Jacques Réda en anglais

Europes by Jacques Réda: amusant de trouver une critique d'une traduction de Jacques Réda (mon cher Jacques Réda) en anglais qui est une excellente introduction à son oeuvre et à son style. Vraiment intéressant.

Although Réda’s style is very literary, he is no snob, and he probably wouldn’t mind being called a tourist. With complete lack of snobbery, he declares that he loves supermarkets “for themselves,” a love only natural for someone who has grown up in poverty (after all, to despise richness is a luxury only the rich can afford). But this confession is immediately followed by an unexpected critical reflection: supermarkets are “counter-museums” or “museums of the instant,” Réda says, “whose instants are accessible, consumable, nearly straightaway consumed but indefinitely renewable . . .”

As a flâneur, Réda is an heir to Baudelaire. As a true Frenchman, he doesn’t simply record what he sees, as American writers usually do, but also analyzes it; yet I wouldn’t say that he writes in the tradition of, say, Sartre, or de Beauvoir (I am thinking of their writings on their travels to the States), whose critical impulse is to seize the unknown in the Other and freeze it through their aphoristic pronouncements. Neither a lover of exotic experiences—Réda prefers to stay in his European milieu rather than look for spicy otherness through some eco-tourist agency—nor a nostalgic ruminator for the good old days, Réda is a lover of trains—that is, of rhythmic movement and chance encounters—of temporary estrangement, and strangely familiar places. The only contemporary writer I can think of who belongs to the same family is John Taylor, an American who lives in France, whose Some Sort of Joy has recently come out in a French translation.