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Archipelago Books in Brooklyn has announced, in its latest catalog, the forthcoming publication of a new translation by Bill Johnston of a short novel from 1933 by the French writer Roger Martin du Gard. The Mail Carrier is the gender-neutral replacement for the title employed in the previous translation (by the art critic John Russell), which was The Postman. While the new title strikes me as a bit anachronistic in tone for a book set in rural France between the wars, the original French title is actually Vieille France, which literally means "Old France" but carries cultural baggage that doesn't come across in English (compare to our loaded term "Middle America").

As it happens, Vieille France was the first book I ever read from cover to cover in French. I didn't actually know all that much French at the time, but I couldn't find a copy of The Postman, which was out of print, and which seemed the logical next step after reading The Thibaults and Jean Barois in English. I don't have my copy of the French edition anymore, but I remember slowly making my way through with the aid of a dictionary and a pencil to write in the English equivalents of the (many) words I didn't know. As I recall, the novel was pretty slight, but I did make it through to the end (and eventually my French got better). Years later I stumbled across this mass-market edition of The Postman, which attempted to capitalize on the popularity of a certain notorious American novel.


The far classier cover art that Archipelago has come up with includes a hedgehog by Albrecht Dürer. The book has been announced for April 2027. Perhaps there's hope now that someone will undertake a new translation of Les Thibaults, since the existing one, by Stuart Gilbert, is dated and unsatisfactory.

Notebook: Albatross

John Livingston Lowes:

The size of the albatross ... has long been a stone of stumbling to matter-of-fact souls, who protest that Coleridge has strained verisimilitude to the breaking point through his patent misconception of the albatross's size. For he has suspended about a sailor's neck a bird the sweep of whose regal wings was twice a tall man's height, and, in the poem as it originally stood, has fed the Brobdingnagian creature "biscuit worms," as if it had the tastes and the dimensions of a wren... One may admit at once the piquant incongruity of the biscuit worms, which were promptly banished from the poem. As for the rest, Coleridge was intent upon poetic truth, not ornithological fact. But even a poet may be presumed to know that size is a matter of species and age, and the sooty albatross, which is much the smaller bird, might readily enough, as I know from experiment, have been carried suspended from a sailor's neck.

The Road to Xanadu: A Study in the Ways of the Imagination (emphasis added)

I often return to this 1927 study of the making of "Kubla Khan" and "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," though I'm not sure that I've ever read it cover-to-cover. My Vintage Books paperback copy is now in pieces crudely taped together, but I haven't gotten around to replacing it. Lowes is such an engaging and enthusiastic writer (not to mention such an erudite scholar), that one can just open the book anywhere and start reading, as in the passage above, which inescapably creates a mental image of Professor Lowes in some dusty back room in a natural history museum trying on a taxidermied albatross for size.

Notebook: Coleridge's Glosses

Most editions of "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" published today include Coleridge's marginal glosses, which have come to be seen as an intrinsic part of the poem, though they weren't part of the first printed version (in Lyrical Ballads, 1798). Coleridge tinkered with the text of the poem repeatedly over the years, and by the time of its inclusion in his 1817 collection Sibylline Leaves it had acquired a set of notes by the author, presumably intended as exegesis, the form of which, according to John Livingston Lowes, Coleridge may have borrowed from glosses in some of the narratives of exploration that he was fond of reading. Arguably these glosses aren't "necessary" to the appreciation of the Rime, but — reason not the need — they certainly make it richer.

My favorite of these sidenotes is a sentence so lovely it can stand on its own:

In his loneliness and fixedness he yearneth towards the journeying Moon, and the stars that still sojourn, yet still move onward; and every where the blue sky belongs to them, and is their appointed rest, and their native country and their own natural homes, which they enter unannounced, as lords that are certainly expected, and yet there is a silent joy at their arrival.

You can feel the wild onrush of Coleridge's mind here, as he adds clause after clause until the Moon and stars are all but absorbed by the metaphor and the syntax finally comes a bit unmoored at the very end. There is little to prompt any of this in the stanzas it was meant to accompany, which come after the mariner has shot the albatross and the rest of the crew have died:

The moving Moon went up the sky,
And no where did abide:
Softly she was going up,
And a star or two beside --

Her beams bemocked the sultry main,
Like April hoar-frost spread;
But where the ship's huge shadow lay,
The charmed water burnt alway
A still and awful red.

There's no "yearning" in those stanzas, and the simple lines about the Moon and the stars provide little foundation for the elaborate imagery of the gloss, but the Rime is fuller for the addition. The same mind that could conceive — but not "finish" — "Kubla Khan" is here seen moving ever outward, finding more and more connections as it weaves of the universe a fabric that can never be completed.

The Prehistory of the Bear

I've been re-reading Rafi Zabor's great jazz novel The Bear Comes Home again, so out of curiosity I decided to see what I could find out about the original serialization of parts of the book. Zabor was a contributor of reviews and articles to the (now defunct) magazine called Musician, which in its November 1979 issue ran the first installment of his work-in-progress about a talking and jazz-playing ursine. The last installment appeared one year later, at which point a note was appended indicating that "a full novel is intended... and we'll keep you posted." As it turns out, that "full novel" wouldn't appear for another seventeen years.

As it happens, PDFs of most of the serialization are available on the World Radio History website (a few pages of one chapter seem to be missing) and I've made JPEGs of four of the opening pages. It's amusing that the editors used as an illustration a mock-up of a (fictional) article from the Village Voice that is referred to in the text.

Although the novel seems to cover a time period of only a few months or maybe a year or two, the musicologist Tim Storhoff has noted that technologies are described in the final version, published by W. W. Norton in 1997, that either didn't exist in 1979-1980 or hadn't yet become commonplace: compact discs, for example, and laptop computers. (The bear, in the book's first sentence, dances on the sidewalk to "a disco cassette.") In addition, living figures who appear as characters in the opening chapters died during the writing process, notably the drummer Steve McCall, whose death (in 1989) was incorporated into the Norton edition.

Much of the Musician text made it into the final version substantially unchanged, but there is at least one section, involving a talking lion, that was cut (perhaps wisely). I'm electing not to read it, but it's there for the curious.