As a young man on the front lines in the French army during the “Great” war, Jean Giono witnessed untold horrors. He became a fervent and outspoken pacifist. In 1939, when war broke out again, he was imprisoned, without formal charges, for “defeatism.” He would be detained once more, near the end of the war, unjustly accused of “collaboration.” While at liberty in 1944 near his home in Haute Provence, he dictated a text that enacted an escape from the abyss of degradation into which Europe and the rest of the world had plunged. This flight took the form of an imaginary voyage, on a sailing ship, to the furthest reaches of the planet. In the spirit of Baudelaire’s poem “The Voyage,” and of Melville’s Moby-Dick, Giono’s fictive Captain and crew venture beyond the known world in search of abiding truths and unbounded possibilities. Fragments of a Paradise, left unfinished, is a fantastical prose poem of unprecedented scope.

 

Rendering prose as rich and colourful as Giono’s poses unusual challenges for a translator. In the case of Fragments d’un Paradis, these challenges are compounded by the oral qualities of the diction. Giono dictated this text to an amanuensis, and subsequently did almost no correcting or editing. As a result, for example, the writing abounds in repetition. Should the translator take steps to “improve” the original? I think not. Even more demanding is the task of doing justice to the extraordinary vitality and vividness of Giono’s prose. (He actually subtitled Fragments “Poème”). I’ve done my best to remain faithful to the semantic and structural elements of the original, while striving to capture its expressive force; this involves tireless experimentation, and close attention to cadence.