Ywn join Celine and his cat in a series of comedic misadventures across Nazi-occupied Europe

he's lying, it's an interesting bit of memoir writing, and Nord afterwards is much better. I wouldn't recommend either to people who can't read him in the original though

>I wouldn't recommend either to people who can't read him in the original though
you mean in the French? I almost feel a little goofy when I consider that Celine might be one of my favorite authors when his style is apparently watered down in translation. Maybe I just need to learn French.

>I wouldn't recommend either to people who can't read him in the original though

It's really not bad translated into English. Frogs need to get over themselves.

Shit! Piss! Fuck!...stupid cunt!

It translates fine.

t. bilingual patrician

Vonnegut in his intro to Rigadoon actually says that the English translations of Celine have a better chance of standing the test of time due to the more longstanding crudities of the English language. Some frogs can correct me if I'm wrong, but I've heard that Journey really doesn't read like modern French at all due to the slang.

There is a lot of slang, but I don't think it's really hard (for modern french) to understand nor do I think he's anything remotely close to being untranslateable.

French Celine fan-boys tend to be fakes. Sarkozy's favorite writer is Celine. Really makes you think.

>Celine and HP Lovecraft will never meet and write the ultimate WW2 horror story

They could've raced their kitties

Some of it is old all right. Then again very little slang, whether still in use or not, would sound like modern french to those expected to read and comment on Celine today. Those people would reduce modern french slang to the arab strain spoken in the suburbs. Not entirely wrong, in their defense. That's just one of the ways his flavor is lost in english. His artificial syntax doesn't translate at all either.

>That's just one of the ways his flavor is lost in english. His artificial syntax doesn't translate at all either.

Well I've read him in french and English (Mannheim) and he did a great job translating. And like I said, the people who claim Celine is untranslatable are usually just bobos (bourgeois yuppies). Basically everything Celine hated.

I'm sure Sarkozy would say Celine is untranslatable.

You've compared your opposition to an ugly little man, guess I'm convinced now

What was his problem? Why did he have so much hate in him?

Also, does Journey to the end of the Night get better or worse? I've read half to when he return to France, but kinda lost interest. So fucking rambly.

Wtf I love Celine now

French existentialist fiction is the one thing that I will concede to the Right. Drieu La Rochelle, Celine and Genet were much better than Camus and Sartre.

Wasn't Genet a big homo that hung out with Foucault and crew?

What's your problem? Why do you have so much good in you to have a problem with someone else's hate?

>homos haven't played a huge part in right wing history
Anyway no Genet did not associate with Foucault and he was certainly not of their opinion milieu.

I'm getting this all from wikipedia, so feel free to correct me if it's all Jewish tricks, but he doesn't sound particularly right wing.

>From the late 1960s, starting with an homage to Daniel Cohn-Bendit after the events of May 1968, Genet became politically active. He participated in demonstrations drawing attention to the living conditions of immigrants in France. In 1970, the Black Panthers invited him to the USA, where he stayed for three months giving lectures, attended the trial of their leader, Huey Newton, and published articles in their journals. Later the same year he spent six months in Palestinian refugee camps, secretly meeting Yasser Arafat near Amman. Profoundly moved by his experiences in the USA and Jordan, Genet wrote a final lengthy memoir about his experiences, Prisoner of Love, which would be published posthumously.

>Genet also supported Angela Davis and George Jackson, as well as Michel Foucault and Daniel Defert's Prison Information Group. He worked with Foucault and Sartre to protest police brutality against Algerians in Paris, a problem persisting since the Algerian War of Independence, when beaten bodies were to be found floating in the Seine. Genet expresses his solidarity with the Red Army Faction (RAF) of Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof, in the article "Violence et brutalité", published in Le Monde, 1977.

WWI fucked his shit up. But a lot of the hate is stylistic I think. Like Celine troll-mode on when he writes and then he turns troll-mode off and is a doctor helping poor people and saving cats n shiet.

Is Gilles any good?

I love Celine. He was nice to cats and he helped poor women. I love how much he hated everyone and yet did more good than evil. OK, well, according to him. He was such a stinky Frenchman (or should I say Vranchman) and so funny and cute. I want to cuddle him all day and listen to him say crabby things about the neighbors.

I will read him someday but when I started with Journey... I found it to be rather predictable. I liked the lethargic sentiment and watching the 'plowing' of the fields he witnessed with stupor but it felt predictable from this distance. He did seem like an excellent writer, it's just that I found some other WW1 books, like Storm of Steel, more enticing (because the author there is an authentic undiagnosed psychopath).

classic.esquire.com/editors-notes/hog-wild-in-the-streets/

burroughs, genet and terry southern cover the 1968 chicago democratic convention riots

better than food boy tricked me into getting journey to the end of the night but i still haven't really read it, should i bother? clearly he's a bit of a bigoted nazi douche, like better than food boy himself

His later works are (correctly) deemed as untranslatable as poetry by English speakers with any proficiency in French.

You seem to think much more highly of your French skills than you have any reason to, yet you use a word that can only be heard coming from the native yuppies it's supposed to describe (always aimed at others). Let me guess, you spent a year studying with them in France and then started considering yourself bilingual?

Gilles is very good but if i were you i'd start Drieu by Le Feu follet or Journal d'un homme trompé
Dirk Raspe is also very great but it's his last work before the suicide so don't start by that

I feel it gets better as it goes along though there is a bit of a slump after he returns to France. Gets pretty exciting by the end.

This was before he went full nazi. There's nothing really crazy racist except for the casual racism that was practically the norm when he gets to Africa. Almost cackled in public when I read the word "negress".

Most of his fiction is pretty devoid of racism, even after the pamphlets. I haven't read all of his work, but so far the only thing I've encountered was him ranting about "white mongrelization" at the beginning of Rigadoon.

>This was before he went full nazi
céline never went "nazi" he was just antisemitic and couldn't fit anywhere else
drieu is a similar case, the man couldn't fit and chose the collaboration but was still living in marginality
even the other collabos like Degrelle or Brasillach didn't like him much, he was only there because he was a good doctor. The germans found him too weird and unstable

Am I just not looking in the right places, or is there not much Drieu material easily available in English? I remember trying to find Le feu follet years ago (translated as Will O' the Wisp apparently) and seeing it was long out of print.

i have no idea about it sorry but I guess that it hasn't been translated much because he didn't provoke the foreign interest I guess, i only know that Le Feu follet was a huge success in the literary circle of buenos aires when it came out and helped Drieu getting friendly with Borges
maybe that's the perfect occasion to learn french user

They're really not untranslatable. It's just him ranting and being self-aware.

I've probably read more of him than you and mostly in french.

Just sit in your little cafe stealing wifi telling anglos they'll never understand a writer because he sometimes employs slang.

Also, Bloy > Celine

Can't remember the story, but I do recall it throwing me off when Borges mentioned him in one of the stories in Labyrinths. That's pretty interesting.

I actually had four years of AP French in high school but I still felt like a drooling retard afterwards. I really should pick it back up since I seem to gravitate towards French literature and film without consciously trying.

www.vho.org/aaargh/fran/livres6/CELINEtrif.pdf
for those who can't read French like a patron.

>when Borges mentioned him in one of the stories in Labyrinths

Yeah, Borges studied in Switzerland during the interwar years so he became acquainted with a lot of french literature. He was a big fan of Leon Bloy, which is definitely worth checking out. He's an extremely demanding writer though, imo. Like a Catholic proto-Celine, similar worldview to Dostoevsky. He's definitely one of the greatest french writers I've ever encountered.

What does slang have to do with your being deaf to tone and rhythm
You don't even need to know french to understand the issues with translating an author who's praised for his inventive language and credited with innovating french literature even by people who despised him, just pick up one of the Journey translations, is the language inventive? would it have done anything to innovate english lit at the time? no / no

I guess you are right. Celine should only be read exclusively by the french bobos. Exclusively. He cannot be translated. Never. Not once. How dare you.

"Dine ! Paradine ! Crevent ! Boursouflent ! Ventre dieu !... 487 millions ! d'empalafies cosacologues ! Quid ? Quid ? Quod ? Dans tous les chancres de la Slavie ! Quid ? De Baltique slavigote en Blanche Altramer noire ? Quam ? Balkans ! Visqueux ! Ratagan ! De concombres !... mornes ! roteux ! de ratamerde ! Je m'en pourfentre !... Barbatoliers ? immensement ! Volgaronof !... mongomoleux Tartaronesques !... Stakhanoviciants !...Culodovitch !... Quatre cent milles verstes myriametres... de steppes de condachiures, de peaux de Zebris-Laridon !... Ventre poultre ! Je m'en gratte tous les Vesuves !"

Bloy was a hack compared to his eminently more talented friend (for a while); Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, who famously called Bloy "a volcano of shit".

His short stories (Sueur de Sang, etc) are good, but not on Villiers's god-tier level, his diaries have some amusing parts, but his incessant ranting at his self-inflicted and religiously-inspired shit life is tiring after a while. Le Desespere is not a bad autobiog. novel as they go, and some of his remarks on language in Exegese des lieux communs are pretty funny too, but overall, he was a one-trick pony compared to Huysmans, Villiers and the rest of them.

Maurice G Dantec also had the hots for Bloy big time, on account of his ultra-conservative Catholicism coupled with his scatological revolutionism.

>Maurice G Dantec also had the hots for Bloy big time
who cares about some irrelevant scifi writer

FUCKING BOSS

Celine's translators make no effort to translate the slang. They use common, basic English words instead.

I don't, but then I also think Borges was a highly overrated hack who couldn't write a novel.

La femme pauvre and Le salut par les Juifs are masterpieces.

Haven't read any Villiers or Huysmans yet.

I think Bloy was a genius, Schmitt, Junger, Kafka, Levinas, Bernanos all agree with me.

>he was a one-trick pony

what is celine if not a one-trick pony?

Sure you can read it, just don't be surprised when what you get turns out to be mere vitriol with nothing left of what earned him praise

You understand that quotation?

He was fully bilingual and travelled to Canada and America to promote the english translation of his book.

But of course, a bobo knows best.

Half of these words are portmanteaux, they're understandable but don't worry if you can't
I don't know what the bobo guy meant to say by posting it but he probably doesn't either

stanford lund does a pretty good job in Conversations with Professor Y. Idk if he translated any other Celine works though.

>I don't know what the bobo guy meant to say by posting it but he probably doesn't either

No french person is going to know half of what Celine is talking about without a dictionary/glossary. Vonnegut isn't wrong.

Can someone explain what exactly is happening here?

cool céline delirium aka literary free jazz

Ok, but what does paradine actually mean? Is one half of empalafies empaler and what is the other half? What's the origin of condachiures, Zebris-Laridon, poultre...

Ever heard of pic related?

That quote is from the Bagatelles pamphlet though, which is an extreme case
Neologisms were already neologisms in his time, a dictionary isn't going to be much help if you don't get them and no, native speakers aren't going to need one because although Celine does sometimes use real technical terms it's clear to them whether they're meaningful to the context or only there for musicality or effect

mate it's 30s/40s argotic how am i supposed to know it's just supposed to be depreciative
relax and enjoy it

No, French readers don't need a dictionary to read his books. That's just you.

I read one or two Tintin comics in French and I don't recall having a problem with Haddock's insults. I can read other classics just fine but this just goes way over my head.
I'm just trying to learn something, I thought you might be French and willing to help.

i am french some of the words he's using are just out of his own mind or slang that has been lost with the decades
like I have no idea what he's talking about with Zebris-Laridon
poultre is poutre in ancient french, which is cement beam for example

I see. Do you happen to know from which of his works this excerpt was taken? Are there commentaries available?

his pamphlet bagatelles for un massacre
since it has out of print until recently I don't think there's anything in english
you'll probably find something on the internet but about the book as a whole not particular excerpts

>Mais si Hitler me disait Ferdinand, c’est le grand partage ! on partage tout ! il serait mon pote ! les juifs ont promis de partager, ils ont menti comme toujours…
Seems riveting

>paradine
Probably meaningless, his pals called him Ferdine but that's unrelated, more like emphasis on the previous sound like in "zut et double zut"
>empalafies
empaler (impale) and empaffé, that has to do with buggery
>condachiures
con (vagina), chiure (shit), conchier, could be condemned but I don't think so, the added d- sounds like one of the ways argot distorts words
>Zebris-Laridon
argot originally from arab for dick so peaux de zebis = foreskins, usually slang for"nothing"
>poultre
construction beam so dicks again though it makes me think of pleutre/poltron = coward

I give up on Laridon, can't think of anything concrete

Thanks, that's great. It's easy to see where the words come from when the answer has been given, but the extra letters from combining them or the weird spelling of poultre for example just obfuscate the meaning too much for me to comprehend.

>Are there commentaries available?
I know you're just honestly asking a question, but trying to imagine academic commentary for Bagatelles is killing me.

There is though, some of it self-published, some in more general academic books on his works

Huh, that's interesting. I guess I figured that stuff was too inflammatory to touch.

Would rather hang out in Parisian cafes with Hemmmingway before going to rural Spain to fish and watch bull fights desu

It is, academic works just fly under the radar and they know it. I think most only comment on the language though, or usually separate the pamphlets from the rest

Name another homo who contributed to the Right.

They're all closet cases

...Ernst Rohm?

I wish.
Okay, outside of Rohm's autobiography, can name a fag who contributed to the Right's literature?

Yukio Mishima

Point taken.
Were there any European or American writer-faggots on the Right?

I guess if you really want to scrape the bottom of the barrel, Milo tried to publish a book. I'm not aware of any, but I'm sure they exist. Probably fairly niche/marginal figures though.

Brasillach and Abel Bonnard

Except 15 years old can actually do it ?...

Oh? You didn't pre-order it, user?
Never heard of them before, I will check them out. I love right-wing faggots, how they justify their cognitive dissonance waxes lyrical.

assuming you're french
Brasillach has a few books popping up here and there at gibert jeune otherwise if you're fine with giving money to the useful idiots of the Godefroy de Bouillon publishing house you can get his best works
Abel Bonnard is easier to find

see

lololol you have to be french to understand Celine, amirite? amirite? Fucking Celine fanboys. They can't even tell you what Celine is saying but they insist it cannot be translated.

I posted 56 and 83 and i never said Céline was untranslatable
why are you so bitter friend calm down

It's okay for you to need a dictionary to read Céline, mister proud bilingual user.

Please, get over yourselves. I've read 6 works of Celine and only one in english and I happen to think it was a great translation and I would encourage anyone who is interested in him to read the Ralph Manheim translations.

I just can't stand you idiots with nothing to say about Celine other than trying to dissuade anglos from reading him. It's cringe.

I haven't seen anyone really mention his post-war trilogy at all. It's just a lot bland praise for Voyage, always followed by "anglos will never understand him."

You can't read in french, stop posing mon frère.

les celiniens m'ont toujours fait chier

Journey is very light on idiosyncrasy compared to the trilogy and yet didn't get translated too well, but nobody will ask of you that you understand why when you can't distinguish the dense pamphlets from his books and seriously try to maintain that a dictionary is needed to read him

kek
I am not French, but I'll take a look all the same.

>when you can't distinguish the dense pamphlets from his books

But I can. Physically.

> and seriously try to maintain that a dictionary is needed to read him

I'm not. Only I'm backing Vonnegut's claim that there's literally nothing wrong with him being translated. And saying that the whole "muh argot" and the "misc. things he's praised for in France that non-french will never understand" is bullshit.

The thing you fags don't want to admit is that deep down you know you're the exact thing Celine would have despised.

Anti-translation memers are cancer.

You seem upset. Are you having difficulties coming to terms with the idea that you may never have really understood Céline?

Of course there's nothing wrong with him being translated, whether you like it or not a translation is simply not going to carry his strenghts, Celine openly concerned himself with style above all else and that has never been controversial
Your obsessing over imaginary pictures of people you disagree with also doesn't help to support your position

Mainly I defend the translations because of all the books of Celine I've read, the one I read in english happens to be my favorite, and I don't think I'm retarded or misunderstand him, (because I read it after reading a few novels of his in french)and this one just so happens to also be Celine's favorite. I think I'm on to something.

You guys just always shill the anti-translation meme in every thread and can't really talk about anything in Celine. Maybe one of you will mention that quote that Guillemin pointed out from Voyage. That's as good as it gets.

OP made the thread about Nord but no one is discussing it. Only pointing out how impossible it is to understand, which I'm not at all convinced of. "It's french free jazz n shiet!"

Enjoy your shitty Celine threads. I'll know to avoid them.

The rumours concerning Abel Bonnard are based on a mishearing of remarks by Petain on Abel Hermant. Bonnard was banging one of the Murat princesses, according to an elderly friend of mine who actually knew him, FWIW.

His pamphlet on education is nothing if terribly topical.

>The thing you fags don't want to admit is that deep down you know you're the exact thing Celine would have despised.

lol @ you and your pathetic projecting.

celine would've despised fucking everyone including myself. but ESPECIALLY the cunt trying to talk on his behalf like his fucking agent in life convinced that he'd be one to somehow escape his disdain. fuck off, faggot.