Céline's Later Works (1 Viewer)

[TheStone]

So Buk was a big fan of Céline; and following his fervent recommendations probably everyone here has sampled Céline.

I read 'Journey To The End Of The Night' and 'Death On Credit' and they were fairly good, pretty raw - you know. And so now I want to read his later works. But some people say they're shit, Céline included.

Opinions?

 

[jordan]

i don't think celine ever said his later books were shit. i have only read excerpts, and they're certainly more difficult to read, and they're awfully bitter. i've wanted to get around to them for years now, but i never have.

 

[TheStone]

"An author doesn't have so many books in him.Journey to the End of the Night, Death on the Installment Plan"”that should've been enough . . ."

OK, admittedly it's not an outright proclamation that he repudiates his later works, but he's sort of implying that they're not so profound, weren't as necessary as his first two 'masterpieces' - just kind of spilled out of him haphazardly.

 

[jordan]

do you know where that quotation is from? i'd like to read the whole interview. it doesn't surprise me that celine agrees that his first two books were the most vital. i got the sense that most of the later books were about vindicating himself as a writer for what he saw as the hypocrisy of condemning him over his pamphlets after WWII while holding up his first two books as great literature. to him, it was all one big mess of ideas, and his goal in the later books was to show this.

 

[mjp]

So he was like a late-career Lenny Bruce, reading from court transcripts when people just wanted him to tell jokes...

 

[the only good poet]

I don't have the book at hand to verify, but I believe the above quote comes from Celines's introduction to Journey.

 

[roni]

btw.:
are there (or have there been) different translations of 'Journey' into English?

(same question goes for 'Hunger', 'Notes from the underground', and all other not-Original-English-books, he has praised.) - you can guess, where that question aims at:

We all know, how important the quality of a translation is to bring the right feeling to the foreign reader.
I'd be very much interested to know, if we can track down for sure, which translations of those books Hank has read.

 

[the only good poet]

I don't know. I wouldn't purchase Ralph Manheim's revised translation of Journey published by Oneworld classics over his earlier one published by Calder. Substituting "ass" for "cunt" is, for me, unforgivable. There again, maybe I'm the cunt and "ass" is more in keeping with the original?

 

[jordan]

there have been different versions of the translation, but, to my knowledge, they're all by ralph manheim. i don't know if they ever fixed the egregious mistranslation of the last line, though - it is one of the most unjustifiable errors in translation i have ever come across (and I've done a fair amount of translation study back in my undergrad/grad school days). he positively martinized it, that's for sure.

 

[jordan]

I don't have the book at hand to verify, but I believe the above quote comes from Celines's introduction to Journey.

not quite, but close... he does say that "of all my books, journey is the only really vicious one" in the preface to the 1952 reissue, but that was before the trilogy that most people point to as his "later work" - it's a similar sentiment, though. one thing about celine that links him to bukowski is that you can't trust much of what he said in the first place. for instance, the context of the quotation above is that if he weren't forced to earn his living through his writing, he'd suppress all of his books. from a trained doctor (even though being a doctor wasn't the most profitable profession), it probably would have been easy enough to earn a living without his writing.

 

[hoochmonkey9]

here it is.

 

[jordan]

he sounds like a lovely man

 

[the only good poet]

This book is worth picking up for the interview alone:http://www.abebooks.co.uk/servlet/B...castle+Louis+Ferdinand+Celine&sts=t&x=38&y=14 I actually recall there were two interviews - but you know my memory is somewhat unreliable.:confused:

 

[roni]

that reminds me:
I have this book by Lucette Destouche (translation of the title would be: 'My life with Céline'), since it was cheap (3,90 EUR) at Zweitausendeins, but have never read it. Maybe I should now.

 

[Black Swan]

A new book "Madame Céline, route des gardes"
http://www.actualitte.com/actualite...temoignages-autour-de-madame-celine-34129.htm
presented to Lucette Destouches for her 100th birthday.
and a film, perhaps! Some unpublished writings by Céline.