Unlocked Doors & Inner Rewards: Homage to Paul Auster (1947-2024)
by Samuel E. Martin
It’s easy to picture Auster taking Joubert’s writing lessons to heart as a young translator still honing an individual style.
Monday, February 3, was Paul Auster’s birthday. He would have been seventy-eight had cancer not claimed his life at the end of April last year. For much of his career, his reputation as a major contemporary writer was doubtless more prominent in Europe than in the US; my sense – and certainly my hope – is that in his later years he had begun to receive his due recognition on these shores, too. I say “due recognition” in earnest, though I should probably state for the record that I haven’t (yet) read any of Paul Auster’s novels. My second-hand opinion is based, trustingly, on the esteem in which I know critics and readers hold them. I do, however, have a first-hand readerly opinion of Paul Auster the translator which is inseparable from my regard for Paul Auster the man, for reasons that I’d like to take his recent birthday as an opportunity to recall.
In the late spring of 2015, a flailing graduate student with a growing passion for literary translation but no notion of how to make my way in that world, I managed to secure departmental funds for a week-long “research trip” to Paris. There, I wrangled an introduction to the philosopher Georges Didi-Huberman, and with “awkward reverence” (in Philip Larkin’s wonderful phrase), I presented him with a draft translation of one of his short books, which I’d been laboring over at the expense of my officially sanctioned research. If Georges was at all taken aback, he more than returned the favor by telling me that my gesture put him in mind of a young Paul Auster, who had come to Paris with literary ambitions several decades before and used his translations rather like letters of introduction to the French poets he admired. While I understood that the parallel had everything to do with superficial circumstance and nothing to do either with my prospects or with my translation itself (which Georges hadn’t yet read), it was still a lot to absorb. I already knew and loved the story of the poet Jacques Dupin taking a twenty-four-year-old Auster under his wing in Paris in the early 1970s, beginning a strong friendship between the pair which lasted until Dupin’s death in 2012. My surprise was complete when, at the end of our conversation, Georges handed me a sheet of paper with Paul Auster’s address on it and urged me to contact him for advice.
It took me several weeks to work up the gumption, during which time I read Winter Journal, Auster’s raw, riveting memoir written in the second person. Sometime in July, I sent a few pages of miscellaneous translations to the address Georges had given me, along with a letter explaining my situation and saying how much Winter Journal had moved me. I included my email address on the off chance. Sure enough, on a morning in mid-August a message popped up in my inbox labeled “From Paul Auster,” forwarded from his publicist. It was a brief note, gracious and candid. After thanking me for my translations, Auster cut straight to the chase: his own efforts to earn his crust as a translator forty years earlier had led to poverty and depression, he said, and I should harbor no illusions about the publishing industry. He nonetheless offered a couple of practical tips about how I might try to get my foot in an editor’s door. “You’re putting yourself on a rough road,” he concluded, “and yet the inner rewards can be immense.” He signed off, “Yours in struggle.” Coming from an author who had long since scaled the ladder of literary success, it was an extraordinary message of solidarity to someone starting out on the lowest rungs.
Two and a half years went by before I encountered Paul Auster in person. In February 2018 he visited the Penn campus to lead an undergraduate workshop and give a reading from his recently published novel 4321. The reading, which I attended, was followed by a Q&A session with the audience. It was hardly the moment to out myself and remind Auster of our correspondence, but in response to a question from the floor, he described his mental fiction-writing process as a move from the first to the third person, so I followed up by asking him whether he thought of translation in the same way. He began by describing translation, particularly of poetry, as a worthy form of literary apprenticeship, before reaching for his copy of 4321 to give us a sample. One of the book’s characters spends his time translating French poems, Auster explained, and at one point he sends a woman “The Pretty Redhead” by Guillaume Apollinaire when he can’t bring himself to write her a letter. The translation of the poem contained in the novel was Auster’s own; he had spent two years fine-tuning it. “There were already a few other versions by English-language poets. Some are pretty good,” he said. “I wanted to make one that was really good.”
Then he read the poem. “La Jolie rousse” is neither technically flashy nor difficult to construe; its impact relies in large part on the simple accumulative logic that characterizes some of Apollinaire’s best-known work. Auster read his translation superbly, with a conviction and a warmth of feeling that were irresistible. In the recording of the event, you can hear the moderator’s awed chuckle into the microphone: “Wow!” Despite the thrill, part of my brain whispered with regret that my question had gone unanswered in its specifics. Not until long afterward did the full aptness of Apollinaire’s poem dawn on me. It wasn’t just that the translation is filtered through a fictional character in 4321; it was also that by reading the poem in reply to my question, Auster had effectively used it in much the same way that Archie uses it in the novel, namely, as a way of conveying something vital with different words – which is what good translation comes down to, after all.
Paul Auster’s death on April 30, 2024 came less than a week before the two hundredth anniversary of the death of one of the French authors he had translated with such devotion. Joseph Joubert (1754-1824) may look at first like an outlier next to Apollinaire, Jacques Dupin, and Auster’s other cherished poets of the twentieth century, yet his affinity with them runs deep. A prolific writer of notebooks and fragments that he never sought to publish, Joubert has maintained a quiet but ardent following among readers (many of them poets, in effect) who are drawn to the beauty of his thought and the delicate poise of his style. Auster’s translated selection of The Notebooks of Joseph Joubert made little dent in the Anglophone literary sphere when it first appeared in 1983; it fared better when reissued by NYRB Classics in 2005, though I suspect that was at least in part due to the translator’s own celebrity, which by then was well established. It’s easy to picture Auster taking Joubert’s writing lessons to heart as a young translator still honing an individual style: “I have to grind my sentences; and that is the most difficult thing” (98). This is Joubert speaking, but it is also Auster speaking through him, the same meticulous craftsman who, decades later, would write “Yours in struggle” to an eager novice.
The craft of The Notebooks of Joseph Joubert lies just as much in the choice and combination of notebook entries as in the phrasing of each sentence. There are clear risks involved in assembling a writer’s fragments that simultaneously fantasize and defy the existence of his ideal book. One particular fragment stands out in this regard:
I would like thoughts to follow one another in a book like stars in the sky, with order, with harmony, but effortlessly and at intervals, without touching, without mingling; and nevertheless not without finding their place, harmonizing, arranging themselves. Yes, I would like them to move without interfering with one another, in such a way that each could survive independently. No overstrict cohesion; but no incoherence either; the lightest is monstrous. (64-65)
Rereading this passage, I’m both swayed by Joubert’s vision and struck by Auster’s boldness in including it in the first place. Perhaps it didn’t feel bold at the time; perhaps, on the contrary, Auster was so dazzled by the starry book of Joubert’s description that he simply felt unable not to present it to his readers in turn. Yet either way, doesn’t it seem to set an impossibly high standard for the actual book that is The Notebooks of Joseph Joubert?
Because there are imperfections, of course. In another translated fragment on the very same page (but who’s to say this placement isn’t strategic on Auster’s part?) Joubert reminds us: “The mind of every author has its faults” (64); likewise the work of every translator. When I began comparing Auster’s English sentences to the French sentences in my edition of Joubert’s Carnets, idly at first but then with greater scrutiny, I was a bit surprised to see how often the translation strays from the sense of the source text. Some French grammatical constructions, such as the restrictive negation ne … que, go unheeded on more than one occasion, resulting each time in a reversal of Joubert’s logic. Hence, one translated fragment reads, “When you no longer love what is beautiful, you can no longer write” (151), whereas Joubert’s actual proposition is that you can no longer write when you only love what is beautiful. Auster is similarly tripped up several times by false friends, those notorious word pairs across languages that look like they ought to mean the same thing but don’t. These are “light incoherences” (some, no doubt, lighter than others); does that necessarily make them “monstrous”?
In the translation course that I’m teaching this semester, my students and I are reading Kate Briggs’s essay This Little Art, which, as many Hopscotch readers will recall, makes a mantra of Helen Lowe-Porter’s entreaty that readers of a translation “look to the whole” – in other words, that they judge a translation on its overall cohesion and legibility, rather than dismissing it on the grounds that the translator has often erred. Briggs bases her account on her own experience of translating Roland Barthes’s lecture course The Preparation of the Novel, a course spent hypothesizing the novel that Barthes would never actually produce. Paul Auster, meanwhile, describes Joseph Joubert in almost identical terms, as “a writer who spent his whole life preparing himself for a work that never came to be written” (ix). The Notebooks of Joseph Joubert thus represents an intriguing test case for Helen Lowe-Porter’s readerly counsel. “Look to the whole” is well and good for a novel, a story, even a lecture course; I wonder, though, if it can hold up for a posthumous selection of fragments whose whole point is that “each could survive independently”…
In the end, I think I’m prepared to assert that the Notebooks’ very selectedness should make a difference, or at least that it makes a difference to me. Regardless of the translation’s inaccuracies, I don’t want to lose sight of the fact that Auster, unbidden, handpicked each entry amid hundreds of other possibilities; every fragment, every (mis)translated pensée, then became a thought that he weighed in his mind. Joseph Joubert believed that you can no longer write when you only love what is beautiful, and I’m fascinated and grateful to know it – but I’m equally fascinated and grateful to know that whether or not Paul Auster believed you can no longer write when you no longer love what is beautiful, he believed that Joubert believed it and that the thought was worthy of our consideration.
As for false friends, Auster shows us a Joubert who was clearly nothing of the kind. The very first fragment chosen by Auster for the Notebooks sets the same exacting standard for friendship that Joubert held for his writing:
The only way to have friends is to throw everything out the window, to keep your door unlocked, and never to know where you will be sleeping at night.
You will tell me there are few people mad enough to act like this. Well then, they shouldn’t complain about not having any friends. They don’t want any. (3)
I think again of Jacques Dupin unhesitatingly giving food, lodging, funds, and friendship to a penniless twenty-four-year-old American writer in Paris in 1971; I think of that same writer offering friendly advice and support to a budding translator in 2015. I think of Paul Auster in 1983, intent on sharing with Anglophone readers his love of the writings of Joseph Joubert – and I think of a translated fragment that Auster’s wife, Siri Hustvedt, shared with her Instagram followers in May 2024, a week after her husband’s death: “One must die lovable (if one can)” (150).
Originally published on Hopscotch Translation
Tuesday, February 11, 2025
Samuel Martin teaches French at the University of Pennsylvania. He has translated works by several contemporary writers including Jean-Christophe Bailly and Georges Didi-Huberman; his translation of Didi-Huberman’s Bark was a co-winner of the French-American Foundation Translation Prize and was longlisted for the PEN Translation Prize.
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