Au Diable Vauvert is a French publishing house, founded in 2000 in the Camargue in the South of France. Its mission has always been to widen the concept of literary genre and to champion the translation of emerging voices in pop culture. In this essay, Alexander Dickow introduces us to Au Diable Vauvert’s impressive history of translations, as well as discussing his own experience of their writers-in-residency programme.
There I was, translating the inchoate into sentences amongst the black bulls and white horses of the Petite Camargue. Here I was, watching the mosquitos drink my hands dry, admiring the rows of cypress trees and bent grapevines. And then came coronavirus, and I had to find some way back to Blacksburg, Virginia, through the crowded train stations and the petri-dish airports.
But as Magritte wrote (more or less), ceci n’est pas un journal de confinement: no need to dread a deluge of pandemic-inspired prattle (there’s only a trickle of that here), for I intend instead to pay homage to an intrepid publisher, Au Diable Vauvert. The name comes from the identical expression, which in French means something close to “in the middle of nowhere.” Indeed, this house is located in La Laune, a mere cluster of houses ten minutes beyond the town of Vauvert, between Arles and Nîmes. It’s a strange location for a publishing house: a mostly rural and right-wing community where the publishing house’s founder Marion Mazauric’s left-wing intellectual background stands out. But Marion stands out anywhere: she’s a force of nature, which brought her the moniker “The Red Tigress” as a student in the 1970s.
Marion established Au Diable Vauvert in this remote location for good reasons: to represent the publisher’s independence from France’s literary and editorial center in Paris, for starters. But the Gard region around Vauvert is also known for the controversial practice of bull-fighting. Marion is, among other things, an alguazil, who plays something like a policeman’s role in the corrida. One of Au Diable Vauvert’s collections is dedicated to bull-fighting, including books on famous toreros (the word has replaced the archaic term toreador), and Au Diable Vauvert holds an annual Prix Hemingway competition for the best short story about bull-fighting. Marion is a staunch defender of this cultural practice. Au Diable Vauvert’s logo is an impertinent little devil with his zizi mischievously silhouetted between his legs, as if to suggest that this publishing house is willing to put it all out there.
Why celebrate Au Diable Vauvert on Asymptote’s blog? Aside from my gratitude for a residency at the old schoolhouse where the publishing house is located, Au Diable Vauvert is also a worthy champion of translation, having helped bring to France the likes of Irvine Welsh, David Foster Wallace, William Gibson, and Neil Gaiman, among others. They are a publishing house that plays what the French call the role of passeur (crucial, needless to say), ferrying works across the pond into the hands of grateful French readers. Actes Sud, located in Arles, and the other major publishing house in the region, envisages its role in similar terms, but Au Diable Vauvert is newer (twenty years old this year as opposed to forty in 2018 for Actes Sud), and quite often, in my opinion, more daring. I note, for instance, the willingness to resuscitate little-known gems of the past (French, in this case), like Jehan-Rictus’ angry, slang-drenched poems in Les soliloques du pauvre (The Rantings of the Poor Man, 1897; Au Diable Vauvert, 2020), which Au Diable Vauvert claims prefigures the forms and preoccupations of modern-day rap music.
I should situate translation for the Anglophone audience accustomed to its 3 percent portion of production in publishing: according to Marie-Françoise Cachin, one out of six books in France is a translation, around 17 percent of the market. So Au Diable Vauvert is not exceptional in having translations, but rather in the pedigree of the writers they publish, particularly in speculative fiction of all kinds. American and English SFF (science fiction and fantasy) still dominates the genre in France: thankfully, Au Diable Vauvert also supports French speculative fiction, having recently collected in one volume Serge Lehman’s literary monument F.A.U.S.T, a work of very political (French) science fiction. As a point of comparison, American science fiction remains resistant to SF beyond the English language: Cixin Liu’s breakout The Three-Body Problem was the first book in translation to win a Hugo Award—ever. Translations are largely limited to independent houses in the US (see Rachel Cordasco’s blog, Speculative Fiction in Translation). Au Diable Vauvert ought to be a model for all American publishers of speculative fiction (if not in general); publishers should blend literary imports through translation as well as championing their English-language writers.
So, what was I doing at Au Diable Vauvert, besides pestering the publishing house’s employees for bottles of water and the like? The publishing house, or rather its auxiliary association A l’avocat du diable (At the devil’s advocate), runs a modest residency where writers occasionally profit from the site’s isolation. I say modest, because the residency is not widely publicized, and it’s too remote for some tastes. While I was there, writer of romans noirs Christophe Siébert, to whom a newspaper recently granted the lovely moniker “le clochard celeste” (the celestial hobo, if you like), was finishing a book to celebrate the house’s twentieth anniversary, and awaiting the release of his new book, appropriately titled Images de la fin du monde (Images of the End of the World). Alas, the current coronapocalypse has stalled both the anniversary celebrations and the appearance of Christophe’s new novel (which also begins a new cycle of novels that take place in the dark and sinister megalopolis, Mertvecgorod). The book is now slated for May or June. In the meantime, you can still treat yourself to thirty free ebooks from their catalogue.
Of course, I forgot to say what I was doing there. I’d keep it a deep, dark secret, but I’ve been asked specifically to comment on the work I happened to undertake during the residency—which was supposed to last four weeks, through March, but only lasted two—and now I’m at home in quarantine for another two while my family is away in Philadelphia. So in the end I didn’t lose the writing time, even though I’d rather be enjoying the aforementioned bulls, horses, and cypress trees. Anyway, I recently finished translating Alain Damasio’s bestselling (in France, for now) Horde of Counterwind (a translation still seeking a publisher), and have been working my way through his huge new hit novel, Les furtifs—soon to become, I hope, The Furtive, in my translation once again. I was also tackling my own first two novels: the first, Le premier souper (The First Supper), I wrote in French, and spent much of those two weeks at La Laune revising. I just finished a new version (again). The second novel, The Vessel, is in progress and written in English, but I pull out all the stops stylistically—there’s a sprinkling of so-called foreign languages throughout and it’s mostly set in France. Both reside somewhere in the belly of speculative fiction, and I plan on sending The Vessel, eventually, to Au Diable Vauvert (I’m sending the first to La Volte, which publishes Alain Damasio’s work; Le premier souper is dedicated to Alain, who has become a fast friend in the course of translating the massive and complex Horde of Counterwind). I plan on translating Le premier souper into The First Supper, its English-language incarnation, and in fact some of it has been translated already, and is even forthcoming or published. Le premier souper/The First Supper is really more three linked or intertwined novellas on related themes, rather than a novel in the traditional sense, but hopefully, I’ve tied the novellas together in a compelling way that makes it stand on its own as a “novel” (whatever that means).
Writing is solitary work. Christophe gently chided me about adapting somewhat poorly to the isolation of the residency—I bugged him too often for apéritifs in the evening, you see, and he’s got a hint of graphomania, it would seem (all the better for him!). I rather loved the isolation (I just take regular breaks throughout the day, personally). Translation is less solitary: it demands a good editor perhaps even more than authorial work does, and when the translated writer is alive, it demands a great deal of interfacing, when possible. Marion has suggested I translate or help find a translator for one of her current favorite (English-born, but French-raised) fantasy writers in her stable, Patrick Dewdney, who she refers to as “Dickensian” in his approach to fantasy. Word to the wise—though the Dewdney volume still awaits me in my to-read pile.
In any event, however solitary La Laune was, I must prolong and deepen the resources of isolation here in Blacksburg: no fellow resident writes next door; no editorial assistants or accountants to disturb downstairs. Thankfully, Skype and Zoom—and blogs—exist these days to escape occasionally from the lack of toilet paper and the endless bleach wipes. I also have a pile of Au Diable Vauvert books to discover. Here’s hoping you’ll discover them too.
Alexander Dickow is a poet, scholar, and translator who writes in French and English. He is associate professor of French at Virginia Tech, and has been Communications Manager for Asymptote since April 2017. His books include Caramboles, Rhapsodie curieuse, and Appetites. His full-length translation with Sean T. Reynolds of works by Gustave Roud, Air of Solitude followed by Requiem, is now out from Seagull Press.
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