"Je vis, non j'existe."

I live, not I exist, says Le Clézio. This from the top of France Culture's home page. I think this sentence nicely and profoundly describe Le Clézio's attitude. To say that I exist is way too abstract to be true. I live, in, with, within. I and I live. I have always already been we, with the living and the non-living surrounding me alike. A refreshing pause from a dangerous ego-centrism.

No kidding!

This from AbeBooks' "A year in review":

" Unknown outside France, Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio won the Nobel Prize for Literature."

No hard feelings, but can it be? UNKNOWN OUTSIDE FRANCE? Most of Le Clézio's works are translated into Japanese and well received. And this for over forty years!

And don't imply he's ONLY a French writer... he's avowedly and factually FRANCO-MAURICIAN; so to call him a French writer is but halfway true.

In other languages, too, J.M.G. has been an imposing presence. And to my eyes he's one of the two most important writers, along with Gary Snyder, actively writing.

English-speaking (reading, rather) world, awake.

Finishing the Singing Festival

Yesterday I finished translating La fête chantée, a book on Native American themes by the French writer J.M.G. Le Clézio. Boy, it took me some time to finish this! Le Clézio is one of the few writers whose interest in the Old Way is genuine and serious; whose vision of the world is much determined by his long-time experience of living with a tribe in Panama. The book is full of sympathy toward a world that was destroyed by the conquistadores. The long chapter on the Relacion de Michoacan tells the story of the pre-Columbine society that to our eyes looks like a parallel world displaced in time. I'm hoping the book will be published in January 2005 or so.