These days I'm working on--among other projects--translating another book by Véronique Pittolo from French into English: this time her riff of the Helen of Troy myth! It's a gorgeous, brilliant, funny, poignant exploration and explosion of the story we all know, at once critical and creative--and it was performed (more than once) in France. The opening pages are forthcoming in Fence, and I'm working more steadily and at a better speed than I ever have before--with a translation, I mean (they usually take me...let's just say a long long long time). I'm going to post the author's bio here, and this post is to keep me on track--and to encourage anyone looking out for a really cool translation to reach out.
Born in Douai in 1960, and currently living and working in Paris, Véronique Pittolo won the Grand prix de la littérature de la SGDL (Société des gens de lettres) in 2004 and is the author of sixteen books in several different genres. Images inspire and shape Pittolo's writing: her work comes out of art history and contemporary art[1], as well as cinema and television, but her imagination owes as much to Flaubert, Nerval, and Virginia Woolf as it does to the dreamy figures of Piero della Francesca and the sequence shots of Alfred Hitchcock. The fragmentation of narrative in Godard's work is also an important influence, leading Pittolo to develop an aesthetic based in Montage, where the effects of rupture and juxtaposition are used to create hybrid works which straddle the line between critical essay, memoir, poetry, and poetic prose. As she absorbs characters from fairy tales, mythology, cinema, and French history, Pittolo interrogates the reverberating effect of heroic constructs on our lives, blurring the line between collective memory and personal memories. Hero (translated by Laura Mullen and published by Black Square in 2018) works deep into the familiar elements of male heroism inherited from 1970s American TV series, as imagined through film noir cliches and the self-portraits of Cindy Sherman (Film Stills). The book mixes creative impulses with critical, and each character embodies situations of success, failure, seduction, and suspense, as commentary alternates with scenes of tense encounters. In Helen: a User's Guide, the author examines representations of the feminine through stereotypes, to expose the constrictions of gender roles and the strategies of the couple, ancient, modern, and almost universal.[2][3] Casanova, her most recent work, is an unconventional biography that revisits the legacy of the famous libertine, who is—in the poet's vision—trapped by the sexual clichés cinema perpetuates.
[1] The author has worked as a critic for Beaux Arts Magazine, Art Press, and Photographie Magazine.
[2] Characters from literature, cinema, and art form a reservoir Pittolo revisits in her hybrid poetic and political fiction: Revolution in Your Pocket reveals the dysfunctions of our social democracies through the legacy of the French Revolution, while in her novel, At the Pool with Norbert, the confidant male character attends (in the era of #MeToo and social media) to the words of a female narrator who questions the contemporary transformation of romantic and sexual bonds.
[3] Helen... was performed in April of 2010 at Théâtre du Fil de l'eau, Pantin: https://dispotheque.org/fr/helene-mode-demploi