Ti'Jean Kerouac's Mamaloshen Novel

When you went over to have dinner with Eric Mottram, he would sometimes greet you by exclaiming “ah, what a great day, not a single coincidence!” And it is true, coincidence can often be cheap thrills or cheap inspiration, and yet — it always somehow fascinates because it seems to defy the laws of causality we take as the norm. Eric’s exclamation came to mind this morning when I opened Le Monde (well, the url of that paper) and came across an article on Jack Kerouac’s French novels. The Coincidence? Last night I gave a reading in Albany (in the Jawbone series), jumping in at the last minute for the poet Essence who was ill. I closed with the last poem in the new book (Aljibar II, which US readers can get here) called “A/To Jack Kerouac: Ode bilingue,” the only poem I have written in French — well, half of it is in french — since 1967. Sugar Mule, edited by M.L. Weber, published the poem (with the photos I took on the trip to Lowell that was the occasion of writing it) in issue #10, available online here.

Introducing the poem I explain that the great American poet and novelist’s mamaloshen was French (well, Canadian French, joual) and that he always claimed to have written in French early on. The Le Monde article refers back to one in the Québecois paper Le Devoir, which announces the discovery among the Kerouac manuscripts in New York, of a second novel written in French. It is a short book — some fifty handwritten pages in a 1952 notebook — and is set in 1935, telling the adventures of “Moriarty” senior, Neil Cassady’s dad, when the son was but 9 years old. Here is how the book starts:

Dans l’mois d’Octobre 1935, y’arriva une machine du West, de Denver, sur le chemin pour New York. Dans la machine était Dean Pomeray, un soûlon; Dean Pomeray Jr. son ti fils de 9 ans et Rolfe Glendiver, son step son, 24. C’était un vieille Model T Ford, toutes les trois avaient leux yeux attachez sur le chemin dans la nuit à travers la windshield.

Having spent over a year translating Kerouac’s Mexico City Blues into French in the late seventies, I am itching to try to translate his French novel into English. Which would pose interesting problems: for one, Kerouac’s French is laced with English, always difficult to deal with (I hate the traditional footnote that states “in X in the original”), but maybe worse would be the problem of what to do about the grammatical mistakes Kerouac makes in French — his knowledge of that language being obviously more oral (it’s what the family spoke at home) than writerly (he was after all schooled in Lowell, MA). But then I find out that there exists a translation into English by Kerouac himself, though that too has remained unpublished until today. Still, I’d love to try and translate Sur le Chemin before looking at and comparing it to Kerouac’s own version. Fascinating stuff (at least for me), and maybe I’ll speak to exactly those questions at the Translation Symposium organized by Andrew Zawacki and Jed Rasula at the University of Georgia, Athens, in early October (more on that in good time).