So It Goes E-Book

Nicolas Bouvier

• Herausgeber: Eland Publishing
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Beschreibung

Translated here for the first time into English, this collection of shorter travel writings from the golden pen of Nicolas Bouvier covers journeys undertaken in the 1970s, '80s and '90s. In the Aran Isles in mid-winter, he glories in the extremities of the wind outside while inside, feverish, he is enchanted by local tales which hum like a kettle on the fire. In Xian, he pays homage to the civilised brilliance and understatement of his guide, while in Korea he experiences the unchanging beauty of the Buddhist temple at Haeinsa and is marked forever by his climb of volcanic Halla-San. And the roots of his interminable curiosity and amusement are traced back to his childhood reading, and to the bitter war he conducted at the age of eight to rid himself of his arch-nemesis, Bertha.

Leseprobe

SO IT GOES

Travels in the Aran Isles, Xian and places in between

NICOLAS BOUVIER

Translated by Robyn Marsack

Contents

Title PagePublisher’s ForewordAcknowledgementsEpigraphAran JournalScotland: Travels in the LowlandsIn the Mists of the Whisky IsleXianThe Roads to Halla-San or The Old Shit-Track AgainAn Eight-Year-Old’s WarAbout the AuthorCopyright

Publisher’s Foreword

Only twice have I read a travel book and immediately wanted to speak to the author. The first time it was Ogier de Busbecq’s Turkish Letters, and I was well aware that I would never get through to the sixteenth-century Habsburg ambassador to the court of Suleyman the Magnificent. The second time was when I finished The Way of the World by Nicolas Bouvier in 2006. It didn’t take long to discover that Bouvier had died in 1998, and I entered a period of mourning for this man I had never met.

Despite his brilliance, Bouvier had largely slipped back beneath the Anglophone waves. Tracking down and publishing the works which had been translated – The Way of the World, The Japanese Chronicles and The Scorpion-Fish – allowed me to spend time with his words if nothing else. I tried, and largely failed, to trace the field recordings he had made of music from Zagreb to Tokyo. I looked at the images he had collected from around the world, the photographs he began to take in Japan in the 1960s, the poetry he wrote. I watched, much more than once, the film made about him in 1993, Le hibou et la baleine, and other snippets on the internet. I still long to have met him, and feel quite envious of the translator of these stories, who did.

So It Goes is the final element of Eland’s homage to this exceptional chronicler of the world – a selection of his shorter pieces of travel writing, and an essay on the childhood which catapulted him into the world equipped with such fertile curiosity. It contains all the hallmarks of his particular genius: an acute, painterly eye for the details which escape many others, an ear attuned as much to the qualities of a wind or the soft exhalation of a carthorse as to the nuances of conversation, and a willingness to open himself totally to the experience of a place, even when it threatens to unhinge him.

The title, So It Goes, is a phrase which crops up like a mantra throughout the book. Bouvier borrowed it from Kurt Vonnegut, whose writing he hugely admired. In Slaughterhouse Five (1969), the phrase implies that even faced with the horrific destruction of war, no good will come of shirking the truth. Bouvier is as good as his word.

Rose Baring

London, 2019

Acknowledgements

The publishers and translator acknowledge the following publications, from which quotations have been taken:

Kings, Lords and Commons: Irish Poems from the Seventh Century to the Nineteenth Century, translated with a preface by Frank O’Connor (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1959), for ‘The End of Clonmacnoise’, Anon.; Alcools by Guillaume Apollinaire (Berkeley & LA: University of California Press, 1965) for the quotation from ‘Le Larron’, which is adapted from the translation by Anne Hyde Guest; Collected Poems Vol. 1 by Michael Hartnett (Dublin/Manchester: Raven Arts/Carcanet Press, 1984/5) for the lines from ‘A Small Farm’; Collected Poems by John Montague (Oldcastle: The Gallery Press, 1995) for the lines from ‘Patriotic Suite’: ‘The gloomy images of a provincial Catholicism’.

The translator gratefully acknowledges support from the Royal Literary Fund while working on this translation; Rose Baring’s enthusiasm and editorial skills; the help of Anna Crowe, whose eagle eye and poet’s sensibility were invaluable; the encouragement of Diana Hendry; and suggestions from Andrew Rubens on the last lap.

If you don’t find the ordinary supernatural, what’s the good of carrying on?

Charles-Albert Cingria, La Fourmi Rouge

Aran Journal

Everything red is beautiful

everything new is fair

everything high is lovely

everything common is bitter

everything we lack is prized […]

The Sickbed of Cuchulain

or The Wasting Sickness of Cuchulain

Trinity College MS