SARINAGARA
Fiction / History
Paper, $14, 140 pages
978-1-56279-134-6

Fall 2008 Season

2008 Recipient of the
HEMINGWAY TRANSLATION GRANT

"All memories fade away in the end. Then, only dreams are left. And because they are all we have, we confide our life's worries to them."

"A common and ill-informed prejudice says that poetry doesn't mean anything, that it is only words without an object. Or that it is the promise, never fulfilled, of a halt in the constant slippage of words into oblivion.
This prejudice admits no other truth for poetry than emptiness: a single illumination that casts light on the vacuity of time."

The following is from an interview
by Yann Nicol in The Brooklyn Rail.

In Japanese, "Sarinagara" means "and yet." This word is the last word of one of the most famous poems of Japanese literature. When he writes it, Kobayashi Issa has just lost his only child: yes, all is emptiness. But Issa mysteriously adds this last word to his poem, leaving its meaning in suspense.

This enigma is the theme of a narrative that brings together the stories of three Japanese artists across the centuries: Issa, the last great Haiku master of the 18th century, Natsume Soseki, inventor of the Japanese modern novel at the end of the 19th century, and Yamahata Yosuke, who was the first photographer to take pictures of the victims and ruins of Nagasaki in August 1945. These three "dreamed lives" make the substance of a narrative that takes the reader from Paris to Kyoto and from Tokyo to Kobe, and asks the question of how anyone can hope to survive the most heartbreaking experience.

"Surviving is both the test and the enigma." Following the death of his young daughter, the narrator moves to Japan with the project of writing an essay on Japanese literature. There, on the other side of the earth, he experiences a series of incidents that connect him to a recurrent childhood dream and allow him to explore the depth of his own grief through the stories of others. Sarinagara is a poignant meditation on the nature of grief, art, and memory.

Born in Paris in 1962, PHILIPPE FOREST is the author of numerous essays on art and literature and of three novels, all published by Éditions Gallimard: L'Enfant éternel (The Eternal Child, winner of the Prix Femina for a first novel in 1997), Toute la nuit (All Night Long, 1999), and Sarinagara (winner of the Prix Décembre in 2004). He is currently a professor of literature at the University of Nantes, specializing in avant-gardes.

PASCALE TORRACINTA is currently at work on a translation of the French poet Yves Bonnefoy's spiritual autobiography The Country Beyond and a (French) translation of Gloria Kurian Broder's Their Magician and Other Stories. In France, her most recent translation, The Work of the Imagination by Paul Harris, was published in March 2007 by Retz. Her essays, reviews, and translations have appeared in several magazines on both sides of the Atlantic, including The Threepenny Review and Poetry Northwest. She has taught French Literature at the University of Oxford and at the University of Geneva, and, for the last five years, at a high school in Cambridge. She lives in Boston.

Cet ouvrage, publié dans le cadre d'un programme d'aide à la publication, bénéficie du soutien du Ministère des Affaires étrangères et du Service Culturel de l'Ambassade de France aux Etas-Unis.

This work, published as part of a program of aid for publication, received support from the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Cultural Services of the French Embassy in the United States.