En lisant, en écrivant – Extrait

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Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Acknowledgments Julien Gracq, born Louis Poirier in 1910, is considered one of the major French writers of the twentieth century. His training in history and geography permeates his fiction and essays. His first novel, Au chateau d’Argol (José Corti 1938), was hailed by André Breton as a true Surrealist novel. It was followed by Un beau ténébreux (1945), Le Rivage des Syrtes (1951), for which Gracq declined the prix Goncourt, and Un balcon en forêt (1958). All have been translated into English, the latter two by the poet Richard Howard. The Belgian director André Delvaux adapted “Le Roi Cophetua” (one of the three short stories that comprise La Presqu’île) into the film Rendez-vous à Bray, which received the Prix Delluc in 1971. His reflections on literature in Préférences, as well as Lettrines (1967 & 1974) and En lisant en écrivant (1980) are penetrating and frequently quoted. Gracq has also published two books of poems, Liberté grande (1947) and Prose pour l’étrangère (1952) and a play, Le Roi pécheur (1948). His latest books, La Forme d’une ville (1985), Autour des sept collines (1988) and Carnets du grand chemin (1992) are evocations of places, at the crossing between memory and description. All published by Corti, his works, in two volumes, are now also part of Gallimard's Bibliothèque de la Pléiade. Lucy R. McNair is a freelance translator and doctoral student in Comparative Literature at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Her translation of The Poor Man's Son, an autobiographical novel by the late Algerian writer Mouloud Feraoun, was published this year by the University Press of Virginia. Alyson Waters teaches in the French Department at Yale University and is the Managing Editor of Yale French Studies. She was awarded an NEA Translation Fellowship in 2004 to translate Vassilis Alexakis's novel Les mots etrangers, which will be published in 2006 as Foreign Words by Autumn Hill Books. She lives in Brooklyn, New York, with her husband and daughter.