May 19th: Rachel Careau and Jeffrey Lependorf on Colette
Presented by 192 Books and Paula Cooper Gallery, Rachel Careau will discuss her new translation of Colette’s Chéri and The End of Chéri with Jeffrey Lependorf.
The live event will stream directly on this page on Thursday, May 19th at 7 pm ET. There is no login or rsvp required. A recording will be posted shortly afterwards. If you have questions during the event, please email them to Evan@192Books.com.
Colette —Chéri and The End of Chéri, Translated by Rachel Careau with a preface by Lydia Davis (Published by W.W. Norton, 2022)
Chéri and its sequel, The End of Chéri, mark Colette’s finest achievements in their brilliant, subtle, and frank investigations of love and power. Set in the Parisian demimonde in the last days of the Belle Époque, Chéri tells the story of Léa, a courtesan at the end of a successful career, and her lover, the beautiful but emotionally opaque Chéri. Chéri will soon enter into an arranged marriage, ending their six-year affair, which—they will each realize too late—has been the one real love of their lives.
The End of Chéri picks up their story in the aftermath of the First World War. Chéri, now a decorated soldier, has returned from the trenches to a changed world. Emotionally estranged from his independent and unfaithful wife, a psychically wounded Chéri begins an inexorable descent—one that leads him back to a stunning encounter with Léa.
As the acclaimed writer and translator Lydia Davis puts it in an illuminating foreword, Rachel Careau’s “brilliantly ingenious, close new translation” reveals Chéri and The End of Chéri as “the strangest of love stories.” Colette skillfully portrays her characters’ shifting inner lives and desires amid a clear-eyed depiction of interpersonal power dynamics. Careau’s lean, attentive translation restores to these classic novels their taut, remarkably modern style—the essence of Colette’s genius.
Photo: Steven Careau
Rachel Careau is the recipient of a 2019 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Translation Fellowship for the translation of four short works by the Austrian French writer Roger Lewinter. Her translations of Lewinter’s Story of Love in Solitude and The Attraction of Things were published by New Directions in 2016. Her writing and translations have appeared recently in BOMB, Harper’s Magazine, Literary Hub, Plume,and Two Lines. She lives in Hudson, NY.
Photo credit: David McIntyre
Jeffrey Lependorf serves as Executive Director of The Flow Chart Foundation, an organization that explores the interrelationships of poetry and various art forms as guided by the legacy of John Ashbery. He served formerly as Executive Director to both Small Press Distribution and the Community of Literary Magazines and Presses. A composer and visual artist, he is also most recently the editor of Something Close to Music: Late Art Writings, Poems, and Playlists by John Ashbery (forthcoming this June from David Zwirner Books).