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In this cahier Nobel laureate Gao Xingjian publishes for the first time his latest theatrical text, Ballade Nocturne. Originally written in French, it is a ‘woman’s manifesto’ that pursues Gao’s experimentation with artistic forms through a combination of poetry, dance, music, and drama. The play is translated by Claire Conceison, who adds a preface about Gao’s work and her experience of translating it. The text is complemented by five paintings by the author and by a booklet containing the original French version.

40 pages, 5 colour images | 240 x 150mm | Sewn paperback with dust jacket | ISBN 978-0-9558896-9-1 | Publication date: 10 March 2010


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Alison Leslie Gold, known best for her work on Anne Frank and the Holocaust, here for the first time relates a personal memoir, centred on recent losses of loved ones and on various findings that to some extent offset the losses. Starting with her childhood experience of running her primary school ‘lost and found’ depot, she develops, through a series of letters, a meditation on ageing, friendship, and the sort of ‘translation’ required when writing to the dead. Her text is accompanied by 13 paintings from Charlotte Salomon’s masterpiece Leben? oder Teater?

40 pages, 13 colour images | 240 x 150mm | Sewn paperback with dust jacket | ISBN 978-0-9558896-8-4 | Publication date: 9 February 2010


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In this cahier, Vincen Cornu, a Paris-based architect, attempts to ‘translate’ architectural sensation into words and images, in order to convey the inspirations behind his work and the ways in which buildings, and the spaces they create, can offer journeys of imaginative discovery. Writing for the enthusiast rather than for the specialist, he takes the reader back to early theories of architecture, through topics as diverse as skyscrapers, railway tracks, grain barns in Northern Spain designed to deter rodents, and the work of masters in the field such as Álvaro Siza, Hans Scharoun, and Louis Kahn. The text works alongside numerous full-colour drawings and architectural plans to give a glimpse into what architecture might mean to us today.

44 pages, 24 colour images | 240 x 150mm | Sewn paperback with dust jacket | ISBN 978-0-9558896-7-7 | Publication date: 16 December 2009


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In this cahier the novelist, critic, translator, and editor of News from The Republic of Letters Keith Botsford presents the visual and literary work of the Polish painter and intellectual Józef Czapski. Botsford’s imagined brief autobiography of Czapski takes us inside the artist’s turbulent life, signalling the chief events which marked him, as well as the affinities which led to his creative flourishing. This cahier offers a chance either to get to know a neglected thinker or artist, or – for those already familiar with Czapski – a chance to come to know him better. The text is accompanied by 12 full colour reproductions of Czapski’s work.

44 pages, 12 colour images | 240 x 150mm | Sewn paperback with dust jacket | ISBN 978-0-9558896-4-6 | Publication date: 16 April 2009


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Simon Leys, novelist, unflinching cultural and political commentator, Sinologist, and occasional illustrator, presents here timely meditations on the experience and hazards of literary translation. Preceding his essay are observations on everything from demented tyrants to musical geniuses who gain insights from vacuum cleaners. Written with wit and concision, this cahier offers English-language readers a chance to get to know a writer who is renowned for his wisdom and insight as much as he is for his linguistic and literary expertise.

44 pages, 6 images | 240 x 150mm | Sewn paperback with dust jacket | ISBN 978-0-9558896-3-9 | Publication date: 22 November 2008


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This cahier presents new work by the celebrated Irish poet Paul Muldoon. After a preface in which the poet explains what for him is the importance of translating, there follow four original works, “The Windshield”, “Balls” (a five-sonnet sequence), “Quail”, and the title series of poems, “When the Pie Was Opened”. Interspersed with these are the poet’s translations: from the Latin of Ovid, from the Anglo-Saxon, from the Medieval Welsh of Dafydd ap Gwilym, from the Greek of Kostis Palamas, and from the Irish. The cahier is completed by drawings and an etching by the Sicilian artist Lanfranco Quadrio.

44 pages, 6 images | 240 x 150mm | Sewn paperback with dust jacket | ISBN 978-0-9552963-8-3 | Publication date: May 2008


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Four excerpts from Rachel Shihor’s novella Yankinton have been selected, and translated from the Hebrew for this cahier. These poignant and humorous tales are as much about the act of recollection as they are about the remembered Tel Aviv of the 1940s and 195os. In a playful and yet muted style, Shihor tells of the everyday life of a child beginning to grasp her surroundings. Six works by the painter David Hendler further explore the city.

44 pages, 6 images | 240 x 150mm | Sewn paperback with dust jacket | ISBN 978-0-9552963-7-6 | Publication date: February 2008


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Isabella Ducrot is a Roman textile artist and painter, who in this cahier presents reflections on the nature of textile and weaving which arise both from her major textile collection and from her close reading of mythology and art history. Her meditations are illustrated by her own art and are introduced by a specially-written poem by the celebrated Italian poet Patrizia Cavalli.

36 pages, 8 colour images | 240 x 150mm | Sewn paperback with dust jacket | ISBN 978-0-9552963-6-9 | Publication date: February 2008


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The cahier comprises three linked pieces by the translator and short story writer, Lydia Davis. First is ‘A Proust Alphabet’, which gives an account of several words and issues of particular interest, encountered during the author's recent translating of Marcel Proust's Swann's Way. There follows a short article on the French thinker and novelist Maurice Blanchot, entitled ‘The Problem in Summarising Blanchot’. Finally comes a series of dreams and dreamlike moments, recounted in ‘Swimming in Egypt: Dreams while Awake and Asleep'. The text is accompanied by ten tritone photographs by Ornan Rotem.

48 pages, 10 tritone illustrations | 240 x 150mm | Sewn paperback with dust jacket | ISBN 978-0-9552963-5-2 | Publication date: 30 November 2007


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The cahier comprises an introductory preface by Alan Jenkins, and his new translation of "Le Bateau Ivre" by Arthur Rimbaud (reproduced in French original with translation facing), along with two poems of his own which take their bearings from Rimbaud's as well as from images by the painter William Pownall. Two of Pownall's works are reproduced, as well as one drawing by Rimbaud and two by Paul Verlaine.

32 pages, 8 colour illustrations | 240 x 150mm | Sewn paperback with dust jacket | ISBN 978-0-9552963-4-5 | Publication date: 30 November 2007


View flier \| About Jonathan Harvey

This cahier, third in the series produced by the Center for Writers & Translators at the Arts Arena of The American University of Paris, is published to coincide with the Dutch premiere of the newly written opera Wagner Dream, directed by Pierre Audi and produced by De Nederlandse Opera.

The cahier includes an interview with Jonathan Harvey, the composer of Wagner Dream, and Jean-Claude Carrière, the librettist. It contains an essay by Jonathan Harvey on contemporary music and its relation to Buddhist thought and practice. Six photographs are reproduced from the world premiere of Wagner Dream, as well as a detail from Jonathan Harvey’s musical score, and a rare image of an ancient Indian ritual plaque.

40 pages, 8 colour illustrations | 240 x 150mm | Sewn paperback with dust jacket | ISBN 978-0-9552963-3-8 | Publication date: 1 June 2007


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This cahier, the second in the series produced by the Center for Writers & Translators at The American University of Paris, commemorates Muriel Spark by publishing nine short pieces, as well as one photograph, by her. To this it adds a preface by the editor, Dan Gunn, as well as several photographs deriving from his stay with Muriel Spark’s friend Penelope Jardine, during which the selection of texts was made.

Included in Muriel Spark’s texts are: one handwritten note on dream interpretation; one dream, recounted; two poems; an essay on Piero della Francesca and another on hotels; one note on translation; one short story; and several diary entries.

40 pages, 7 colour images | 240 x 150mm | Sewn paperback with dust jacket | ISBN 978-0-9552963-2-1 | Publication date: 17 April 2007


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This cahier, the first in a series, marks the opening of the Center for Writers & Translators at the Arts Arena of The American University of Paris. It also marks the completion by its author Richard Pevear of his translation (done in collaboration with Larissa Volokhonsky) of Tolstoy’s War and Peace, which will be published later in 2007.

Readers will learn here of the intuitions and convictions that have steered the course of one of the most famous translators of our day, as well as of the particular difficulties and rewards of translating Tolstoy’s masterpiece. Also published here for the first time is Richard Pevear’s translation of a long poem by Pushkin (with Russian text facing) as well as drawings by Pushkin himself.

36 pages, 5 monochrome illustrations | 240 x 150mm | Sewn paperback with dust jacket | ISBN 978-0-9552963-1-4 | Publication date: 3 April 2007




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