News
REVIEW: What’s New in Translation: May 2025, Asymptote
By Regan Mies, Aysmptote
On the Havel River, near Berlin, a small ship is hosting an academic conference in the memory of Paul Heudeber, the mathematician and author of The Buchenwald Conjectures—a renowned work of mathematical theory, poetry, and commentary on life in the titular concentration camp. In attendance are his daughter, the math historian Irina Heudeber; her mother and Paul’s partner Maja, a once-prominent socialist activist; and a cast of graduate students and academics at the top of their fields…
Much of The Deserters’ allure is its language—in a virtuosic translation by Charlotte Mandell—but equally compelling is the challenge the novel presents; one can’t help oneself from trying to decipher the relationship between the two plotlines, wondering what revelation from one story shines light on the other…
Read More
REVIEW: ‘Twelve Post-War Tales’ by Graham SwiftPlus ‘The Deserters’ by Mathias Énard and ‘Glass Century’ by Ross Barkan.
By Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal
Graham Swift offers the title of his third collection of short stories, “Twelve Post-War Tales,” in an egalitarian spirit. The characters include ex-soldiers and war orphans but also teachers, miners, maids and other working-class Britons who know of battlefields only from textbooks and newsreels. Even these civilians, suggests Mr. Swift, have been shaped by war’s carnage. Everyone lives in a postwar world…
REVIEW: Survivors of War and Disaster, Seeking Refuge in Math, The New York Times
Mathias Énard’s latest novel, “The Deserters,” conjures its layered melancholy from a pair of interwoven narratives. The first explores the probable suicide of Paul Heudeber, an East German mathematician and Buchenwald survivor, as recounted by his now elderly daughter, Irina. The second follows the perilous desertion of a soldier in a nameless contemporary war. Utterly distinct in form and tone, these braided stories demand a certain vigilance from the reader, an alertness to echo and intuition…
by Dustin Illingworth, The New York Times
Mathias Énard’s latest novel, “The Deserters,” conjures its layered melancholy from a pair of interwoven narratives. The first explores the probable suicide of Paul Heudeber, an East German mathematician and Buchenwald survivor, as recounted by his now elderly daughter, Irina. The second follows the perilous desertion of a soldier in a nameless contemporary war. Utterly distinct in form and tone, these braided stories demand a certain vigilance from the reader, an alertness to echo and intuition…
REVIEW: “Paul Valéry’s strange novella, written during a period of existential crisis,” TLS
The young André Breton was so bowled over by Paul Valéry’s genre-defying novella “La Soirée avec Monsieur Teste” (1896), he learnt it by heart and described it as the poet’s supreme accomplishment. It was written when Valéry had entered a period of existential crisis, soon to be exacerbated by the death of his mentor, Stéphane Mallarmé, which heralded a break from writing poetry that lasted two decades…
By Shaun Whiteside, TLS
The young André Breton was so bowled over by Paul Valéry’s genre-defying novella “La Soirée avec Monsieur Teste” (1896), he learnt it by heart and described it as the poet’s supreme accomplishment. It was written when Valéry had entered a period of existential crisis, soon to be exacerbated by the death of his mentor, Stéphane Mallarmé, which heralded a break from writing poetry that lasted two decades…
INTERVIEW: “A Conversation with Charlotte Mandell,” LA Review of Books
IN THE SPRING of 1919, the poets André Breton and Philippe Soupault began an experimental collaboration that would become a foundational document for surrealism: The Magnetic Fields. One hundred years after its initial publication, The Magnetic Fields feels prescient, and at times unnerving, due to the context of global war and pandemic in which it was written. To celebrate the book’s centennial, NYRB Poets has just published Charlotte Mandell’s new English-languge translation of Breton and Soupault. In translator Mandell’s hands, the text feels as thrilling and as bewildering as ever — and, I would add, remarkably timeless. I spoke with Mandell about the book’s context and the joys and complexities of translating this foundational work of surrealist automatic writing.
by Paul Maziar, LA Review of Books
IN THE SPRING of 1919, the poets André Breton and Philippe Soupault began an experimental collaboration that would become a foundational document for surrealism: The Magnetic Fields. One hundred years after its initial publication, The Magnetic Fields feels prescient, and at times unnerving, due to the context of global war and pandemic in which it was written. To celebrate the book’s centennial, NYRB Poets has just published Charlotte Mandell’s new English-languge translation of Breton and Soupault. In translator Mandell’s hands, the text feels as thrilling and as bewildering as ever — and, I would add, remarkably timeless. I spoke with Mandell about the book’s context and the joys and complexities of translating this foundational work of surrealist automatic writing.
PAUL MAZIAR: The Magnetic Fields came before Dada and Surrealism took hold. Where is this work situated, relative to those movements?
CHARLOTTE MANDELL: The Magnetic Fields seems to have been written at a pivotal period in France, before Dada took hold there in 1920 and before the advent of Surrealism in 1924, with the publication of Breton’s Surrealist Manifesto. Breton’s close friend, Jacques Vaché, was an admirer of Alfred Jarry — a French progenitor of Dada and Surrealism — and introduced his work to Breton. Vaché died of an opium overdose in January 1919; Breton and Soupault began writing The Magnetic Fields soon afterward, using automatic writing as a way to transcend everyday life, a way for Breton to take his mind off his friend’s death. The Magnetic Fields is dedicated to Vaché, and Breton would later go on to mythologize Vaché as a founding force of both Dada and Surrealism in France…
REVIEW: “‘Monsieur Teste’: All in His Head,” Wall Street Journal
“He breaks your spirit with a word,” says Émilie, the wife of the title character of “Monsieur Teste” (a play on tête, or head, in French). He is a man who is all intellect and who divides the world into things that are possible and impossible. The young poet Paul Valéry published the novella in 1896, at a time of intense artistic innovation. Only a few years earlier, Valéry had fallen in with the Symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé and his circle, and was influenced by the great poet’s restless syntax and unconventional language.
by Diane Mehta, Wall Street Journal
“He breaks your spirit with a word,” says Émilie, the wife of the title character of “Monsieur Teste” (a play on tête, or head, in French). He is a man who is all intellect and who divides the world into things that are possible and impossible. The young poet Paul Valéry published the novella in 1896, at a time of intense artistic innovation. Only a few years earlier, Valéry had fallen in with the Symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé and his circle, and was influenced by the great poet’s restless syntax and unconventional language.
“Monsieur Teste” follows its hero on a fully interior quest, driven by the logic of the system he is developing to figure out how his mind operates. The book is composed of nine sections that resemble a cohesive story, but as it unfolds, the paragraphs that are neatly scripted with scenes and dialogue begin to loosen and the text begins to break up. The effect is that of chunks of icebergs floating on the page, surrounded by white space. What are we to make of this? Is it a parody of intellectuals trying to live a life of the mind, or is this the life of the mind itself?
REVIEW: “Our December Book Club Selection: Monsieur Teste by Paul Valéry,” Asymptote
Perhaps for most of us, the idea of a poet still confers an indelible sense of the romantic, with odes and music and beautiful abstractions. For Paul Valéry, however, this association was at best weak, and at worst a diminishment of language’s complex facilities and capacity for precise worldly evaluation, never satisfying the sublimity and intensity that he sought in his writings. Thus, in 1896, he introduced an incarnation of reason and his “infinite desire for clarity” in a character named Edmond Teste, and this alter ego would remain one of the most enduring vehicles of thought throughout Valéry’s life. Now, in our December Book Club selection, Monsieur Teste, we are offered a fascinating collection of writings that track the poet’s evolving mode as he pursues his own consciousness in search of pure intellect and reason, puzzling out the dazzling relationship between language and existence.
by Mia Ruf, Asymptote
Perhaps for most of us, the idea of a poet still confers an indelible sense of the romantic, with odes and music and beautiful abstractions. For Paul Valéry, however, this association was at best weak, and at worst a diminishment of language’s complex facilities and capacity for precise worldly evaluation, never satisfying the sublimity and intensity that he sought in his writings. Thus, in 1896, he introduced an incarnation of reason and his “infinite desire for clarity” in a character named Edmond Teste, and this alter ego would remain one of the most enduring vehicles of thought throughout Valéry’s life. Now, in our December Book Club selection, Monsieur Teste, we are offered a fascinating collection of writings that track the poet’s evolving mode as he pursues his own consciousness in search of pure intellect and reason, puzzling out the dazzling relationship between language and existence. They are the imprints from a modernist icon’s search for self-knowledge…
REVIEW: “In praise of three ‘unimportant’ books,” The Washington Post
To broadly generalize, books can be divided into three sorts. First, there are the established classics, works central to our culture and imagination such as Plato’s dialogues, Shakespeare’s plays and Jane Austen’s novels. Second, there are the books that speak to us at this moment, that are topical, relevant, part of ongoing national and societal conversations. The range here is vast, encompassing current bestsellers, modern children’s literature, contemporary poetry, self-help guides, political tracts and much else. All these works are at least tacitly therapeutic; they aim to help us enjoy, escape from or critique the way we live now.
by Michael Dirda, The Washington Post
To broadly generalize, books can be divided into three sorts. First, there are the established classics, works central to our culture and imagination such as Plato’s dialogues, Shakespeare’s plays and Jane Austen’s novels. Second, there are the books that speak to us at this moment, that are topical, relevant, part of ongoing national and societal conversations. The range here is vast, encompassing current bestsellers, modern children’s literature, contemporary poetry, self-help guides, political tracts and much else. All these works are at least tacitly therapeutic; they aim to help us enjoy, escape from or critique the way we live now.
Finally, there is a third category comprising all those idiosyncratic, half-forgotten or “unimportant” books that simply attract us personally. Seldom canonical, though often old, and of doubtful contemporary pertinence, they chiefly appeal to people who like reading in and of itself. Let me mention three examples, all recently published but quite different…
INTERVIEW: “Charlotte Mandell on Translating Paul Valéry,” Asymptote
The body of work comprising Paul Valéry’s Monsieur Teste manuscripts represents some of his most illuminating and challenging ideas, condensed into an alter ego who could articulate an evolving analysis of poetry’s intellectual mechanisms, multivalent origins, and immovable rationality. In reflecting on the character’s origins, Valéry had pointed to sudden, surging, “strange excesses of self-awareness,” a rousing that stirred newfound doubts and investigations into his chosen craft, and thus a renewed inquisition into the very acts of thinking, imagining, and inventing. Monsieur Teste became then a companion that would walk alongside Valéry for the remainder of the poet’s life, leaving impressions and musings in the stray forms of philosophical texts, brief aphorisms, and fictional letters.
by Mia Ruf, Asymptote
The body of work comprising Paul Valéry’s Monsieur Teste manuscripts represents some of his most illuminating and challenging ideas, condensed into an alter ego who could articulate an evolving analysis of poetry’s intellectual mechanisms, multivalent origins, and immovable rationality. In reflecting on the character’s origins, Valéry had pointed to sudden, surging, “strange excesses of self-awareness,” a rousing that stirred newfound doubts and investigations into his chosen craft, and thus a renewed inquisition into the very acts of thinking, imagining, and inventing. Monsieur Teste became then a companion that would walk alongside Valéry for the remainder of the poet’s life, leaving impressions and musings in the stray forms of philosophical texts, brief aphorisms, and fictional letters.
An encompassing collection of these works are now available in a luminous translation by Charlotte Mandell, which we were proud to present as our December Book Club selection. In this interview, Mandell speaks to us about the challenge of working with Valéry’s occasionally-lyrical, occasionally-bareboned style, and what it means to meet translation as its own form of creation…
REVIEW: “Paul Valéry Would Prefer Not To,” The New Yorker
One way of being a modernist writer is to pay attention to the most saliently modern objects and experiences. So it is that Proust recounts the arresting novelty of a telephone call or an airplane sighting. For T. S. Eliot, the products of industrial capitalism can appear either literally (“a record on the gramophone” in “The Waste Land”) or as a metaphor for inner states, as when he describes the hour of dusk at which “the human engine waits / Like a taxi throbbing waiting.” Sometimes newfangled technology seems to enter into the nature of the writing itself. John Dos Passos’s trilogy, “U.S.A.,” features passages explicitly mimicking newsreels, and even in cases where the evocation of modernity is less self-conscious something similar is often detectable: it’s not just that Hemingway’s heroes shoot a .30-06 or drive an ambulance; we also feel that Hemingway himself writes typewriter prose after an eon of longhand…
by Benjamin Kunkel, The New Yorker
One way of being a modernist writer is to pay attention to the most saliently modern objects and experiences. So it is that Proust recounts the arresting novelty of a telephone call or an airplane sighting. For T. S. Eliot, the products of industrial capitalism can appear either literally (“a record on the gramophone” in “The Waste Land”) or as a metaphor for inner states, as when he describes the hour of dusk at which “the human engine waits / Like a taxi throbbing waiting.” Sometimes newfangled technology seems to enter into the nature of the writing itself. John Dos Passos’s trilogy, “U.S.A.,” features passages explicitly mimicking newsreels, and even in cases where the evocation of modernity is less self-conscious something similar is often detectable: it’s not just that Hemingway’s heroes shoot a .30-06 or drive an ambulance; we also feel that Hemingway himself writes typewriter prose after an eon of longhand…