past. Two. Finally, I retrace my footsteps, linger at the Visigoths who sacked Rome on the 24 August AD 410 – what precision! (‘The barbarians are coming today’, Cavafy wrote). Reading about the death and burial of Alaric, the Visigoth leader, makes me wish I knew more about Alaric.

Everything leads to something else. I am not advancing my quest to understand Bonnefoy’s poem. Or perhaps I am. This kind of amplification and qualification explains how Tristram Shandy took so long to be born. How Liebniz, writing the history of the House of Brunswick, tunnelled deeper and deeper, angering his patrons who only wanted a fairytale… how Proust burrows into his childhood and resurfaces a lifetime later. ‘A dizzying net of divergent, convergent and parallel times’ (Borges, The Garden of Forking Paths).

Bonnefoy’s poem and Augustine recede. In their place, in a cobwebby corner of my mind, I see our long dead neighbour in the south of France. She lived with her unmarried son, our friend P––, in the farmhouse that adjoins my husband’s family’s ancestral homestead. In the evening we’d find her in the kitchen, the hearth over which she had cooked still glowing. She’d be darning. She was proud of her handiwork – thick work socks that were more darn than sock. Now her small bent body, that I never saw out of mourning, diminishes up the stairs. Tomorrow she’ll get on with her darning. I close my computer. Tomorrow I’ll have another go at the holes in my education. And Bonnefoy’s poem.

 

Thursday 7 November 2024

Still sunny in Northern California despite the political news, we are trying not to overthink. In fact, I’m tempted to resort to the language of signs, I mean emojiis.

But this really just to say that The Community of Writers has featured my new collection Apple Thieves in their latest newsletter with a photo, the title poem, which was first published in The New Yorker and the last poem, “Monarch,” a butterfly-shaped calligramme, after Apollinaire whose poems I have translated. If you scroll down about 3 contributions you’ll find Apple Thieves.

Interview in 'The London Magazine'

‘The London Magazine’ has just posted an interview about my new collection; you can read it here.

The book will be launched by Carcanet Press tomorrow at 7pm in the UK. Where I am, in California, it will be 11 am. The wonderful thing about online launches (usually via Zoom) is that the reader can invite her friends from the west coast of North America east across the time zones to Europe and beyond.

Here, right now, it is lunch time, the sun is shining, the occasional cyclist pedals by, shuttling kids around, or heading for the hills. The creek out front of us is dry dry dry, waiting for rain, probably still a few months off. But the nightly chorus of crickets doesn’t mind. A commuter trains whistles past, but not very often at this time of day. I’d like to say the whistle takes me back to the transcontinental trains that whistled through southern Canada when I was a kid, but alas, the line shuttles between only San José and San Francisco.