translating

so i forget why ever one writes blogs one cannot possibly keep up with and do whatever else one does...
as in, substitute "me" or "I " or, preferably, "we" for "one," which so much reminds me of the talk I had to give at the BEA, which is something like the booksellers exhibition association or the equivalent,
and it is because a former very smart student, David Goldfarb, asked me, and it was about editing and translating, both of which I've done something of, and my major detail was about you ("one," ("I," "we," etc.) should, might, have translate(d) the followint

Mon amour.... il
which is , said the poet, Rene Char, Elizabethan usage, and I blundered right in with "he" -- very  very bad idea
and i even tried "it" -- terrible terrible idea
so then I got to "she" which is right, but why not go around it, wiht "my beloved" as my beloved Patricia Terry did,

and which I had done, with Patricia, for Breton's famous
"Union libre", which goes

Ma femme
for which another translator ( who shall be nameless) wanted to put "my woman" or even "my wife"=
both impossible

so we put, of course "my beloved"

well, that's it for translating, and for editing, simiilar ENORMOUSLY exciting things like when editing the Harper Collins World Reader (yes, for my sins) and the publishers hired someone to dumb down all the editing work done by the something like 40 specialists I had chosen to write the prefaces: they were smart and interesting and there went all the advance pay, oh well, you'll say, hey, you had 3 terrific years editing that volume (those volumes) but they SANK because Norton figured out they had to add
the nations they had somehow left out before and try going up against Norton, and you will SINK

but on the other hand, they do distribute Pegasus Books, which so kindly did my Provencal Cooking: savoring the simple life in France, which I loved doing, and because of having such fun, I now did
my (OH CAN WE TALK ABOUT IT AGAIN??) my modern art cookbook out in September with
Reaktion Books (who did my Motherwell with Pen and Brush, and my Picasso and my Dali)
and I get to give talks all over: the Y (oct 22) and the Nat Arts Club (sometime) and in chicago at the MLA and so  on

and for which I translated lots of Cezanne and Picasso recipes, and some Colette and so on..
joy was had by, if not all, then many (lke the Joy of Cooking, which my preface refers to, how not????)

drawing surrealism

At the Morgan, Drawing surrealism is plentiful and fun. Here's a review...

Drawing Surrealism at the Morgan

Mary Ann Caws

How much more powerful to say “drawing surrealism” than something like “surrealist drawings.” It gets the action into the art, which is, often, exactly where it is. Unweighted by color, untrammeled by, oh you know, something like the history of painting and how the surrealists (in whatever grouping you choose to deal or not deal with them) dealt with that  history. Very often, not at all.

Edith Remmington; now there’s one of the surrealist women (so many of them, so interesting in their lives and works and everything else) has this slithering snake advancing toward a jetty with an immense chain moving out along it.” Chains and coils and serpentine lines. These drawings set your mind to snaking.

Some of the drawings call out for narration, and what a delight not to have to supply one!

I very much enjoyed the untitled Miro charcoal and graphite pencil drawing with the ladder and the cascade of drops: this is the kind of work that might make you think it was asking for a narration, but leaves, provoked by its non-spelled out drama, spaces for the imagination.

Among my personal old favorites, the Masson Battle of Fishes of 1926 – this was the first of his sand paintings I ever encountered, and the traces of Blood on the Sand (La Goutte de Sang of 1927) brought into the encounter all sorts of desert films, Ava Gardner pleading about something or other, someone drawing a rapid gun. But I had not seen the Drop of Blood work just above it, so powerful and so rarely seen, since it belongs in a private collection.

About ownership: De Chirico’s very grand drawing of The Poet and the Philosopher in 1913, that made its way into the Minotaure, that glossy magazine of the 30’s,  was owned by André Breton, and Paul Eluard, and finally by Roland Penrose, the English surrealist, once married to Lee Miller, that brilliant and beautiful photographer. Understated, this very lovely drawing.

On the opposite side of understatement, the overdrawing or superposition of  faces in Picabia’s Olga brings back to every surrealist reader those superpositions in  Breton’s Nadja and elsewhere: overstatement, as in the surrealist shout of the manifestos and over-the-top position papers

                                                  

 So much, indeed, of surrealism seems overstatement that this large but subtly conceived exhibition seems just the right touch, slithering toward us.

Should someone ask: so what does the idea of, the practice of surrealist drawing repose on? 

 You could do worse than to answer: try Giacometti’s Surrealist Table: just be sure the

female figure stands there to hold it all together and up: