Translator's Introduction to Rue Laferrière — Web Exclusive
By Neil Blackadder
Jacques Réda has made something of a specialty of writing about the city—above all, about Paris—from the point of view of an intensely thoughtful flâneur. Réda made his name as a poet in the late 1960s, then in 1977 published his first prose collection, Les Ruines de Paris, in which he led the reader through the city's arrondissements and suburbs via a series of elegiac meditations. Réda has continued to write in a similar vein, in both verse and prose.
In the 2001 collection Accidents de Ia circulation ("Traffic Accidents"), Réda gradually widens his circle of attention from individual Paris streets and neighborhoods to the suburbs, then to provincial towns and finally abroad to cities including Lisbon and Madrid. "Rue Laferrière," from the book's opening section, does not deal at length with that actual street until well into its second half, which is characteristic of Réda's meandering style: often the place named in the title serves primarily as a starting point for the narrator's reflections.
There is for me something archetypally French about the sensibility that informs Réda's writing in this piece—the philosophically disposed precision, the combination of a poet's eye with a surveyor's. This trait presents a challenge for translation. What sounds wittily contemplative in French risks seeming pedantic in English. Yet simplifying the syntax and lowering the register might mean sacrificing too much of the text's flavor. I could have approached "Rue Laferrière" as a prose poem, and allowed myself to depart further from the original in crafting an English version; however, the collection is designated "recits," indicating a certain narrative quality, which I have striven to replicate.
Réda, born in 1929, has published over thirty books of poetry and prose. He is well known and highly regarded, not only for his closely observed and penetrating explorations of the quotidian but also for jazz criticism and as a past chief editor of the Nouvelle Revue Française. In 1993, Réda was awarded the Grand Prix of the Académie Française for a lifetime's work.
Neil Blackadder's translations from German of plays by Maxim Biller, Rebekka Kricheldorf, and Lukas Bärfuss were presented in staged readings in 2006 in New York and Chicago. Other drama and prose he translated from French and German have appeared in Chelsea, Absinthe, and elsewhere. He teaches theater at Knox College.