Collected French Translations: Prose by Ashbery John

Author:Ashbery, John [Ashbery, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2017-09-04T04:00:00+00:00

Hebdomeros: With Monsieur Dudron’s Adventure and Other Metaphysical Writings (Cambridge, Mass.: Exact Change, 1992).

MONSIEUR DUDRON’S ADVENTURE

Around two in the afternoon on April 17, 1939, M. Dudron, comfortably ensconced in his folding deck chair, was taking a siesta in his office-studio. As often happened when he wasn’t working, his thoughts turned to painting. “Painters,” he said to himself, “today and even for some time past, no longer make painting; they do not paint; they lay out pigment on the canvas to dry. Now, a beautiful painting is never dried pigment but beautiful colored substance. I understand very well how it is that no one understands. It’s been ages (two or three quarters of a century) since that precious thread of Ariadne was lost. Is it my task to find it again and present it to the painters, my contemporaries, who yawn over their palettes until their jaws are dislocated and try to save face by a pretentious and skeptical attitude which, nonetheless, is basically nothing more than dissatisfaction and annoyance? For that matter there is enough to be dissatisfied and annoyed with,” M. Dudron continued to himself. “Painters today no longer enjoy themselves when they paint. They all feel, most confusedly it’s true, but they feel it anyway, that it’s no use, that it’s no longer any use. A few, out of despair, dive into the swamp of so-called invention or so-called spirituality; they try to entertain themselves and also to entertain others by talking of inspiration, lyricism, astonishment, strangeness, mystery, oh yes, mystery most of all, but these, alas, are nothing but minor subterfuges which, if they can furnish a few results from the practical point of view, ease their consciences only up to a certain point, while basically, in their heart of hearts, they all yearn with infinite nostalgia for that distant land, that paradise lost, of beautiful, of very beautiful painting.”

He had reached this point in his meditations when the tremendous roar of a motor caused him to get up and go over to the window. Down below, before his front door, he saw a magnificent automobile, long and gleaming as a terrestrial torpedo boat. A female acquaintance of his got out. She was a woman with passionate tresses, dressed with an elegance both severe and athletic that suggested a cross between Athena and a modern Valkyrie, but more Valkyrie than Athena. Bursting into M. Dudron’s room, she began without sitting down or even greeting him to speak to him very quickly and breathlessly, meanwhile pacing up and down the room. “Be ready this evening at seven o’clock sharp, Maître, when I shall come by in the car to pick you up.” Then, still striding back and forth, she proceeded to explain that she had arranged to meet several friends at an inn about fifty kilometers away, on a hill above a small town situated on a lake. It was there, close to the inn, that an acquaintance of hers, a superrich industrialist whose specialty was the manufacture of bushings for hunting rifles, had created a snail farm.

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