Masters and Servants

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In July 1995, when I was living in a small town in southern New Mexico, I received a letter in my post office box from Guy Davenport. Davenport was sixty-eight; I was twenty-six. He was the most learned literary person I’d ever heard of: author of forty books, MacArthur fellow, poet, fiction writer, critic, the first man to write a doctoral dissertation on James Joyce at Oxford University. I was eking out a living by substitute teaching French at a high school in the sixth-poorest county in America, a school where the majority of my students spoke Spanish as their first language. Ten days beforehand, I had sent Davenport a letter; with it, I included the manuscript of a little book. I came to the little book by chance while studying in Paris in the winter of 1990. For an independent study in translation I was undertaking, I was told to pick an author who hadn’t been translated into English. A twenty-year-old who had no sense of contemporary French writing, I solicited suggestions from my professors. To a one, they came back with the same name: Pierre Michon. They described him as not merely the finest contemporary French writer yet to make his way into English, but the finest living French writer — a fervently held minority opinion, then as now, but not, as I would come to understand, an indefensible one. Of his five books, the criterion by which I selected the little novella I would translate, “Vie de Joseph Roulin,” was, I concede, sophisticated: I picked the shortest one. As it would turn out, it was also arguably the best of them, a story that — following the eighteen months it took me to translate the little novel’s sixty-three pages — I would love enough to spend the next eight years finding an American publisher for it.

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