Pierre MICHON is one of the most important representatives of contemporary French literature. Although his introduction in Japan has only just begun, he already commands a firmly established reputation in France, as attested by the many literary prizes he has received. His career began with a strange work entitled Vies minuscules, published in 1984. At long last, we have managed to bring out its Japanese translation, Small Lives. As its translator, I find myself both stunned by the forty-year gap between the French publication and the Japanese edition, and strangely moved by a peculiar sense of synchronicity.
The original Japanese title is an extremely concise expression that, when considered alongside the intricate themes underlying the story, stands out all the more vividly. In Small Lives, Pierre MICHON modeled his work after the tradition of biographical collections, from Plutarch’s Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans to Marcel Schwob’s Imaginary Lives, while creating a new form that fuses biography, autobiography, and fiction. The small word Récits printed beneath the title discreetly suggests the presence of a novelistic narrator. While the form appears to be a series of life portraits depicting various figures, the narrator’s voice can be heard in the background like an ostinato. The infant in his mother’s arms gradually becomes a man possessed by literary “ambition,” who in turn transforms into the very author of this book. From André Dufourneau, the orphan who fled to Africa, to Antoine Peluchet, who disappeared into a dubious legend, to old Foucault with his unlettered eyes, and finally to the fallen archangel Georges Bandy, these figures summoned to center stage seem, in their strange way of coexisting in presence and absence, like mirror images of the narrator himself.
Everywhere in the work there are “small lives.” In the background stand Fiéfié, bearer of the suspect legend of Antoine; Achille, a teacher who is the very picture of absurdity; Lucette, a girl with vacant eyes; Thomas, the arsonist. Each leaves an equal impression on the reader. When confronted with death, there is no longer any distinction between great and humble, and Pierre MICHON, like a portraitist, clothes them all in the splendid garb of death. The author seeks to seize that border moment when each model’s likeness shows most clearly. It is for this reason that the names of painters such as Greuze, Van Gogh, Velázquez, and Rembrandt are invoked.
In 2003 Pierre MICHON came to Japan and gave a lecture at Waseda University. On that occasion I sat beside him, listening to his readings of Hugo’s “Boaz Endormi” and Villon’s “Ballade des pendus,” and felt something beyond the commonplace description of “literary erudition.” I realized I was witnessing the moment a living body was given to the text.
That same year, I looked for a publisher willing to take on translating Pierre MICHON into Japanese, but things did not go as I had hoped. Nearly twenty years passed before Mr. Ryo Ido of Suiseisha appeared and unexpectedly said, “Would you like to translate Vies minuscules?” Pierre MICHON had returned, like the seasons coming full circle.
MICHON is a formidable author. His penchant for long, breath-like sentences is only the beginning. The countless literary quotations, some obvious and some subtly hidden, make a translator’s work extremely challenging. His language is at times coarse and at times astonishingly refined. I could not shake the question of how to convey to readers the feel of a fabric where right and wrong sides are indistinguishable.
Whenever I faced difficulties, the old saying kyū sureba tsūzu (“where there is crisis, there is breakthrough”) came to mind. This was not only because of the challenges of translation. In the narrator of this book, I thought I saw the figure of someone wrestling to carve out the way to becoming a writer. MICHON wrote most of this book in Paris in the late 1970s. I, too, was living in Paris at the same time, struggling without confidence over a clumsy doctoral dissertation. Now, more than forty years later, seized by the strange sense of time’s disparity and simultaneity overlapping, I find myself thinking anew that the essence of both writing and translation may come down to surviving this solitude and poverty. It is not so much that “where there is crisis, there is breakthrough,” as that “without crisis, there is no breakthrough.”