Catalan Literature At PEN World Voices Festival 2010

Hopper’sNighthawksin My Dreams

April 26-May 2

Program

Thursday, April 29

The Morgan Library& Museum,Gilder Lehrman Hall,225 Madison Avenue

Please call ACF’s reservation line at 212.319.5300 ext. 222or email:reservations@acfny.org

Moderated by Susan Harris, Editorial Director,Words Without Borders

Free and open to the public. No reservations.

Free and open to the public. No reservations.

New York seen from up close and afar, by three great writers who were inextricably attached to the city. Henry James, a

native, left New York early in life and returned to it only late, but the city haunts his work. Edith Wharton is one of the great chroniclers of New York society, high and low. Elizabeth Hardwick, a transplanted Kentuckian, cast her keen eye

Tickets: $15/$10 Morgan and PEN memberswww.smarttix.com or 212.868.4444

1 – 2:30 p.m.This Critical Moment: The Journey — A National Book Critics Circle Conversation

Friday, April 30

5:30 – 6:30 p.m.The Essay

Saturday, May 1

3:30 - 4:30 p.m.Quim Monzó in Conversation withRobert Coover

1 – 2 p.m.The Poetryof Edward Hopper

Have a conversation with leading literary critics about writers at this year’s Festival — including Sherman Alexie, Quim Monzó, Peter Schneider, Martin Solares, Peter Stamm, and Josef Winkler. Who are their influences? How has

Almost all modern essays are written in prose, but works in verse such as Alexander Pope’s An Essay on Criticism and An Essay on Man also contribute to the form’s rich history. Brevity is often a defining principle,

Catalan writer Quim Monzó draws on the rich tradition of surrealism to put a deliberately paranoid sense of menace in the mundane. He has translated Arthur Miller, J.D. Salinger, Dorothy Parker, Ray Bradbury, and the works

The great American painter of solitude comes back to us brilliantly illuminated and transformed by the Catalan poet Ernest Farrés, whose recent Edward Hopper is a collection of poems based on Hopper’s paintings. New York

Austrian Cultural Forum, 11 East 52nd Street

Scandinavia House,58 Park Avenue

Deutches Haus at NYU42 Washington Mews

Scandinavia House,58 Park Avenue

7 – 8:30 p.m. New York Stories

Program

on the life of the city in the latter half of the twentieth century, when it established itself as the intellectual center of American life. Distinguished contemporary novelists and critics Colm Tóibín, Roxana Robinson, and Darryl Pinckney,

who have edited the New York stories of, respectively, James, Wharton, and Hardwick,and the contemporary Catalan writer Quim Monzó who sethis novel in New York, all consider the city and the stories it has inspired.

Participants: Quim Monzó, Darryl Pinckney, Roxanna Robinson and Colm TóibínModerated by Edwin FrankCosponsored by The Morgan Library & Museum and NYRB Classics

their work been received, both here and abroad? Members of the National Book Critics Circle trace the journey these writers have travelled from publication to translation to critical attention. Free, but reservations are required.

but the opposite holds true as well, with examples such as John Locke’s voluminous An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. These writers, all of them accomplished essayists, discuss the form —its great history, its

restraints, freedoms, and challenges. Free and open to the public. No reservations.

of Robert Coover, who joins him today. Sit in on this special discussion about Monzó’s new book, Gasoline, and the things these two acclaimed writers share—their lyrical, visionary imaginations, and fantastic senses of the absurd.

poet Edward Hirsch, who has also written about Hopper, joins Farrés for a conversation about the power of Hopper’s imagery to invoke poetry.

Participants: Eric Banks, Jane Ciabattari, Rigoberto González, and Mary Ann NewmanCosponsored by the Austrian Cultural Forum and the National Book Critics Circle

Participants: Quim Monzó,Peter Schneider, and Jean-Philippe Toussaint

Cosponsored byThe American-Scandinavian Foundation and Words Without Borders

Participants: Robert Coover and Quim Monzó

Cosponsored byDeutsches Haus at NYU

Participants: Ernest Farrés and Edward HirschModerated by Gail Levin

Cosponsored byThe American-Scandinavian Foundation and InstitutRamon Llull

How do You Translate a Painting?

Introduction

A t the beginning of his novel Gasoline, Quim Monzó introduces a dreaming man. The dream is set in the painting Nighthawks, which gradually transforms in every way: the nighthawks’ clothes change, their

coffee cups turn into dripping ice creams, the characters mul-tiply by the dozens, the cityscape transforms –first snow covers the streets, then the late-night bar is moved to a sandy beach… So this novel about the emptiness and meaninglessness of post-modern art begins by inhabiting, dreaming, metamorphosing a universal painting by Edward Hopper.

In the book of poems Edward Hopper, by the Catalan Ernest Farrés, each one of the fifty-one poems draws its title from a painting by the American painter of loneliness. The poet’s premise is radical: “Hopper and I form the same person.” This approach gives the poet great freedom in the framing of each poem, multiplying the distances toward the painting’s scene, the immersions in its landscape, the points of view, and the ways in which the image affects his poetic awareness and gives it voice.

What are the odds that the translations of these two books would be published at almost the same time in the United States, two books by Catalan authors from different generations but which have a point of convergence in the world of Edward Hopper’s paintings? In any case, that was the decision made by the edi-tors and translators. Open Letter has just published Gasoline, by Monzó, after publishing Death in Spring, by Mercè Rodoreda, last year –confirming their commitment to introducing English speakers to the best of Catalan prose, both classic and contem-porary. Monzó’s renowned translator, Mary Ann Newman, the director of The Catalan Center at NYU, will also be participating as a critic in this year’s World Voices Festival.

Farrés’s book was brought out last fall by Graywolf Press and has garnered the Robert Fagles Translation Prize. As Erica Mena noted in her review, it is “one of the more interesting books of poetry to be recently published in English. There are a number of things that make Lawrence Venuti’s translation of Ernest Far-rés’s book of poems in the voice of Edward Hopper unusual. One should be obvious from the previous sentence: a tripled persona in which translator speaks for poet who speaks for painter.”

The conversation between Quim Monzó and Robert Coover in New York will be a continuation of the public conversations they have already had in Barcelona when presenting Coover’s translations in Catalan. Monzó, who is well versed in American literature (as the translator of Arthur Miller, J.D. Salinger, Doro-

thy Parker, and Ray Bradbury, among others), shares Coover’s lyrical, visionary imagination, as well as his fantastic sense of the absurd.

The conversation between Ernest Farrés and Edward Hirsh is also one between two poets that share a similar vision of po-etry –and a link to Hopper’s paintings. Each of them has written about House by the Railroad. Hirsh imagines the building “hav-ing the expression / Of someone being stared at.” Farrés, on the other hand, imagines himself “holding vigil / inside a huge Vic-torian house” and, thus, imagining what life could be if “luck is placed / within my reach.” Being stared at / Holding vigil within: isn’t that tension the very core of poetry?

Catalan authors will once again participate in the PEN World Voices Festival in New York, as they have every year since it be-gan. And this year both writers have recently had their work published in English, at the hand of wonderful translators, and will be appearing in conversation with great American authors in a magnificent display of the hospitality of translation.

Carles TornerHead of the Department of Literature and the HumanitiesInstitut Ramon Llull

The Morgan Library & Museum,Gilder Lehrman Hall, 225 Madison Avenue

Scandinavia House, 58 Park Avenue

Deutches Haus at NYU, 42 Washington Mews

Thursday, April 29

7 – 8:30 p.m. New York Stories

Saturday, May 1

5:30 – 6:30 p.m. The Essay

Friday, April 30

3:30 – 4:30 p.m. Quim Monzóin Conversation with Robert Coover

Quim Monzó( B A R C E Lo N A , 1 9 5 2 )

Quim Monzó has always alternated between writing narrative fiction and articles. He is a frequent contributor to the newspa-per La Vanguardia. He published his first collection of short sto-ries, Whew! He Said, in 1978; his later collections include The Why of It All (1993), Guadalajara (1996) and Three Christmases (2003). In 2004 he put together his shorter narrative fiction in Eighty-six Stories. Gasoline (1983), a novel about the emptiness and non-sense of postmodern art, was published in 1983; and, in 1989 The Enormity of the Tragedy, which plays with the cliché of the character whose days are numbered. His collections of journal-ism include Zzzzzzzz... (1987), All is a Lie (2000) and The Subject of the Subject (2003), the reading of which offers an inimitable look at the past two decades. He has received, among many others, the National Prize of Literature, the Prudenci Bertrana Prize for Novel, and, on more than one occasion, the Crítica Serra d’Or Award. All of his work can be found through Quad-erns Crema and has been translated into more than twenty languages. His most recent novels to be translated into English are The Enormity of the Tragedy (Peter Owen, 2007) and Gasoline (Open Letter, 2010). Guadalajara, a collection of short stories will be published during 2010 (Open Letter).

FurThEr iNFormaTioN: http://www.monzo.info

“A gifted writer, he draws well on the rich tradition of Spanish surrealism to puta deliberately paranoic sense of menace in the apparently mundane everyday and also to sustain the lyrical, visionary quality of his imagination.”

—New York Times

“Quim Monzó is today’s best known writer in Catalan. He is also, no exaggeration, one the world’s great short-story writers. This novel shows all his idiosyncrasyand originality. We have at last gained the opportunity to read (in English) oneof the most original writers of our time.”

—Independent (London)

“To read this novel is to enter a fictional universe created by an author trapped between aversion to and astonishmentat the world in which he has found himself.His almost manic humor is underpinnedby a frighteningly bleak vision of daily life.”

—Times Literary Supplement (London)

all ThE workS iN TraNSlaTioN aT http://www.monzo.info

Latest Works in Translation

English

French

German

hungarian

Portuguese

Spanish

russian

· Guadalaja tr. Peter Bush. To be published by Open Letter in 2010.

· Gasoline [Benzina], tr. Mary Ann Newman. New York: Open Letter, 2010.

· The Enormity of the Tragedy [La magnitud de la tragèdia], tr. P. Bush. London: Peter Owen Publishers, 2007.

· Mille crétins [Mil cretins], tr. E. Raillard. Nimes: Éditions Jacqueline Chambon, 2009.

· Tausend Trottel [Mil cretins], tr. M. Lübcke. Frankfurt: Frankfurter Verlagsanstalt, 2009.

· Minden dolgok miértje [El perquè de tot plegat], tr. M. Pátak. Budapest: Patak Könyvek, 2009.

· Gasolina, tr. M. das Neves. Lisboa: Teorema, 2009.

· Mil cretinos, tr. R. Alapont. Barcelona: Anagrama, 2008.

· [Mil cretins], tr. N. Avrova. Moscow: Atticus Publishing Group, 2009.

Selected Works

· Uf, va dir ell (Quaderns Crema, 1978) [‘Whew! He Said’].· Olivetti, Moulinex, Chaffoteaux et Maury (Quaderns Crema, 1980).· Benzina (Quaderns Crema, 1983) [‘Gasoline’].· L’illa de Maians (Quaderns Crema, 1985) [‘The Island of Maians’].· La magnitud de la tragèdia (Quaderns Crema, 1989)

[‘The Enormity of the Tragedy’].· El perquè de tot plegat (Quaderns Crema, 1993) [‘Why of It All’].· Guadalajara (Quaderns Crema, 1996).· Vuitanta-sis contes (Quaderns Crema, 1999) [‘Eighty-six Stories’].· El millor dels mons (Quaderns Crema, 2001) [‘The Best of All Worlds’].· El tema del tema (Quaderns Crema, 2003) [‘The Subject of the Subject’].· Catorze ciutats comptant-hi Brooklyn (Quaderns Crema, 2004) [‘Fourteen

Cities Counting Brooklyn’].· Mil cretins (Quaderns Crema, 2007) [‘One Thousand Cretins’].

Once again, he feels as if he were asleep and awake at the same time, yet if he concentrates he feels as if he were fast asleep. A fraction of a second later, it dawns on him that perhaps Hildegarda is already awake, up

and about, and (out of boredom) dressed, as he wastes time wondering whether or not he’s awake. Then it all fades to gusts of wind, oranges, bicycles, a tin clown, a man jumping off a skyscraper, a tunnel, and a locomotive leaving a trail of smoke that, upon clearing, takes the shape of a street corner, a cafeteria with people inside. The dream is an exact reproduction of the scene in Nighthawks by Edward Hopper. He is thrilled to be able not only to identify the origin of the images in middream, but also to be aware of doing it, and to remember that he had seen the painting as a little boy, many years before (impossible to calculate how many) at the Art Institute of Chicago. He also realizes that the painting is now appearing in this fantasy because the night before he had seen a reproduction of it in the window of a frame shop, along with two other reproductions of Hopper paintings. He remembers one of them: an office, and a secretary with a prominent ass (wearing a blue dress and glasses, he seems to recall) who is poring over a file cabinet, and a moth-eaten clerk sitting at his desk.

The diner, on the corner of two dark and deserted streets, has picture windows, a sign that reads phillies, and a thin old waiter behind the counter, wearing a white soda jerk’s hat. One woman and two men with wide-brimmed hats are sitting at the bar, drinking, but this doesn’t last long because soon the diner is filling up with people: men identical (in face, hat, and suit) to the man or men already sitting there; and women identical (in face, hairdo, and dress) to the woman already at the counter (but wearing hats, fur stoles draped around their necks, and

GasolineQ u i M M o N z ó

shiny handbags). Outside, in the street, there is a good layer of snow on the ground, and this is perfectly logical, because it’s New Year’s Eve, though in the painting he had seen as a child (and obviously in the reproduction he has seen the night before) there wasn’t a trace of snow. All at once, the people leave the bar and spill out onto the street, laughing. They leave by the dozens, by the hundreds. There are thousands of them, f leeing like insects. No matter how many leave, though, the diner is always full of people having vanilla, strawberry, raspberry, or chocolate milkshakes and crushed ice with a good squirt of blueberry, lemon, or mint syrup. It’s just like that old movie gag in which (by circling out beyond the camera’s range and circling back in again through an offscreen door) an endless stream of people gets out of a tiny car that could barely have seated four.

Of all the crowd, aside from the waiter, two characters always stay behind: the redhead dressed in burgundy and the man eat-ing vanilla ice cream with chocolate syrup drizzled over it—who is he, himself (and he finds it hard to believe he hadn’t recog-nized himself till now)—staring intently at the street where a car flashes by. Bit by bit the sky turns from black to dark blue, lights come on in a few windows; they go out when day breaks definitively, morning arrives implacably, and the diner ceases to be the silvery island it was during the night. The waiter sets up the counter with cups, teaspoons, knives, bread, jam, and butter. Not missing a beat, a stream of hungry office workers hurries into place, pushing and shoving, gulping down watery coffee, milk, toast, and croissants. As he has shifted his attention to the inside of the bar, the outside starts to go dark on him again. This is why, when he tries to light up the street again (at that point in mid-morning when all the office workers have left and the lonely people in the place are the man and the woman, or the woman and the two men, one of whom is he), the surroundings fade: everything goes white, stunningly resplendent, and turns into a beach. Oh, what a delightful sight, Hopper’s diner smack in the middle of a beach with plastic chairs and a string of deso-late awnings, and, in the distance, a backdrop of immobile waves spotted with surfing teenagers. Finally he feels he’s dreaming freely: he resolves to let his imagination flow. The woman in the

burgundy dress is wearing sunglasses, as is the waiter. The other man is and isn’t there, appearing and disappearing. When he takes off his hat (and the shadow that hides his face vanishes), Heribert recognizes himself unmistakably, sweating beyond en-durance in his steaming woolen winter coat.

The dream has been boring him for some time now. He tries to stop it, but he can’t. Now he sees them in bathing suits: himself in shiny black briefs and her in one of those backless skintight suits with two strips of cloth stretching up from the waist in front, covering the breasts and tying around the neck. They are rolling down a flight of stairs and he crashes into a glass door that softly gives. For a fraction of a second, Heribert (about to dive into the water) asks himself if the woman isn’t Helena. Now they are swim-ming, off on their own, surviving the gigantic waves that engulf them. They swim in silence, and when Heribert plunges deeper, he wishes he didn’t ever have to surface again. He seems to stay underwater for hours. When he does surface, she is already on the beach, walking slowly towards the diner. He rushes after her. When he reaches the sand, he steps on a small black cockroach. Hildegarda’s voice (was it Hildegarda, then, and not Helena?) tells him to hurry, to go faster, because she has to leave. Now he’s run-ning, trying not to step on any of the thousands of roaches stream-ing out from under the sand. When he looks up, he tries to sight the cafeteria, but it is nowhere to be found: the beach is a long sliver, absolute and deserted, on which two figures are running: the woman and the other man who is finally there, and he seems to have seized the opportunity to run off with her (which proves that the whole game of appearing and disappearing was just a ruse to seem inconspicuous and then be free to make off with the woman). He thinks: if only I could remember the man’s face... ; if only I had seen his face... ; if only I could start dreaming another dream... He has a premonition that he will never dream again, and he flees through passageways between buildings, silent base-ments, swimming rough waves beating against the ships, going back to a port, to a city square at night, to the diner on the old street, with the woman dressed in burgundy and a man in a dark suit whose hat brim hides his face, wondering whether the figure of a second man will emerge, a shriek, a blow to the chin, the earth splitting open as he laughs, the fall.

A sharp noise awakens him. First he thinks maybe the bottle of champagne has fallen on the floor and shattered, but he slides his foot along until he finds the bottle right where he remembered leaving it: by the side of the bed. Then he figures it must be the shade banging against the windowpanes. Then he opens his eyes and shifts around under the sheets. Maybe it was a cat on the roof, or one of the wicker chairs on the balcony blown over by the wind, or maybe the glass ball has struck the banister. He sits up and touches his head. It hurts. He remembers the window shade again: it must have crashed into the glass, harder than ever before. Or maybe it had been a thief with a mask and a striped jersey who slipped in through the dining room window? Or a hit man with a long, black, shiny getaway car waiting out in front, with the motor running, who has jimmied the door open and is now coming slowly up the stairs, feeling his way along to that very room where he would now kill him? Or maybe it’s Helena herself (Helena would certainly have no need to hire a hit man) who suddenly feels like... ?

He yawns. Yawning makes you sleepy. He closes his eyes tighter. He tries to go back to sleep. He can’t. He lifts his head. He runs a finger along Hildegarda’s shoulder. He kisses her ear. In the half-light he looks at her back, her hips... He squeezes his eyelids shut. He tries to pick up the thread of the dream again, but it eludes him; the more he tries to remember it, the faster it flees. He only remembers the beach... If it were summer, he’d get up and run out to the ocean for a swim. Some people have a tradition of swimming on a certain day in the winter. In Barcelona they swim across the port. On New Year’s Day? The Feast of the Kings? Christmas? He remembers the beach full of spots, like red caviar. All at once, he can make out the counter, the waiter, the woman.

He saw the painting for the first time when he was thirteen, as a father in well-pressed trousers dragged him from one gallery of the museum to the next (until the moment he discovered the painting, after which the hard part was dragging him away from it). Nighthawks had mesmerized him. Many years later,

when a critic averred (in passing in some article) that Hopper was a precursor of the hyperrealists, Heribert read it with surprise. It was a devaluation and, to some extent, an injustice to categorize him (and thus to label, limit, judge him, and store him in formaldehyde) as a mere precursor of the hyperrealists, when in any Hopper there was much more (a web of memory, of desire) than in all that evaporated outpouring of canvases filled with ketchup, French fries, and shiny cars.

He knows full well why he dreamed of it. Because the night before, in the shop window, he looked at it coldly and thought it really wasn’t such a big deal after all, and maybe if he were to come across it now for the first time he wouldn’t find it so exceptional. He yawns again; he decides to shut his eyes, but they are already shut. (...)

Published by Open Letter, 2010 Translated from Catalan by Mary Ann Newman

Robert Coover’s most recent books are Noir, The Adventures of Lucky Pierre: Directors’ Cut, Stepmother, and A Child Again. He is the recipient of the William Faulkner, Brandeis University, Ameri-can Academy of Arts and Letters, National Endowment of the Arts, Rea Lifetime Short Story, Rhode Island Governor’s Arts, Pell, and Clifton Fadiman Awards, as well as Rockefeller, Gug-genheim, Lannan Foundation, and DAAD fellowships. Among other courses, he teaches experimental narrative and literary hypermedia workshops, including “CaveWriting,” a spatial hy-pertext writing workshop in immersive virtual reality. He cre-ated and directs Brown University’s freedom-to-write program, the International Writers Project.

Robert Coover ( C h A R L E s C i T Y , i oWA , 1 9 3 2 )

Friday, April 30

3:30 - 4:30 p.m.Quim Monzó in Conversation with Robert Coover

Deutches Haus at NYU42 Washington Mews

Noir The Star Diner

R o B E R T C o o V E R

Y ou phoned your pal Snark, your inside feed in Blue’s unit, and asked him to meet you at the Star Diner. The Diner doesn’t have a liquor license, but for those in the know, they keep whiskey in the milk dispenser.

Snark is a heavy drinker and usually after five or six mugfuls he starts opening up. The trick is to keep up with him. Waiting for him, you ordered up a bowl of chili, a fresh doughnut and a mug of black coffee. If pressed, you’d have to admit you prefer the cooking in here to the fancy spread at Loui’s. You’d just got paid. You could have two doughnuts. One of them jelly-filled. Another of Snark’s soft spots, you could share it with him. He likes to dip them in his whiskey. You also ordered up several glasses of ice water and put them down as fortification for the night ahead.

When he arrived, you got him jawing about his family, station gossip (Blue was suffering a violent case of redhot hemorrhoids and was making life hell for everyone), tips on the horses, and recent crimes, mostly of the gory sort, Snark’s particular métier. Snark has an unusual family. A pair of Siamese twins for kids and a wife who’s a professional contortionist. She was working up an nightclub act with the twins that Snark said he hoped would be big enough to allow him to retire from the force. When he’s tanked enough, Snark will describe all the positions his wife can get into. Snark himself can’t touch his toes, even with his knees bent.

After a few (it was getting ugly, he was talking about the posi-tions the twins could get into), you told him the widow’s tale and showed him the piece of paper. That’s deep shit, he said, and took another slug from his mug of whiskey. Outside, an old panhandler with long white hair and beard was pressing his bulbous nose against the window, gazing hauntingly in upon your conversation. You’d often seen him out there, he was part of the scenery in his old weathered topcoat and rumpled fedora, unwashed gray-black clothing held togeth-er with frayed sashweight cord. Hunched shoulders, caved-in chest, his limp beard down to his belt, plastic bags full of dust-bin debris, a living piece of the inner city. More or less living. He often had something poetical to say, like I got the city inside me, mister, it’s weighin’ me down and suckin’ up all my brain juice, or I seen a bird today with a broken wing and a cat et it and a car hit the cat. Who is this broad? Snark asked.

Her name? I don’t know. I learned it and then I unlearned it. You tapped your own whiskey mug in explanation. You realized you’d spotted your tie with the chili. Not the first time. It’s why you wear patterned ties. Her husband killed himself. Or was killed.

I think I know the case. He drowned himself. With his feet in concrete.I think it was a shooting.Well, maybe he drowned himself, and then shot himself. Or vice versa. I’m sure it was him.What I need to know, Snark, you said, scraping at your tie, is how do I get to Mister Big? Well, he has a weakness for pedicures. I don’t do toenails. Also toy soldiers. Toy soldiers? Yeah, they tell me his office walls are lined with glass cases full of them. He dresses up and plays out battles on his billiard table. Hmm. Any specialty? Medieval. He digs the Dark Ages.

When Snark left, you bought a doughnut dipped in pink sugar and took it out to the old panhandler. He tipped his crumpled fedora and, staring up at you with watery blue eyes curtained by long strands of dirty white hair, said: They was a woman had a dog that done tricks. The dog got sick and died and the woman got sick and died. Don’t know which come first. But no one remembers the tricks the dog done. Just me. If you ever need to know, mister, just ask me. He put the pink doughnut in one of his plastic bags and shuffled away. Was he going to eat the doughnut? Sell it? Bury it? Where was he going? What else was in his bags? On a hunch, you followed him. What were you thinking? That he might reveal something about the city that you didn’t know. Something that would be a kind of clue. On the principle that opposites attract, you thought, he might even lead you to Mister Big. Why not. Besides, you were restless. You’d slept all day, drunk too much, needed to walk it off. Snark was heavy duty.

The old panhandler’s route was a twisty one down bleak aban-doned streets, ever narrower, darker, and more labyrinthine. A wind was blowing down them, chasing scraps of rag and news-paper, causing signs and hanging lamps to squeal and sway. Sometimes all you could see were the blown newspapers and the panhandler’s long white hair and beard flowing along in the shadows. There seemed no pattern to his wanderings, though he stopped at each trashbin and poked around, so maybe he was making his nightly rounds. Doing his collections, straight-ening up the city, he the only feeble sign of life within it. You’d been trailing along and no longer knew where you were. Didn’t matter. Though you wished you’d remembered to pack heat, you were at home nowhere and anywhere. And there was some-thing about these dark nameless streets going nowhere that resonated with your inner being. The desolation. The bitter-ness. The repugnant underbelly of existence. Well, you’d eaten too fast. The doughnuts and chili hadn’t settled well. As the old fellow stooped over some gutter refuse, you stepped into a doorway, cupped your hands around a struck match, lit up. You smelled something familiar. And then the lights went out.

The city as bellyache. The urban nightmare as an expression of the vile bleak life of the inner organs. The sinister rumblings of the gut. Why we build cities the way we do. Why we love them the way they are even when they’re dirty. Because they’re dirty. Pissed upon, spat upon. Meaningless and deadly. We can relate to that. Here’s a principle: The body is always sick. Even when it’s well, or thinks it is. Cells are eating cells. It’s all about digestion. Or indigestion. What in the city we call corruption. Eaters eating the eaten. Mostly in the tumultuous dark. It’s a nasty fight to the finish and everybody loses. Cities laid out on grids? The grid’s just an overlay. Like graph paper. The city itself, inside, is all roiling loops and curves. Bubbling with a violent emptiness. You have often pondered this, especially after suppers at the Star Diner. You were pondering it that night when some semblance of consciousness returned. Pondering is not the word. Your buffeted mind, its shell sapped, was incapable of pondering. It was more like an imageless dream about pain and the city. Almost imageless. You were being dragged through an old film projector. Your mazy crime-ridden gut was on view somewhere. Your sprocket holes were catching, tearing. Your head was caught in the mechanism. Fade out.

Before you could see anything, you could hear water sloshing lazily against stones like crumpling metal. The dirty spatter of rain, squawk of gulls. You were down at the waterfront. They must have dragged you here. You opened one eye. Everything in shades of gray, slick with rain. Could be twilight. Probably dawn. You were lying on your belly on wet rocks and broken concrete under an old iron bridge down in the docklands at dawn. In the rain. Everything hurt. Head felt cracked open. To rise up on one elbow took an heroic effort, but you were a hero. Your clothes were a mess. But your tie had been laundered.

Captain Blue was sitting on an old truck tire in a police slicker and rain hat, smoking a cigarette. He tossed you the pack. It was your own. One left. You fumbled for matches but they were wet. Blue came over irritably (you were wasting his time) and let you light your cigarette off his, then he sat down again. So what are

you doing down here, dipshit? he asked. They throw you out of your flophouse?

I had a yearning for the bracing seaside air, you said, and felt your pockets.You were lucky, Noir. It wasn’t robbery. When we found you, you still had your bankroll.Oh yeah? Where is it?I shared it out with the guys. Reward for saving your useless fucked-up life.What do you mean, saving my life? What did they do?It’s what they didn’t do. Pretty mean old boys, Noir. Now where did that big roll come from?

Client of mine. At the bottom of an empty pocket, a nearly empty pocket, there was a wrinkled scrap of paper. The name the widow scribbled out for you. You tried to remember that familiar smell you noticed just before they brained you, but your sinuses were clogged now with the odor of dead fish and machine oil.

Don’t bullshit me, scumbag, your clients don’t have that kinda money. What are you up to?

You sighed. Even that hurt. So the sigh was more like a groan. You’d smoked the cigarette down to the point where it was burn-ing your lips, and you badly needed another. You flicked the tiny fagend toward the water where rotting pilings from collapsed wooden docks reared up out of the greasy water like ancient stalagmites, black bones, and said: Collecting for police charity.

I oughta take you over to the station, wiseass, and work you over just for the pleasure of it. But somebody’s already done that for us.Who do you think that was?I don’t know. My guess is you’ve picked up a tail.Is that a guess or inside track? Educated guess, let’s say. Out in the dead black water, pimpled with rain, rusting barges with angular bent-neck cranes sat like

senile old geezers having a mindless bath. You don’t know why you notice such things. You’re a nosy guy, Noir, Blue said, and nosy guys attract the curiosity of other nosy guys.

Crushed beercans. An old shoe. Rusting hubcap. Broken crate slats. Piece of sewer pipe. Bent plastic bottles. Debris of the shore, snuggling in the rocks. Integers. Adding up to nothing. Still, you keep on doing the fucking maths. You staggered to your feet, feeling like shit. Think I’m going to have to change the mattress, you said.

Snark says there’s a woman involved.Yeah, my mother. She misses me. Take me home to her.You’ve got a head wound, numbnuts. You should go to hospital and have it treated, get an X-ray.An X-ray might break it. I’ve got work to do.

Your funeral, chump. I don’t have a free car, he says, but here… He peeled a tenspot off the roll in his pocket. I’m feeling flush. I’ll pay for your cab.

Published by Overlook, 2010

The great American painter of solitude comes back to us brilliantly illuminated and transformed by the Catalan poet Ernest Farrés, whose recent Edward Hopper is a

collection of poems based on Hopper’s paintings.

Scandinavia House58 Park Avenue

Friday, April 30

1 – 2 p.m. The Poetry of Edward hopper

Ernest Farrés( i g u A L A dA , 1 9 6 7 )

Ernest Farrés is a journalist and writer. He works for the cul-tural supplement of La Vanguardia newspaper.He is the author of three volumes of poetry in Catalan: Cla-var-ne una al mall i l’altra a l’enclusa (Hit or Miss, 1996), Mosquits (Mosquitoes, 1998), and Edward Hopper (2006). The latter, recently published in English (Graywolf Press, 2009), constitutes a se-quence of poems based on the pictorial work of this renowned artist, which has garnered various awards, including the Rob-ert Fagles Prize for the best translation of contemporary poetry into English (to the translator Lawrence Venuti, 2008). He has edited a reference anthology for young Catalan poets: 21 poetes del XXI (21 Poets of the 21st Century, 2001).

FurThEr iNFormaTioN:

http://www.interlitq.org/issue5/ernest_farres/bio.php

“The great American painter of solitude comes back to us brilliantly illuminated and transformed by the contemporary Catalan poet Ernest Farrés, who is cannily

—cunningly!—translated by Lawrence Venuti into a sparkling English vernacular.This is a book of unexpected splendors.”

—Erica Mena, Three percent, University of Rochester

“Edward Hopper (Graywolf, 2009) is a complex and striking work of narrative-lyrical poetry, skirting on the epic, that is also one of the more interesting books of poetry to be recently published in English.”

—Independent (London)

“The power of Hopper’s imagery to provoke poetry is manifest in Ernest Farrés’s poems written in Catalan, a once-suppressed language, happily now made accessiblein English translation by Lawrence Venuti. These poems remind us of Hopper’s fear that representational painting was being suppressed by proponents of abstraction during the 1950s, while they reveal why both a Catalan poet and recent Spanish representational painters have sharedin the discovery of Hopper’s work.”

—Gail Levin, Distinguished Professor, The City University of New York

Latest Works in Translation

English · Edward Hopper, tr. Lawrence Venuti. Saint Paul: Graywolf Press, 2009.

Selected Works

· Clavar-ne una al mall i l’altra a l’enclusa (Columna, 1996) [‘Hit or Miss’].

· Mosquits (7 i mig, 1998) [‘Mosquitoes’].· Edward Hopper (Viena, 2006).

Nighthawks, 1942E R N E s T FA R R é s

(It isn’t a classic spot sought by tourists who go cruising for thrills. Nor an establishment where you’ll find celebrities, el-bow on the counter, chatting with a waiter or the owner. Nor a haunt of intellectuals and artists who posture amid drinks and clouds of smoke. Nor a bar with a clientele of fat-cheeked young guys fortifying themselves before pursuing their inter-minable nightly routine. It is simply a modest café, with plate-glass windows behind which a few strays take shelter around midnight while myriad shadows command the streets, a nest of night birds where the occasional noctambulist effloresces. Tonight, for example, we have seated at the counter a slender man in a felt hat wearing a three-piece suit and beside him a skinny woman with neatly combed hair the reddish color of mahogany, sporting a dress that is also a shade of red. You can take it for granted that he desires her, but he is an overly indecisive man.)

MAN: I’ve sure to it written in my eyes.WOMAN: You bet.MAN: Am I really sending out the wrong signals?WOMAN: Fact is, you seem jumpy, in a stew.MAN (taking a deep breath): I had no idea. WOMAN: Let’s drop it.MAN: I’ve hadsome lousy daysand I agonize over everything. WOMAN: If that’s all you can do,try not to think about it.MAN: That sounds just fine, but—WOMAN: What did thinking ever get you?MAN (after a pause): Want something else?WOMAN: I thought you’d never ask.

MAN (resolved, to the waiter): Give us another round.WAITER: Right away.MAN (to the woman): I’ll bet you whatever you wantI can guess what you’re thinking. I read minds too. WOMAN (smiling): You don’t have the faintest idea of what I’m thinking.MAN: It’s a snap because we wear it written in our eyes.I can look in yours and know everything.WOMAN: I don’t give a damn what you say: you can’t know.MAN: OK. I’ll show you if you sit across from me. WOMAN: So what do you suppose I’ve got on my mind?MAN: Your problem is you’ve realizedno one at work is irreplaceable,everything is relative, everything is temporary.WOMAN: How can you be so sure that’s the problem?MAN: Or maybe your problem is you’ve realizednothing in life is irreplaceable?You’ve got me in your sights but you just button up.WOMAN: The rough patches always come back, at work, in life…MAN: I’m thinking this isn’t the best time for you. WOMAN (raising her eyebrows): I don’t want to get into it.Al night I sleep like a top.MAN (realizing): We’ve got to cheer upa little.WOMAN: We’re both very touchy.MAN: Yeah, I’ve picked up on it.WOMAN: And tense and anxious.MAN: We’ve got good reason to be.WOMAN: Work is a problem,and life, more or lessthe same.MAN: That’s for sure.WOMAN: Let’s try not to think about it.MAN: Right. It don’t matter.

Edward Hopper (Graywolf Press, 2009)

(No és el local clàssic sol·licitat pels turistes que van a la caça d’emocions. No és l’establiment on trobareu famosos recol-zats al taulell xerrant amb el cambrer o el propietari. No és el lloc de reunió d’intel·lectuals i artistes que fatxendegen entre copes i núvols de fum. No és el bar amb una clientela formada per joves galtaplens que agafen forces per prosseguir la seva interminable ruta nocturna. Es tracta, simplement, d’un hu-mil cafè amb façanes de vidre rere els quals s’arreceren quatre gats a mitjanit mentre tot de penombres dominen els carrers, un cau d’”aus nocturnes” on els comptats noctàmbuls es flo-reixen. Avui, per exemple, tenim asseguts a la barra un home esprimatxat amb tern i barret de feltre i, amb ell, una dona escardalenca de cabell d’un color de caoba rogenc ben penti-nat que llueix un vestit que també tira a roig. Es pot donar per segur que ell la desitja, però és un home massa indecís.)

HOME: Segurament ho duc escrit als ulls.DONA: Ja ho crec.HOME: De debò que transmeto males vibracions?DONA: El cas és que transmets tensió i malestar.HOME (agafa aire): No en tenia ni idea.DONA: Deixa-ho córrer.HOME: He tingutuns dies impossiblesi pateixo per tot.DONA: Si no pots fer-hi més,mira de no pensar-hi.HOME: Sona molt bé però...DONA: I què en treus, de pensar-hi?HOME (després d’una pausa): Vols prendre res més?DONA: Vinga.

Nighthawks, 1942E R N E s T FA R R é s

HOME (amb resolució al cambrer): Porti’ns una [altra ronda.CAMBRER: De seguida.HOME (a la dona): M’hi jugo el que vulguis que [encertoDONA (fa un somriure): No en tens ni la més [mínima idea del que penso.HOME: És molt fàcil saber-ho perquè ho portem escritals ulls. Miro els teus ulls i sé tot el que penses.DONA: Se me’n fum el que diguis perquè no pots saber-ho.HOME: Prou que puc demostrar-t’ho si te’m poses de cara.DONA: Si es pot saber, quina una se suposa que en porto [de cap?HOME: El teu problema és haver descobertque a la feina no hi ha ningú insubstituïble,que tot és relatiu, que tot és transitori.DONA: Per què estàs tan segur que és aquest, el problema?HOME: O potser el teu problema és haver descobertque a la vida no hi ha ningú insubstituïble? Veig que em guaites i xxxt, solemnement fas mutis.DONA: Els tràngols hi rebroten, a la feina, a la vida...HOME: Em penso que no passes pel teu millor moment.DONA (arqueja les celles): No hi vull entrar. A les nitsdormo amb un son feixuc.HOME (fent-se’n càrrec): Hauríem d’animar-nosuna mica.DONA: Tots dos estem molt susceptibles.HOME: Tal com jo ho veig, n’estem.DONA: I amoïnats i tensos.HOME: Tens tota la raó.DONA: La feina és problemàtica,i la vida, tres quartsdel mateix.HOME: Ben segur.DONA: Mirem de no pensar-hi.HOME: Entesos. No hi fa res.

Edward Hopper, 2006

House by the Railroad, 1925

Fantasiejo que la sort se’m posaa l’abast. Ara bé: hi ha sorts diverses. Hi ha,posem per cas, aquelles que apreixen ad hoci aquelles que es despleguena recules. Hi ha dèficits de sort i superàvitsde sort. D’igual manera, tenim la bona-sort,la sort-del-dia-a-dia, la sort-sense-memòriai la mala-sort, dita també malastrugança.Hi ha sorts que són un peix que es porta l’oli i sortsque són àspids, escórpores, porcs senglars i estornells.Tinc una visió de vies mig cobertesd’herba i rovell llançant-se,com un traç tosc o un tallamb irisacions que agafen per sorpresa,contra un demà sense taló d’Aquil·les.I m’imagino qui-sap-les planuresi serres lliures de la mà de l’homei encara no impermeabilitzadesa la mercè del cerç, l’aiguat o el calor.Però les fantasies no s’aturen aquí.Com l’esqueix d’un record de la vida passada,una altra fantasia que em sotraga la mentés aquella en què em reconec en vetlladins una gran casa victoriana,buida, feréstega, fantasmagòrica,sense delir-me pel que no tindréperò desvinculat del món, suprem exemple del candor primegeni.

Edward Hopper, 2006

E R N E s T FA R R é s

I fantasize that luck is placedwithin my reach. Of course, there’s different kinds.Take the kind that turns up ad hoc, for instance,and the kind that unfoldsbackwards. There are deficits and surplusesof luck. By the same token, we have good luck,everyday luck, luck-you-don’t-remember,and bad luck, a.k.a. misfortune.Luck that puts us on easy street and luckthat’s an asp, a scorpion fish, a wild boar, a starling.I have a vision of train tracks half coveredwith grass and rust, hurling themselves—like a jagged line or a bladewith an iridescence that catches you by surprise—against a tomorrow without an Achilles heel. And I imagine who-knows-what plainsand mountains untouched by human handand still not weatherproofedat the mercy of nor’easters, downpours, and heat.But the fantasies don’t stop here.Like the rip in a memory of a past life,another jolts my mind:I recognize myself holding vigilinside a huge Victorian house,vacant, foreboding, phantasmagorical,without going crazy for what I can’t possessyet cut off from the world, supreme example of original innocence.

Edward Hopper (Graywolf Press, 2009)

House by the Railroad, 1925E R N E s T FA R R é s

Edward Hirsch, a MacArthur Fellow, has published seven books of poems: For the Sleepwalkers (1981), Wild Gratitude (1986) -which won him the National Book Critics Circle Award-, The Night Parade (1989), Earthly Measures (1994), On Love (1998), Lay Back the Darkness (2003), Special Orders (2008), and, most recently, The Living Fire: New and Se-lected Poems (2010). He has also written four prose books, including How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry (1999), a U.S. bestseller, and Poet’s Choice (2006). He is the editor of the series “The Writer’s World” (Trinity University Press), and also edited Theodore Roethke’s Selected Poems (2005), and co-edited The Making of a Sonnet: A Norton An-thology (2008). He is the recepient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award for Literature. He taught in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Hous-ton for seventeen years, and now serves as President of the John Si-mon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.

Edward Hirsch ( C h i CAg o , 1 9 5 0 )

Friday, April 301 – 2 p.m. The Poetry of Edward hopper

Scandinavia House58 Park Avenue

Out here in the exact middle of the day,This strange, gawky house has the expressionOf someone being stared at, someone holdingHis breath underwater, hushed and expectant;

This house is ashamed of itself, ashamedOf its fantastic mansard rooftopAnd its pseudo-Gothic porch, ashamedof its shoulders and large, awkward hands.

But the man behind the easel is relentless.He is as brutal as sunlight, and believesThe house must have done something horribleTo the people who once lived here

Because now it is so desperately empty,It must have done something to the skyBecause the sky, too, is utterly vacantAnd devoid of meaning. There are no

Trees or shrubs anywhere--the houseMust have done something against the earth.All that is present is a single pair of tracksStraightening into the distance. No trains pass.

Edward Hopperand the House by

the Railroad (1925)E d W A R d h i R s C h

Now the stranger returns to this place dailyUntil the house begins to suspectThat the man, too, is desolate, desolateAnd even ashamed. Soon the house starts

To stare frankly at the man. And somehowThe empty white canvas slowly takes onThe expression of someone who is unnerved,Someone holding his breath underwater.

And then one day the man simply disappears.He is a last afternoon shadow movingAcross the tracks, making its wayThrough the vast, darkening fields.

This man will paint other abandoned mansions,And faded cafeteria windows, and poorly letteredStorefronts on the edges of small towns.Always they will have this same expression,

The utterly naked look of someoneBeing stared at, someone American and gawky.Someone who is about to be left aloneAgain, and can no longer stand it.

Wild Gratitude (Knopf, 1986)

gA i L L E V i N is a noted biographer, art historian, and curator of a number of landmark exhibitions. She is Distinguished Professor of Art History, American Studies, and Women’s

Studies at the Graduate Center and Baruch College of the City University of New York. Levin is the author of many books,

including her well-known series of publicationson the American realist painter Edward Hopper, which

culminated in 1995 in a catalogue raisonné (three volumes with a CD-ROM), the definitive Edward Hopper: An Intimate

Biography, and an anthology, The Poetry of Solitude: A Tribute to Edward Hopper, which she edited and introduced. Levin’s book Hopper’s Places (1985), which features her photographs of exact sites Hopper painted, was reissued by University of California

Press in 1998, doubled in scope.

An expanded second edition of the Hopper biography was published in the spring of 2007 by Rizzoli. In July 2007, the Wall Street Journal named this biography one of the five best artists’ biographies of all times. Levin is also the author of Becoming

Judy Chicago: A Biography of the Artist, published in 2007.

Gail Levin

( u N i T E d s TAT E s )

Other participants

M A R Y A N N N E W M A N is the Director of the Catalan Center at New York University’s Center for European and Mediterranean

Studies. She is a translator, editor, and occasional writer on Catalan culture. In addition to Quim Monzó, she has translated

Xavier Rubert de Ventós, Joan Maragall, Josep Carnerand Narcís Comadira, among others.

Other participants

Mary AnnNewman

( u N i T E d s TAT E s )

dA R R Y L P i N C k N E Y is the author of the novel High Cotton,which won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction

and Out There: Mavericks of Black Literature. He is a frequentcontributor to The New York Review of Books and received

the Vursell Award for Distinguished Prose from theAmerican Academy of Arts and Letter in 1994.

DarrylPinckney

( u N i T E d s TAT E s )

R ox A N A R o B i N s o N is the author of four novels, most recently Cost, three collections of short stories, and the

biography Georgia O’Keeffe: A Life. Her work has appeared inThe New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, The Washington Post,

The Wall Street Journal, and Vogue.

Roxana Robinson

( u N i T E d s TAT E s )

P E T E R s C h N E i d E R published his first novel Lenz in 1973.More than twenty other novels, screenplays, and

volumes of essays followed, including Der Mauerspringer(The Wall Jumper), Extreme Mittelage (The German Comedy),

and Paarungen (Couplings). Since 2001, he has been the RothDistinguished Writer-in-Residence at Georgetown University.

PeterSchneider

( g E R M A N Y )

Other participants

C o L M Tó i B í N is the author of six novels including The Blackwater Lightship and The Master, both short-listed for

the Man Booker Prize. His nonfiction includes The Sign of the Cross and Love in a Dark Time. He writes frequently for

such publications as The London Review of Books and The New York Review of Books. His books have been translated into eighteen

languages. Brooklyn won the 2009 Costa Novel Award.

Colm Tóibín

( i R E L A N d )

Other participants

J E A N - P h i L i P P E To u ss A i N T has written seven novels and several films. His work has been compared to the work

of Samuel Beckett, and the films of Jacques Tati and Jim Jarmusch. Running Away was awarded the Prix Médicis in 2005.

He is included in Best European Fiction 2010. His forthcoming books are Self-Portrait Abroad and The Truth About Marie.

Jean-PhilippeToussaint

( F R A N C E / B E Lg i u M )