Essay on François Augiéras forthcoming in Asymptote

My essay “A Stranger to This Planet,” on the life and work of François Augiéras, will be published in the Fall 2020 issue of Asymptote, the Taiwan-based journal of world literature in translation.

I discovered Augiéras’s work in 2015 at Malvern Books in Austin, Texas, where a slim red book, The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, caught my attention. It was an English translation done by Sue Dyson and published by Pushkin Press in 2001. Although I didn’t have much money then, I always left a bookstore with an item. This was it.

The book enchanted me, and I wanted to read more. I bought two other books of his from Pushkin Press—A Journey to Mount Athos, translated by Dyson and Christopher Moncrieff, and Journey of the Dead, translated by Moncrieff—which were more or less autobiographical. Here was a man whose life was inseparable from his art. He was a Rimbaud who kept writing.

But of course he was wholly original; the unique circumstances of his life—his travels, his loves, his philosophical and spiritual questing—became his literature.

I discovered that Augiéras had written many more books than had been translated into English. I’d been teaching myself French off and on over the years, so I resolved to acquire and translate them.

In 2016, my friend Maxime in Paris directed me to Les Mots à La Bouche, a bookstore in the Marais which specialized in gay literature. (It moved to the 11th arrondissement in February of 2020 due to rising rent.)

It was the best bookstore I’d ever been to—and I’d just visited the equally storied Shakespeare and Company—for there in the corner of the main floor were several more of Augiéras’s works in French. I bought them all, along with two biographies.

Over the next four years I read the remainder of Augiéras’s books, translating them roughly as I went along. It was slow work, to be sure, but well worth it. The last one that I read, ironically, was a memoir of his youth in Vichy France during World War II: An Adolescence in the Age of the Marshal and Multiple Adventures, originally titled A Rimbaud in the Age of the Marshal and then The Trajectory.

“Trajectory,” indeed: an object’s path through curved spacetime, the orbit of a moon or planet. “Planet,” from the Greek for “wanderer" and “wander,” which Augiéras was and did. Reading his work, I traced his trajectory—from Paris to the Périgord, Algeria to Greece, then back to France. In 1969, two years before he died, he was meditating in a crystal cavern outside Domme. Neil Armstrong, meanwhile, was landing on the moon.

A compelling biography can make a great writer seem even greater. The quality of the work matters, certainly, as do the accidents of fate, but a writer whose life becomes legend through the work is likely to be remembered as especially great. One studies a life as much as an œuvre, and one gains a better sense and appreciation of both.

I’m excited for Asymptote to share my essay on Augiéras’s life and work with their readers. Augiéras felt like an outsider, “a stranger to this planet,” and his work is little-known even in France, but he is not without his dedicated admirers. My hope is to shed a bit of well-deserved light on this brilliant writer, so he may inspire others as he has inspired me.

I’m grateful to Writers on Writers editor Ah-reum Han and all at Asymptote for the work they do. If you enjoy world literature in translation—that is, if you enjoy literature—you’ll want to give Asymptote a read. Stay tuned for their Fall 2020 issue.