Tenso

REVIEW Max Rouquette, Green Paradise. Translated by William B. MacGregor. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995, 263 pp. The English-speaking world has too long been deprived of the pleasure of reading Max Rouquette's fiction. Rouquette, a physician from Montpellier, was a founder ofthe Institut d'Etudes Occitanes, and its first secretary general, before later serving as IEO's president. He is widely acclaimed as the finest prose writer in Occitan literature today. The recent translation of Verd paradis (Rouquette, 1961, 1974) into English is an accomplishment destined both to please the reader and to entice Rouquette's English-speaking audience to beg for more. The appearance ofthis translation is due to the efforts ofWilliam B. MacGregor, who worked on the texts while a graduate student in the history ofart at Berkeley. MacGregor first became aware ofRouquette's work while studying in France, where a friend gave him a copy of the French translation of Verd paradis (by Alem Surre-Garcia, 1980). MacGregor subsequently made the author's acquaintance, and the two spent six months together working on the first English draft of this collection ofbrightly painted scenes, stories, dreams, and legends ofthe rural South. Rouquette's characters are more likely to be septuagenarians than teenagers, and all, as a rule, are attached to the land around them; they may have ties to their families, or to their village, but rarely to anyone or anything more distant. For the most part, his protagonists are village people. The priest, the beggar, the busybody are typical foci for his attention, although we frequently know little about them other than the particular situation in which they are involved. The exception to this is those selections written in first person, where the author opens himself to his reader. REVIEW Sometimes Rouquette's characters are from the animal world. Two such selections are among the most dramatic in this work. Rouquette is a careful observer of nature, and describes it with striking poignancy. His compelling account ("The Fox and the Dew Pond") of the struggle ofa fox in complete, almost bucolic denial ofhis imminent, ineluctable death as he fends off a patient vulture, and then a second vulture, is a mesmerizing piece that, rather being the exceptional anecdote in this work, is merely one among many. Every bit as suspenseful, but in a very different way, is the death duel between thetarantulaand thewaspin "Le Tombeau de Jean-Henri Fabre." Rouquette's texts in Green Paradise rarely illustrate thejoys of life. Rather, we see individuals in search of distraction, if not release, from the hard life of the rural Midi. We see this in the flashbacks of the doctor who never completely manages to inure himself against the inevitable death ofclients ("A FigTree for Cacóla"), and in the solitude ofgardian cowboys from Camargue whose only heterosexual contacts are made possible by importing an occasional prostitute from Arles ("The Ghost of the Full Moon"). The latter is a haunting story of the power of loneliness and the need for human tenderness. In it, Rouquette masterfully paints a multisensory tableau ofthegardians with theirassortment ofages and shapes, sounds, and smells. All in corduroy, they exude "the acrid smell of the cold air,...the herds, the sheepfold, hay, fodder, and suint and the manure which clung to their shoes," and then he deftly brushes into the dark earthiness of this scene "the white flame of the candle and behind it, a girl looking like a vision ofspringtime— no, she was really more like a child" (HO). Suchjuxtapositions are not uncommon in this work. In the final, and longest ofthe selections that MacGregor has included in his translation ("The Still of the Night"), we see the pleasures of the flesh of two characters interwoven in a narration with the unpremeditated cruelty of oneoftheirneighbors. Or, in "MasterAlbareda's Oboe," Rouquette tells a story of a duel between music and the devil, wrapping his reader in a semi-magical tale of the enchanting power of breath. 113 REVIEW The selections in Green Paradise include all the texts in the original two volumes of Verd paradis. However, MacGregor has arranged his translations, placing them in chronological order, according to the seasons...