A Translator's Note by PAUL AUSTER
This is one of the saddest stories I know. If not for a minor miracle that occurred twenty years after the fact, I doubt that I would have been able to summon the courage to tell it.
It begins in 1972. 1 was living in Paris at the time, and because of my friendship with the poet Jacques Dupin (whose work I had translated), I was a faithful reader of L'Ephemere, a literary magazine financed by the Galerie Maeght. Jacques was a member of the editorial board - along with Yves Bonnefoy, Andre du Bouchet, Michel Leiris, and, until his death in 1970, Paul Celan. The magazine came out four times a year, and with a group like that responsible for its contents , the work published in L'Ephemere was always of the highest quality.
The twentieth and final issue appeared in the spring, and among the usual contributions from wellknown poets and writers, there was an essay by an anthropologist named Pierre Clastres, De l 'Un sans le Multiple (Of the One without the Many) . Just seven pages long, it made an immediate and lasting impression on me. Not only was the piece intelligent, provocative, and tightly argued, it was beautifully written . Clastres' prose seemed to combine a poet's temperament with a philosopher 's depth of mind, and I was moved by its directness and humanity, its utter lack of pretension. On the strength of those seven pages, I realized that I had discovered a writer whose work I would be following for a long time to come.
When I asked Jacques who this person was, he explained that Clastres had studied with Claude LeviStrauss, was still under forty, and was considered to be the most promising member of the new generation of anthropologists in France. He had done his field work in the jungles of South America, living among the most primitive stone-age tribes in Paraguay and Venezuela,
and a book about those experiences was about to be published. When Chronique des Indiens Guayaki appeared a short time later, I went out and bought myself a copy.
It is, I believe, nearly impossible not to love this book. The care and patience with which it is written, the incisiveness of its observations, its humour, its intellectual rigour, its compassion - all these qualities reinforce one another to make it an important, memorable work. The Chronicle is not some dry academic st udy of "life among the savages," not some report from an alien world in which the reporter neglects to take his own presence into account. It is the true story of a man's experiences, and it asks nothing but the most essential questions : how is information communicated to an anthropologist, what kinds of transactions take place between one culture and another, under what circumstances might secrets be kept? In delineating this unknown civilization for us, Clastres writes with the cunning of a good novelist. His attention to detail is scrupulous and exacting; his ability to synthesize his thoughts into bold, coherent statements is often breathtaking. He is that rare scholar who does not hesitate to write in the first person, and the result is not just a portrait of the people he is studying, but a portrait of himself.
I moved back to New York in the summer of 1974, and for several years after that I tried to earn my living as a translator. It was a difficult struggle, and most of the time I was barely able to keep my head above water. Because I had to take whatever I could get, I often found myself accepting assignments to work on books that had little or no va lu e. I wanted to translate good books, to be involved in projects that felt worthy, that would do more than just put bread on the table.
BRICK/ 4
