ABSTRACT
By an invigorating coincidence, Guy Goffette’s début in the United States and Jacques Réda’s return to American shores have occurred simultaneously. In France, Goffette (b. 1947) is an increasingly studied poet and Réda (b. 1929) an at once major and still insufficiently understood literary figure; the former, moreover, has acknowledged the latter as one of his early mentors. Two splendid translations— Charlestown Blues for Goffette and Return to Calm for Réda—thus form an engaging duo, reinforced by the poets’ common love for jazz. Goffette’s title speaks for itself, though it essentially puns with Rimbaud’s hometown, Charleville, the subject of thirteen sinewy and sensuous ten-line poems in a section also called “Charlestown Blues”; and Réda, as a longstanding contributor to Jazz Magazine and the author of the scintillating essays of L’Improviste (1990), is a lively “impressionistic or, shall we say, philosophical analyst” of this musical genre, as he describes himself in a witty autobiographical text composed directly in English for Aaron Prevots’ translation of Retour au calm (1989). First rendered at International Book Publishers (Troy, Michigan) by Dorothy Brown Aspinwall ( Récitatif / The Party is Over, 1983), Réda’s writing has subsequently attracted attention in the United Kingdom because of Mark Treharne’s vivid translations of his prose poems ( The Ruins of Paris, Reaktion Books, 1996) and Jennie Feldman’s crafted selection of his early verse ( Treading Lightly, Anvil Press, 2005). And to these has been added a chapbook, from Nova Scotia: Réda’s Thirteen Songs of Dark Love (VVV Editions, 2008), also translated by Prevots, collects concise, sensual, but also sometimes bitter lyrics that perhaps reveal more about the sources of the poet’s work than the reader of his tongue-in-cheek prose and poetry might first suspect. The affirming élan of his oeuvre remains complex.
