On Discovering and Translating Christian Bobin

(Christian Bobin is a literary phenomenon in France, where his numerous short works can sell as many as 100,000 copies. His books are hard to categorize—Alison Anderson, his English language translator characterizes them as neither fact nor fiction, neither prose nor poetry, but a combination of all four.
Her translation of Bobin's book A Little White Dress is publishing this December. In Wherever I Lie Is Your Bed we'll be publishing an excerpt from his book The Lady In White, devoted to Emily Dickinson.
Here Anderson writes about how she first discovered this author.)
In 1994 I went to the huge book trade fair in Los Angeles, I think it was still called the ABA Convention in those days (now it's Book Expo America). Thousands of stands, millions of books; I was a beginning translator and totally overwhelmed. So it was with some sense of relief and homecoming that I found the stand of the French Publishers' Agency; they were smoking, surreptitiously, and while I waited for them to finish their clopes and condescend to talk to me, I browsed their books: prominently displayed was a small volume, with Gallimard's plain white collection cover, by an author I'd never heard of called Christian Bobin, and who was, it seemed, all the rage. I didn't get the book, but the name stuck.
Some months later I was in France I found a paperback by the same Monsieur Bobin at the Maison de la Presse in a provincial town. The cover was more alluring, but perhaps deceiving: a black and white photograph by Edouard Boubat. I was disappointed when I couldn't get into the book (after all, that promising cover . . .); it seemed odd, neither a short story nor a novel, and yet it was prose: what was the writer getting at? Where were the characters, the plot? Who was this strange narrator?
Fortunately I kept it, and went back to it a few years later, and suddenly it clicked, as things tend to do with experience. Bobin makes no pretence of trying to write like a novelist, or storyteller, or journalist, or memoirist, or anyone else; you have to read him as he is, opening your mind. He is in a category on his own. His writing is closest to poetry, perhaps, in the lyricism, the choice of subject matter, the almost Romantic emphasis on the nobility of solitude, reflection, love. He teaches you to read all over again, to love words.
On every subsequent trip to France I bought up each new book; Bobin's works are short, rarely more than a hundred pages, and he sometimes publishes several a year. I decided I would try to translate some of his short pieces. I sent them out; they came back; people didn't get it. He's not edgy, or trendy, or experimental; he's deeply reflective, almost religious. Maybe people aren't used to thinking about life in a philosophical way, at least not through literature. But while I may not have been doing a good job marketing or pitching Bobin to potential publishers and journals (something which Bobin would abhor, anyway, the whole commercial side of literature), I must have been doing something right in my translation, because in 2004 I was awarded an NEA translation grant for three short volumes, two of which, A Little Party Dress and I Never Dared Hope You Would Come, have finally found a home at Autumn Hill Press and will be published at the end of this year.
La Dame Blanche, an excerpt of which will appear in the upcoming edition of Two Lines, is Bobin's most recent publication in France as of this writing, an imagined biography of Emily Dickinson. They are kindred souls, both living reclusive lives enriched by their ability to focus on the everyday, in a familiar landscape that is, in fact, never the same from one day to the next. Reading Bobin opens one's eyes onto a new way of seeing the world—in fact it may be an old way, a forgotten way, but it becomes fresh beneath his pen, through his words. Something he must share, after all, with the Lady in White from Amherst. Like all his other texts, La Dame Blanche is short, poetic, inventive. He does not so much tell her story as suggest a way of understanding who she was, of seeing her subliminally, intuitively.
Moral of this story for me, at least: let the Frenchman finish smoking his cigarette; you never know what treasure you might discover in the meantime, even if it is only a name, with a certain resonance.