Louis Ferdinand Celine
So, I finished Tripping on the Real - the manuscript I have been working on since the Covid lockdown began. The situation has been so unprecedented that it caught hold of my imagination and I wanted to dedicate myself completely to a suitable poetic response which involved a re-engagement on my part with French literature and the French language.
Some of you who know me and who have been reading some of the posts on this blog will be aware of my translations / transversions of contemporary French poets Yan Kouton and Christophe Bregaint, for example, as well as my transversions of Baudelaire and of course my continued research on Beckett, in particular with his last novel Comment c'est/How It Is.
Well, all of these obsessions converged during the last three months and went into the process of the composition of Tripping on the Real. The text I am going to post here, or at least the link to it, was my first attempt to write a sustained narrative of over 1000 words in French, which I then translated into English. So, in its current form it works like a prose poem, which I am pretty happy with.
Just a short note on the actual composition. Beckett is famous, of course, for changing over from writing in English to French and has provoked much discussion on the reasons why. He explained rather clearly himself that the reason he made the switch was so that he had more of a handle on the plasticity of the medium - the words - and while I was writing this text myself I totally understood what he meant-means. I had Celine in my ear, also. Beckett was hugely influenced by Celine's style, he read Le Voyage on numerous occasions when it came out and any cursory reading of novels like Molloy for example will easily show the effects of these readings. That wonderfully sounding natural voice, 'sweet and sixty, or words to that effect, 'that's the style!'
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